Robert Fortune

Robert Fortune (16 September 1812 – 13 April 1880) was a Scottish botanist and traveller best known for introducing tea plants from China to India.

Contents

Travels and botanical introductions to Europe

Fortune was born in Kelloe, Berwickshire. He was employed in the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, and later in the Horticultural Society of London's garden at Chiswick, and following the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 was sent out by the Society to collect plants in China.

His travels resulted in the introduction to Europe of many new, exotic and beautiful flowers. His most famous accomplishment was the successful transportation of tea from China to India in 1848 on behalf of the British East India Company.

Similar to other European travellers of the period, such as Walter Medhurst, Fortune disguised himself as a Chinese merchant during several, but not all, of his journeys beyond the newly established treaty port areas. Not only was Fortune's purchase of tea plants forbidden by the Chinese government of the time, but his travels were also beyond the allowable day's journey from the European treaty ports. Fortune travelled to some areas of China that had seldom been visited by Europeans, including remote areas of Fujian, Guangdong, and Jiangsu provinces.

Fortune employed many different means to transport tea plants, seedlings, and other botanical discoveries, but he is most well known for his use of Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward's portable Wardian cases to sustain the plants. Using these small greenhouses, Fortune introduced 20,000 tea plants and seedlings to the Darjeeling region of India. He also brought with him a group of trained Chinese tea workers who would facilitate the production of tea leaves. With the exception of a few plants which survived in established Indian gardens, most of the Chinese tea plants Fortune introduced to India perished. The technology and knowledge that was brought over from China, however, may have been instrumental in the later flourishing of the Indian tea industry.[1]

Apart from his many contributions to botanical history, Fortune was the first European to discover that so-called black tea and green tea were actually from the same plant.[reference - 'science and colonial expansion. The role of the british botanical gardens' - Lucile H. Brockway. Page 27]

In subsequent journeys he visited Formosa (modern day Taiwan) and Japan, and described the culture of the silkworm and the manufacture of rice. He introduced many trees, shrubs and flowers to the West, including the cumquat, a climbing double yellow rose ('Fortune's Double Yellow' (syn. Gold of Ophir) which proved a failure in England's climate) and many varieties of tree peonies, azaleas and chrysanthemums. A climbing white rose that he brought back from China in 1850, believed to be a natural cross between Rosa laevigata and R. banksiae, was dubbed R. fortuniana (syn. R. fortuneana) in his honor. This rose, too, proved a failure in England, preferring warmer climates. Today both of these roses are still widely grown by antique rose fanciers in mild winter regions. R. fortuniana also serves as a valuable rootstock in Australia and the southern regions of the United States.

The incidents of his travels were related in a succession of books. He died in London in 1880, and is buried in Brompton Cemetery.

The standard author abbreviation Fortune is used to indicate this individual as the author when citing a botanical name.[2]

Publications

Books about Robert Fortune

Non-fiction: "All The Tea in China" by Sarah Rose was published in 2008.

Fiction: "The Secret Mandarin" by Sara Sheridan was published 2009.

Plants named after Robert Fortune

Introductions by Robert Fortune

Barnaby Miln, a descendant of Robert Fortune, prepared this list in 1997 with a great deal of help from the Horticultural Department of the National Trust for Scotland. This was in advance of Christian Aid Scotland's The Robert Fortune Show Garden at the Royal Horticultural Society Show on 30 May - 1 June 1997, which was designed by Barnaby Miln. This list was distributed and nobody found fault with it. The show garden won a Royal Horticultural Society’s Silver Gilt Medal (Flora Range), the highest awarded at that show. Several television gardening programmes were broadcast from the Show Garden together with a BBC Songs of Praise in which HRH The Princess Royal was seen being shown the garden by Barnaby Miln.

External links

Notes

  1. ^ Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 82-3; E.M. Cox, Plant-hunting in China: A History of Botanical Exploration in China and the Tibetan Marches (London: Scientific Book Guild, 1945), p. 89.
  2. ^ "Author Query". International Plant Names Index. http://www.ipni.org/ipni/authorsearchpage.do. 
  3. ^ History of European botanical discoveries in China by Emil Bretschneider Published in 1935, K.F. Koehlers antiquarium (Leipzig)
  4. ^ Richard Gorer, born 1913, horticultural writer
  5. ^ National Trust for Scotland, D Donald, Head of Horticulture in 1997

References