The world was shocked last year after the Olympics when it was revealed that China’s largest producers of milk and milk-products had laced their offerings with a plastic derivative, melamine. Fast-backward to the year 1851, when the British public learned during London’s Great Exhibition that the green tea they had been drinking for nearly two hundred years had been laced with cyanide and gypsum (calcium sulphate dehydrate). The blue color of cyanide and the yellow color of the gypsum combined to make a green dye that satisfied the British tea drinker’s eye for uniformity of color. The Chinese had known for generations such consistency in picking was near-impossible, especially since they had for decades been selling the British the third- and fourth-flushes of their country’s most strategic asset – Tea.

Such is one of the revelations found in the most fun and exciting new book I’ve read this year. For All the Tea in in China: Espionage, empire and the secret formula for the world’s favourite drink, by Sarah Rose, tells the story of how Robert Fortune, a Scottish gardener and botanist, infiltrated the interior of China disguised as a Mandarin “from north of the Great Wall” to steal tea plants, tea seeds and the secrets for making green and black teas. Mind you, he did this during the mid-1800s, when it was highly illegal and certainly inadvisable to be caught, drawn and quartered as a Westerner traveling beyond the permissible foreign concessions on the east coast. As an avid tea drinker and collector of Chinese teas and paraphernalia, and having been taught the dark art of preparing Wulong tea, I just couldn’t put the book down.

Aside from Fortune’s personal adventure, which Rose tells compellingly, she explains the geopolitics and macroeconomics involved in tea’s being at the center of world trade for nearly two hundred years. The book also discusses the genesis, triumph and demise of the East India Company, the first true multinational in the world and arguably the most enduring until Parliament “revoked its charter at the stroke of a pen” in 1857.

With Fortune’s successful transfer of Chinese tea plants and processing techniques to the Himalayas, to what is now commonly known as Assam and Darjeeling, and with the British quite queasy over the thought of drinking more green-colored tea, no matter how authentic, the way was open by 1852 for Britons to entertain drinking black tea. Until Fortune’s successful run of corporate espionage, the West actually thought black tea grew from plants different from those of the green tea they had become accustomed to. Fortune illustrated that the color and taste of black tea came from certain varieties of green-leaf tea that underwent a more stressful process of refinement than is found in making green tea. The surplus of sugar poured into Britain from the British Caribbean colonies made drinking the more-bitter black tea a pleasure for all classes in the newly industrialized society.

Of course, in all this, the poppy and its addictive syrup cannot be ignored, a history Rose writes about frankly and unashamedly. Another interesting historical point was that after the Second Opium War, in 1857, when China figured “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”, China sent its own spies to India to cop the poppy seeds and the secret for processing opium to undercut British prices to customers.

So get out your Brown Betty teapot. Get the book. Read it. Learn and enjoy.

And remember: take the tea to the water – not the water to the tea.