At Home - Bill Bryson [100]
For three years in the 1840s, Fortune traveled all around China, disguised as a native, collecting information on how tea was grown and processed. It was risky work: had he been caught, he would certainly have been imprisoned and could well have been executed. Although Fortune spoke none of the languages of China, he got around that problem by pretending always to come from a distant province where another dialect prevailed. In the course of his travels, he not only learned the secrets of tea production but also introduced to the West many valuable plants, among them the fan palm, the kumquat, and several varieties of azaleas and chrysanthemums.
Under Fortune’s guidance, tea cultivation was introduced to India in that curiously inevitable year 1851 with the planting of some twenty thousand seedlings and cuttings. In half a century, from a base of nothing in 1850, tea production in India rose to 140 million pounds a year.
As for the East India Company, however, its period of glory came to an abrupt and unhappy conclusion. The precipitating event, unexpectedly enough, was the introduction of a new kind of rifle, the Enfield P53, at just about the time that tea cultivation was starting. The rifle was an old-fashioned type loaded by tipping powder down the barrel. The powder came in grease-coated paper cartridges that had to be bitten open. A rumor spread among the native sepoys, as the soldiers were known, that the grease used was made from the fat of pigs and cows—a matter of profoundest horror for Muslim and Hindu soldiers alike, since the consumption of such fats, even unwittingly, would condemn them to eternal damnation.
The East India Company’s British officers handled the matter with stunning insensitivity. They court-martialed several Indian soldiers who refused to handle the new cartridges, and threatened to punish any others who didn’t fall into line. Many sepoys became convinced that it was all part of a plot to replace their own faiths with Christianity. By unfortunate coincidence, Christian missionaries had recently become active in India, fanning suspicions further. The upshot was the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, in which the native soldiers turned on their British masters, whom they very much outnumbered. At Cawnpore, the rebels herded two hundred women and children into a hall, then hacked them to pieces. Other innocent victims, it was reported, were thrown into wells and left to drown.
When news of these cruelties reached British ears, retribution was swift and unforgiving. Rebellious Indians were tracked down and executed in ways calculated to instill terror and regret. One or two were even fired from cannons, or so it is often recorded. Untold numbers were shot or summarily hanged. The whole episode left Britain profoundly shaken. More than five hundred books appeared on the uprising in its immediate aftermath. India, it was commonly agreed, was too big a country and too big a problem to leave in the hands of a business. Control of India passed to the British crown, and the East India Company was wound up.
III
All these discoveries and all of this endless fighting made its way back to England in the form of the food that ended up on dinner tables, and in a new kind of room: the dining room. Dining room didn’t acquire its modern meaning until the late seventeenth century and didn’t become general in houses until even later. In fact, it only just made