Ep. 140-15 | A Fortune for the East India Company
The China History Podcast
Laszlo Montgomery
4.8 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 24 January 2015
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The mid 19th Century brought another sea change to the tea industry. Demand continued to grow all over Europe and North America. China's tea industry, which depended mainly on countless artisanal tea growers rather than a few large-scale producers, creates bottlenecks and unreliability in the tea supply chain. The demand had become more than China's exporters could handle. This was also due in part to the well-known political and social disasters happening in China during the second half of the 19th century. The British East India Company begins to put serious consideration into growing tea in India to cut the Chinese out.
We also meet Charles Bruce, the Father of India's Tea Industry. We also encounter the botanist, horticulturist, and man of adventure Robert Fortune. We close the episode with the exploits of Fortune's first China trip and his discovery that green and black teas both come from the exact same species of plant, Camellia sinensis. The famous Guangcai porcelain 光彩 of Guangzhou (Canton) is also briefly explained.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | The new Samsung Galaxy Z-Flip 5 and Chromebook are better together. |
| 0:07.0 | Take hands-free selfies which automatically sync to your Chromebook, ready to edit, and access |
| 0:11.5 | recent chrome tabs across both devices. |
| 0:14.0 | The new Galaxy Z Flip5 and Chromebook, better together. |
| 0:18.0 | Available on Sky Mobile. |
| 0:20.0 | Bluetooth and internet connection required. |
| 0:22.0 | You must be signed into the same Google account on both your phone and Chromebook. |
| 0:27.0 | Spark your creativity with The Sims. Sometimes you might feel like you're not creative and you have to go in search of your creative spark again. |
| 0:36.5 | Maybe this is catching up with creative friends, experimenting with a new look or trying out a new recipe and thanks to the Sims inspiration is just one game and one |
| 0:46.7 | spark away. Ready to spark something download the Sims 4 and play for free. |
| 1:01.0 | Hey everyone, Lausla Montgomery again, part 15 today of our T history podcast. |
| 1:06.0 | Thanks again to everyone who has made it this far. At the very outset of this series all those episodes ago we looked at the second of the |
| 1:11.1 | mythical three sovereigns of the most ancient times. |
| 1:14.3 | Won't say his name, he all know who Shenong is by now. |
| 1:17.6 | Starting from around his time and pre- bronze age China, all the way into the mid-19th century, the Middle Kingdom |
| 1:26.7 | had enjoyed a most profitable worldwide monopoly on the growing, processing, and export of tea. |
| 1:34.0 | Thanks in part to their long and continuous civilization, |
| 1:37.0 | the Chinese over more than 40 centuries, |
| 1:41.0 | from 2737 BCE, all the way up to and during the Ching Dynasty, 1644 to |
| 1:47.9 | 1911, had gradually figured out almost every conceivable way to eke out as much goodness and pleasure |
| 1:56.7 | as could be had from this Camellia Sinensis plant. China acted as the fountain head or yuendau in both the growing of tea and in the development and refinement of tea culture. |
| 2:10.0 | Over the millennia, countless new cultivars had been developed in all the tea-growing regions of China |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Laszlo Montgomery, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Laszlo Montgomery and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.