For All the Tea in China: Espionage, Empire and the Secret Formula for the World's Favourite Drink - Couverture rigide

Rose, Sarah

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3�904 �valuations de Goodreads

9780091797065: For All the Tea in China: Espionage, Empire and the Secret Formula for the World's Favourite Drink

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0091797063 ISBN 13 : 9780091797065

Editeur : Hutchinson, 2009

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Pr�sentation de l'�diteur :

For centuries, China had been the world's sole tea manufacturer. Britain purchased this fuel for its Empire by trading opium to the Chinese - a poisonous relationship Britain fought two destructive wars to sustain. The East India Company had profited lavishly as the middleman, but it was now sinking, having lost its monopoly to trade tea. Its salvation, it thought, was to establish its own plantations in the Himalayas of British India.

There were just two problems: India had no tea plants worth growing, and the company wouldn't have known what to do with them if it had.

Hence Robert Fortune's daring trip. The Chinese interior was off-limits and virtually unknown to the West, but that's where the finest tea was grown - the richest oolongs, soochongs and pekoes. And the Emperor aimed to keep it that way.

In a Mandarin's dress, with a black braid sewn into his hair, Robert Fortune ventured deep inside the country, risking his life for science, adventure, and a place among the great plant explorers.

From Kew Gardens to grimy Old Shanghai, and on to the remote Wu Yi Shan hills, Sarah Rose tells a true tale of pirates, rebels, subterfuge, espionage, and how one man triumphed over an exotic and corrupt Empire.

Quatri�me de couverture :

Robert Fortune was a Scottish gardener, botanist, plant hunter - and industrial spy. In 1848, the East India Company engaged him to make a clandestine trip into the interior of China - territory forbidden to foreigners - to steal the closely guarded secrets of tea.

'Reveals our cuppa wouldn't exist if it wasn't for an amazing Victorian, armed only with a rusty pistol and a pigtail, who stole the secret of tea from under the nose of China's ruthless warlords' Daily Mail

'Reshapes into gripping prose Fortune's own memoirs and letters ... An enthusiastic tale of how the humble leaf became a global addiction' Financial Times

'A compelling sketch of the world of globalisation before instant information, and transforms a modest Scottish botanist into a swashbuckling pirate capitalist, who incidentally changed the way we all have breakfast ... A genuinely curious and evocative yarn' Scotland on Sunday

'In this lively account of the adventures (and misadventures) that lay behind Robert Fortune's bold acquisition of Chinese tea seedlings for transplanting in British India, Sarah Rose demonstrates in engaging detail how botany and empire-building went hand in hand' Jonathan Spence, author of The Search for Modern China

Les informations fournies dans la section � A propos du livre � peuvent faire r�f�rence � une autre �dition de ce titre.