How the British stole tea from China. They had to send an agent to discover how the Chinese were making tea and steal some samples to grow in India. In 1848, the British East India Company sent Robert Fortune, a Scottish Botanist to buy samples of Chinese luxury variants. Foreigners in China were not allowed outside the Treaty Ports. Fortune, a large Scotsman disguised himself as a high ranking Mandarin and travelled undercover despite not speaking much Chinese. Think Sean Connery in You Only Live Twice (except Chinese not Japanese).
Fortune shaved his head, plaited the hair at the back into the classic braid, and wore silk robes. When sometimes challenged about his strange accent and poor Chinese, he would tell questioners he was from up North in China.
He did this for years, and made multiple trips.
It should be the plot for a long forgotten racist comedy from the 1970s, but it actually happened, and he did get the samples, as well as exposing some massive fraud in the Chinese tea industry where they were treating some of teas with cyanide to make them look like the more expensive versions to sell to foreigners.
Fortune shaved his head, plaited the hair at the back into the classic braid, and wore silk robes. When sometimes challenged about his strange accent and poor Chinese, he would tell questioners he was from up North in China.
He did this for years, and made multiple trips.
It should be the plot for a long forgotten racist comedy from the 1970s, but it actually happened, and he did get the samples, as well as exposing some massive fraud in the Chinese tea industry where they were treating some of teas with cyanide to make them look like the more expensive versions to sell to foreigners.