FOR ALL THE TEA IN CHINA (PB)

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 forbidden interior of China, to steal the closely guarded secrets of tea. Having lost it's monopoly to trade tea from China, it sought 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.