A closer look
British botanist Robert Fortune disguised himself as a wealthy Chinese merchant in 1848 and sneaked into the highly restricted tea-producing regions of China to execute massive corporate espionage. He systematically stole thousands of top-secret tea plants, smuggled them out of the country in glass terrariums, and successfully transplanted them to British colonial plantations in India. This brazen act of intellectual property theft completely shattered China's global monopoly on the lucrative tea trade and cemented the British obsession with the caffeinated beverage. An entire empire practically built its polite cultural identity of afternoon tea and crumpets upon the heroic actions of a sweaty guy wearing a fake ponytail and illegally stuffing stolen exotic shrubs into his luggage
