Did a Scottish botanist really steal China's tea secret?

Partly. Robert Fortune really did slip into China, sometimes disguised as a Chinese merchant, to get tea plants for the East India Company, and he was reportedly breaking Chinese rules when he did. But the dramatic version, a single theft that handed Britain China's secret, leaves out what happened next.

The background was money. By the 1720s European maritime trade with China was dominated by the exchange of silver for tea. To circumvent its dependence on Chinese tea, the East India Company sent Fortune to buy tea plants and bring them to India. In 1843 he had been commissioned by the Horticultural Society for a three-year plant-collecting expedition to southern China,. It is widely reported that he also took skilled workers on contract to India to help produce tea.

The plants themselves mostly failed. Apart from a few that survived in established Indian gardens, most of the Chinese tea plants Fortune introduced in northwestern India perished. British taste favoured a strong dark brew that was best made from the local Assam variety, a plant that grew in India already. What mattered more was the technology and knowledge brought over from China, which was instrumental in the later flourishing of the Indian tea industry in Assam and Sri Lanka.

So Fortune was not the sole source of India's tea. He brought plants and workers, and by 1888 tea imported from India finally exceeded that from China.