English (later British) East India Company

Assembled from 53 blocks · 3 evidence · 40 related

1. Story
2. The East India Company was an English chartered joint-stock company, founded in 1600, that became a territorial power in South Asia and the sole legal British importer of Chinese tea. Its China trade ran through Canton, was recorded in the factory records now held in the India Office Records at the British Library, and its monopoly on the China trade was ended by Parliament in 1834. Because tea duty was a major source of British revenue, the Company's tea account was effectively a fiscal instrument of the state. It was also the institution that organised opium production in Bengal, and that commissioned Robert Fortune to remove tea plants and processing knowledge from China.
3. Knowledge
4. Tea
5. English (later British) East India Company
6. Opium
7. Assam
8. Connections
9. Opium
10. Assam
11. Tea
12. Robert Fortune
13. Qing trade confined to Canton
14. Boston Tea Party
15. Commutation Act cuts British tea duty
16. East India Company's China monopoly ends; Tea Committee founded
17. Lin Zexu destroys confiscated opium at Humen
18. The Opium Wars
19. Robert Fortune removes tea plants and tea makers from China
20. Parliament bans the use of printed calicoes
21. English (later British) East India Company
22. Silver
23. Canton (historical) — modern Guangzhou
24. Lin Zexu destroys confiscated opium at Humen
25. The Opium Wars
26. Camellia sinensis
27. English (later British) East India Company
28. Assam Company
29. Robert Bruce shown tea growing in Assam
30. East India Company's China monopoly ends; Tea Committee founded
31. First Assam tea auctioned in London
32. Camellia sinensis
33. Silver
34. London
35. Tea Horse Road (Chamagudao)
36. Canton (historical) — modern Guangzhou
37. English (later British) East India Company
38. Tea culture
39. Tea buried in the Han Yangling mausoleum
40. Tea-for-horse exchange between China and Tibet
41. Tea first shipped to Europe by sea
42. Qing trade confined to Canton
43. Boston Tea Party
44. Commutation Act cuts British tea duty
45. Robert Bruce shown tea growing in Assam
46. East India Company's China monopoly ends; Tea Committee founded
47. First Assam tea auctioned in London
48. The Opium Wars
49. Treaty of Nanking
50. Evidence
51. The Company's Canton trade, its tea purchases and cargo accounting, and its administrative decision-making are documented in a single surviving institutional archive.
52. The Anglo-Indian opium trade, organised as a Bengal monopoly and sold on to private smugglers, rose from a few thousand chests annually in the 1820s to roughly forty thousand by 1839 and reversed the silver flow that had funded tea purchases.
53. Fortune's own published account documents his commission by the East India Company, his travel in disguise into closed tea districts, the use of Wardian cases, the recruitment of Chinese tea makers, and that green and black tea come from the same plant.