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Largely because of tea, China was consistently among four countries from which Britain bought its imports. The value of the goods that Britain received from China vastly exceeded what it got from most of its colonies: In 1857, for example, the computed real value of imports into the United Kingdom from China was 1.8 times that from British North America, twice that from Australia, 2.2 times that from the British West Indies, 6.4 times that from British possessions in South Africa, and 72.2 times that from New Zealand.

Through much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the tax on tea accounted for nearly a tenth of Britain’s revenues” It earned the British government as much as all land, property and income taxes put together so vast was this sum of money that it could pay for the salaries of all government servants; for all public works and buildings, for all expenses related to law, justice, education, art and science, and for Her Majesty’s colonial, consular and foreign establishments combined” Nor were these the only benefits that tea conferred upon Britain’s economy. A large part of the British merchant marine was engaged in transporting tea, not only from China to Britain but also from Britain to its colonies” In short, through much of the Industrial Revolution, the finances of the British government were heavily dependent on tea, the vast bulk of which came from China.

The problem was that Britain had nothing much to sell to China in return, the Chinese had little interest in, and no need for, most Western goods” China’s Quanlong Emperor made this quite clear in a letter sent to George III in 1793: We have never valued ingenious articles. nor do we have the slightest need of your country’s manufactures.”

China’s lack of interest in foreign goods was irksome to the British for many reasons, not all of them financial (one scholar has made the intriguing suggestion that Chinese self-sufficiency was a source of anxiety to the British because they discerned in it the possibility of a rival master race’)” A more immediate concern for Westerners, however, was that Chinese goods generally had to be paid for with silver. Because of the imbalance in trade, there was a huge outflow of bullion from the West to China. Despite the enormous imbalance between exports and imports, the trade was still profitable because Chinese goods bought with silver could be sold in Europe for two or three times what they had cost.

Transfers of bullion on that scale were possible only because the world’s supply of precious metals had been hugely increased by the mines of the Americas.” The European conquest of the Americas thus made the financing of the China trade possible by providing Europeans with massive stocks of bullion, mined by vast numbers of enslaved indigenous and African workers. But over time these supplies dwindled, and by the mid-eighteenth century it had become increasingly difficult for the East India Company to procure the quantities of silver that were needed to sustain its trade with China: finding a means of offsetting the drain of bullion now became a matter of increasing urgency, even desperation.

One simple solution to the problem would have been to start growing tea in India. This was indeed a dream that the Company had pursued since the late 1700s, dispatching skilled botanists and plant hunters to China in the hope of stealing the plants and the know-how associated with the cultivation of tea.” But that goal proved elusive. The Chinese were well aware of the value of the plant, and taking seeds or seedlings of the tea bush out of the country was strictly forbidden. Nor could foreigners roam around China, grabbing whichever plants they wanted-there were many restrictions on their movements there. To the British, and other Europeans, this was a source of intense frustration, for they were accustomed to seizing plants at will wherever they went. But with tea their efforts at stealing the technology were constantly thwarted through the eighteenth century, even as their balance of payments problem was worsening.

This left the East India Company with only one means of addressing its balance of trade problem with China: increasing the flow of exports from its Indian colonies. Cotton from India was one product for which there was already a considerable market in China. Another commodity in which there was a small but brisk trade was opium, harvested from a variety of poppy, Papaver somniferum. It was this plant that would become the solution for the problem posed by Camellia sinensis.

Excerpted from Pages 14 to 16 of Smoke And Ashes: A Journey Through Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh