How Did The British East India Company

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In the mid-1800s England and China traded extensively. England gave supplied China with opium which is a “highly addictive narcotic drug acquired in the dried latex form from the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) seed pod”. And China provided England with tea which was also called camellia (Camellia sinensis). The East India Company was very affluent and helped support the British government through the taxes on the trade of tea. When the Chinese took steps to stop the sale of the opium drug to its citizens and closed the port of Canton to the India Tea Company which made the British react with savagery. By 1848, the British East India Company was faced with a major issue, they were losing its two hundred year monopoly on the beloved supply of tea. The only thing that the British East India Company could do is grow its own tea in the Indian Himalayas. For the East Indian Company to complete the project successfully, they first needed to gain the necessary botanical information. They would have to learn the expertise to grow, pick, and process the tea leaves. The East India …show more content…
In Zhejiang and Anhui was where green tea was processed. His second expedition was, even more, exiting; black tea districts in the Wuyi Mountains in Fujian. This is where Fortune made a huge discovery. He discovered that black tea was derived from the same plant as green tea, but just processed and handled differently. Westerners had only recently been allowed to visit the various ports in China because of the Opium War. Fortune's discovered while in Fujian was that green tea had been colored by the Chinese for the export market using Prussian Blue and gypsum. Fortune had some trouble transporting the highest quality tea plant seedlings to Darjeeling in India, but eventually, he had done it successfully and also provided skilled tea makers and extensive notes on how to process the tea for full