For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History by Sarah Rose

Author:Sarah Rose
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 0143118749
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2011-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

Behind the gentlemanly façade of the East India Company there were often hidden rivalries and simmering tensions, and within the Indian network of company gardeners this friction often centered on the cultivation of tea. The “smaller” gardens on the subcontinent were only so in relative terms: By square mileage, the experimental tea gardens in the Himalayas occupied more ground than was available to the Calcutta Botanic Garden. But the Calcutta garden bore the imprimatur of colonial authority, and in the hierarchy of the company, authority must always be respected. As the superintendent of Calcutta, Falconer issued his orders, and the provincial gardeners were expected to follow them. William Jameson, superintendent at Saharanpur, was one such gardener.

Both Falconer and Jameson were Scottish; both were surgeons and naturalists; both had studied under the finest scientific minds of Scotland; both were in the employ of the company on the subcontinent; both took a keen, almost proprietary interest in the fate of the tea experiment. But there the similarities ended.

Young Jameson was a great deal less professionally polished than Falconer and something of a bumbler. While other naturalists in the medical corps were mapping uncharted territories and unraveling natural history puzzles, Jameson found himself inadvertently imprisoned in Peshawar for trespassing. He did not rise to prominence on the broad sweep of his learning or on his imagination but through a dogged navigation of colonial hierarchy and, most likely, thanks to a nepotistic thumb on the scale. Jameson’s uncle, Robert Jameson, was a celebrated professor of geology and an expert on India, a peer to Wallich and Falconer and the teacher of Charles Darwin. William Jameson was sufficiently politically savvy to ride his uncle’s coattails.

Jameson was prone to answering every official letter at interminable length. He issued elaborate protocols and detailed orders for matters that had never before needed such painstaking attention. The skills that may have enabled him to thrive in a bureaucracy were hardly transferable to botany, however. Jameson wrote pamphlets in which he held forth on the theory of garden design, the state of the weather, the political situation in China (where he had never been), and the preferred methods for planting each and every species under cultivation. Although exhaustive, his recommendations were seldom followed by his superiors and often completely ignored.

Jameson ran the Himalayan tea gardens as if they were a factory, concerning himself mostly with the management of men and resources. His letters to the government are as thoroughly worked out as any contemporary business plan, full of details about size and scale, and what the profit per acre could be if he only had the manpower and assets.

The government was eventually compelled to chide Jameson, asking him to be more measured in his enthusiasms: “As it is evidently the wish of the Honourable the Court of Directors that the experiment should be conducted on the most liberal scale the Lieutenant Governor is pleased to sanction your proposal as to the extent of operations to be ultimately reached. It is

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