The British once sent a spy to China to steal secrets about tea.

 

What one historian called the “greatest single act of corporate espionage in history” wasn’t in search of stock market tips or a coveted algorithm. It was about tea, which by 1800 was the most popular drink among the British — something of a problem for the empire, as all tea was produced in China at the time. And so the English did something at once sinister and cunning: They sent a botanist to steal tea seeds and bring them to India, a British colony at the time. The thief in question was Robert Fortune, who was recruited by the East India Trading Company for the job.

 

This leafy skulduggery inspired the aforementioned historian Sarah Rose to write For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History. The book details how Fortune not only came into possession of precious seeds but also learned the tools of the trade: how tea leaves were cultivated, dried, processed, and manufactured. The plan succeeded, with India overtaking China as the world’s largest tea producer within Fortune’s lifetime. China eventually reclaimed that title, but it took more than a century, and India remains the second-largest today.


Neither China nor England drinks the most tea per capita.

Though both countries are synonymous with tea — China for growing it, England for consuming it — neither drinks the most tea per capita. An astonishing 1.6 billion pounds are drunk in China each year, the most overall, but on a per capita basis, that isn’t even enough to crack the top 15. Far ahead of either country is Turkey, which drinks 6.9 pounds of tea per person every year — a full 2 pounds more than No. 2 on the list, Ireland (4.8 pounds). The United Kingdom comes in third at 4.2 pounds, with Russia (3.05 pounds) and Morocco (2.6 pounds) rounding out the top five.



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