History Mysteries That REAL Scholars Actually Debate

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]In the spring of 500 BC, a Greek sailor leaving the eastern shore of the Black Sea could have kept going west for 90 straight days. Every time he stopped for water, he'd have found someone who spoke his language. These people didn't share a king or an army, and they didn't have a single agreed upon name for themselves, though we know them today all as Greeks.

[00:00:22]No one alive in 500 BC, Greek or otherwise, could have told you with any honesty how many of them there were. And today, with modern estimates, that number is quite shocking.

[00:00:35]Here's the first thing that makes the question hard. There was no unified Greek state in the year 500 BC.

[00:00:42]What there was instead was a network.

[00:00:45]Hundreds or thousands of independent citystates scattered across roughly 4,000 m of coastline.

[00:00:52]These settlements stretched from the eastern edge of the Black Sea to the southern coast of what's now France.

[00:00:58]Each one minted its own coins, fielded its own soldiers, worshiped its own variations of the gods, and kept its own records.

[00:01:08]There was no central census. And the very concept of Greekness was something the Greeks themselves were still working out.

[00:01:17]They tended to define it negatively. You were Greek because you weren't a barbarian, which meant you weren't someone whose language sounded to Greek ears like nonsense syllables.

[00:01:28]Modern scholars have spent the better part of two centuries trying to put a number on it. Anyway, the methods researchers use to estimate ancient populations sound borderline reckless until you understand them.

[00:01:42]There's one method which works backwards from the physical footprint of a city.

[00:01:46]This includes the area inside its walls, the density of housing remains, and the number of rural farmsteads identified in its hinterland. Then it applies modern comparisons from pre-industrial Mediterranean villages to roughly sketch out how many people would have actually lived there. There's the army size method which uses surviving military records and works out the civilian population that would have been needed to field a given force.

[00:02:17]The problem with this though is that ancient writers tended to greatly exaggerate the size of armies. Modern scholars have paired down these numbers, but there's no real science behind these modern historical estimates either. Then there's the grain supply method, which calculates wheat consumption implied by surviving trade records and divides by the average ancient appetite.

[00:02:40]Each method has problems and each gives different numbers, but when you stack them together, they start to converge.

[00:02:48]These convergent estimates are also pretty recent and the first major attempt to count the Greeks of the ancient world was published in 1886 by a German classicist.

[00:02:58]For the better part of a century after that, the working consensus tended to lowball things substantially.

[00:03:06]Mainland Greece was once routinely estimated at well under 2 million people for the early fifth century, and the wider Greek world rarely above 5 million in total.

[00:03:17]The current estimates are a great deal larger simply because our understanding of the archaeology is better. For mainland Greece in 500 BC, the convergent estimate falls somewhere between 2 and a half and 3 million people. Athens itself before the explosive growth of the fifth century sat at perhaps 140,000 including its rural hinterland.

[00:03:40]Sparta proper was tiny, maybe 40,000 citizens at the absolute outside, though it controlled a helot population.

[00:03:50]These were the dispossessed population of Laconia and Messinia, and they may have been six or seven times that number. Corinth, the wealthiest trading city of the era, hovered somewhere around 70,000.

[00:04:04]Thieves, the dominant power in Beaoshia, sat at maybe 60,000, including its surrounding villages, and Argos in the northeastern Pelpineese was probably similar.

[00:04:17]The Aian Islands collectively held perhaps another 4 to 500,000 Greek speakers between them. But here's the thing. While this was the heartland of the Greek world, the mainland was just the beginning.

[00:04:31]By 500 BC, the eastern coast of the Aian, what's now western Turkey, had been densely Greek for nearly four centuries. The Ionian cities of Mitus, Ephesus, and Smyrna were among the wealthiest places in the entire Greekeaking world, and Mitus alone had almost 100,000 people.

[00:04:53]Molita had also by some ancient accounts founded between 60 and 90 daughter colonies around the Black Sea and the Sea of Marura during the 7th and 6th centuries.

[00:05:05]The combined Greek population of coastal Asia Minor in 500 BC is now generally estimated at somewhere over a million.

[00:05:14]Within 5 years of our snapshot date, almost all of these cities would rise against Persian rule in what historians call the Ionian Revolt.

[00:05:24]The numbers they fielded, tens of thousands of hoplights and oresmen drawn from a relatively narrow coastal strip, back up the higher estimates.

[00:05:36]Sicily and southern Italy, the region the Romans would later call Magna Gracia, had been receiving waves of Greek colonists for two and a half centuries by this point.

[00:05:48]Syracuse was already one of the largest Greek cities anywhere on Earth, and Acragos on the south coast of Sicily was nearly as wealthy.

[00:05:58]The combined Greek population of the Western colonies in 500 BC was probably between 1 and 1.5 million. That's a Greekeaking civilization equivalent in size to roughly half of mainland Greece.

[00:06:13]Planted in territory that had been inhabited a generation or two earlier by italic peoples.

[00:06:19]These cities tended to assimilate the native populations of the surrounding lands quite quickly, which swelled the number of people considered Greeks even further. After all, it's important to remember that to be a Greek was, largely speaking to not be a barbarian. And a barbarian was someone who didn't speak Greek at a native level.

[00:06:41]The wealthiest of these western Greek cities were almost impossible to distinguish from their eastern cousins in the mainland. Syracuse was routinely considered to be one of the foundational pillars of Greek civilization despite being located a fair distance from the heartland itself.

[00:06:59]Cyberus on the instep of the Italian boot had been famous across the Greek world for its luxury before it was sacked and erased by its rival Croton in 510 BC.

[00:07:12]Croton itself produced a generation of Olympic champions and was still a major regional power in 500 BC. Torrentum, founded by Spartan colonists in the late 8th century, dominated the heel of Italy and held perhaps 50,000 people.

[00:07:30]The strange thing isn't that these cities existed at all. It's that they thought of themselves as part of the same cultural world as Athens or Mitus, half a sea away.

[00:07:42]Then there are the further frontiers.

[00:07:45]Sirene and its sister cities along the North African coast had been founded by colonists from the island of Thera in the 7th century. By 500 BC, they likely held something like a 100,000 Greek speakers with a much larger surrounding Libyan population.

[00:08:03]Sirene itself controlled a confederation of five smaller coastal cities known later as the Pentapoulos and exported sulfium.

[00:08:13]This is a now extinct medicinal plant that was worth roughly its weight in silver to Greek and later Roman buyers.

[00:08:20]Egypt, meanwhile, had its own Greek population centered on the trading port of Ncratus in the Nile Delta. This was a city granted to a consortium of Greek colonies as a privileged trading hub in the 7th century and probably holding around 10,000 permanent Greek residents.

[00:08:39]The Black Sea coast had been drawing settlers from Mitus and elsewhere for two centuries, and the combined Greek population there was probably around 200,000.

[00:08:50]The grain produced on the steps behind these pontic Greek cities was already starting to feed the larger cities of the Aian.

[00:08:58]This was the beginning of a trade route that would in time become the lifeline of classical Athens.

[00:09:04]Misalia was one of the farthest flung colonies founded by Fosene refugees around 600 BC on the southern coast of what's now France. It had perhaps 30,000 inhabitants and was already spawning sub colonies of its own in what is present-day Spain. Add everything together and the estimates converge on a number somewhere between 5 and 7 million Greek speakers on the planet in 500 BC.

[00:09:32]Interestingly, roughly half of them were living outside the Greek mainland.

[00:09:38]There's also a complication that any honest count has to mention. A significant fraction of the population living inside Greek cities in 500 BC wasn't ethnically or linguistically Greek at all. Many people had been brought in from Thrace, Anatolia, the Black Sea region, and the Balkans.

[00:09:58]Modern estimates put the unfree share of Athens at perhaps a quarter to a third of the total population during this period. Whether those people should be counted as part of the Greek world depends on what kind of question you're asking. However, most evidence suggests that over the generations they became increasingly acclimatized to Greek culture.

[00:10:22]To put the Greeks in context, consider what was happening on the other side of the Agian.

[00:10:28]The Persian Empire under Darius I in 500 BC was the largest political entity that had ever existed on Earth at that time.

[00:10:38]It stretched from the Indis Valley to the borders of Macedonia, from the deserts of southern Egypt to the steps north of the Caspian Sea.

[00:10:48]Modern estimates of its total population vary widely, but a defensible middle figure is around 17 million people with some serious scholars pushing the number significantly higher. But here's the thing. Of those 17 million, the actual ethnic Persians probably numbered no more than 2 or 3 million. The rest were Mes, Babylonians, Egyptians, Lydians, Bactreans, Arameanss, Phoenicians, and dozens of other peoples who'd been brought under Persian rule. Unlike the Greeks, for the Persians, being a nativeborn Persian speaker didn't virtually automatically render you a Persian, which made it harder to bolster those core numbers. The Greekeaking world taken as a whole was therefore substantially larger than the ethnic Persian population that actually ruled this enormous empire.

[00:11:44]That's a piece of context the Persians themselves seem to have understood.

[00:11:49]It also helps explain why Darius and his son Xerxes took the Greek question so seriously over the decades that followed.

[00:11:59]They understood the danger that the presently fractured Greeks represented and that a unifier could pose a massive threat to the Persian Empire. Within 20 years of our snapshot date, Xerxes would march an army across the Helellispont to attack mainland Greece that some ancient counts put at over a million men.

[00:12:21]Modern estimates of the actual force range between 100 and 200,000 soldiers and sailors drawn from satropies as distant as Bactria and Egypt.

[00:12:32]Either way, it was almost certainly the largest army that had ever been assembled in the ancient world up to that point. The Greeks it was sent to attack, even though they outnumbered the ethnic Persians overall, were small, fractious, and famously bad at cooperating with each other.

[00:12:50]But I think this population context is interesting because it really does hammer home why the Persians saw the Greeks as such a massive potential threat.

[00:13:01]This is especially true when you consider the rate at which the Greeks were colonizing absolutely everything around the rim of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

[00:13:12]The way the Persians ran the Greeks they already had under their thumb is also worth a look.

[00:13:18]The Ionian cities of Asia Minor had been brought under Persian control during the conquests of Cyrus in the 540s.

[00:13:27]Darius governed them through local tyrants who paid tribute and supplied ships and the system was profitable enough that for half a century it more or less worked.

[00:13:38]The Greeks weren't the only seafaring people in the Mediterranean in 500 BC.

[00:13:44]And if you're familiar with the period, you also already know they weren't the best either.

[00:13:49]That title goes to the Phoenetians based in the cities of Ty, Sidon, Biblo, and Arwad on the coast of modern Lebanon.

[00:14:00]They had been the dominant traders of the eastern Mediterranean for centuries before the Greeks began their colonial expansion.

[00:14:08]In fact, they were such expert navigators that one of their colonies, Carthage, would send expeditions as far as western Africa.

[00:14:18]There, Hano, the navigator, would famously have an encounter with gorillas or perhaps chimpanzees.

[00:14:27]The Phoenetians had given the Greeks the alphabet sometime in the 8th century, taught them celestial navigation, and largely shaped early Greek ship building. By 500 BC, however, the Phoenician homeland had been swallowed by the Persian Empire, taxed heavily and required to supply the bulk of the Persian fleet.

[00:14:49]The political and demographic momentum of the Phoenician world had shifted west to the Phoenician daughter city of Carthage on the coast of modern Tunisia.

[00:14:59]By 500 BC, it was already a regional power in its own right and would soon clash directly with the Greek colonies of Sicily. The total Phoenician speaking population in 500 BC is harder to pin down than the Greek figure. This is partly because the Carthaginians wrote less down than their Greek rivals and partly because much of what they did write was destroyed when the Romans flattened Carthage in 146 BC. The Romans deliberately destroyed their entire cultural heritage, keeping only a handful of texts on farming and seafaring, which they deemed economically useful. The best modern estimates put the Phoenician homeland population at perhaps half a million in 500 BC.

[00:15:47]Carthage and its growing western network of colonies added maybe another half million on top of that.

[00:15:54]The total Phoenician civilization, in other words, was probably around a million people, roughly 1/5 to 17th the size of the Greek world.

[00:16:06]The Italian Peninsula in 500 BC was a complicated patchwork that was still comparatively underdeveloped at the time with one major exception.

[00:16:17]The Atruscans at the peak of their power and controlling territory from the Po Valley down to the Bay of Naples probably accounted for around a million and a half people. Their 12 city league was arguably the wealthiest non-Greek civilization in the western Mediterranean, trading metals and wine north into Gaul and south to the Phoenetians of Carthage.

[00:16:41]Atruscan workshops produced bronze and ceramic goods that were prized as far as the Greek mainland. That said, on a per capita basis, Carthage was likely far better off civilizationally than the Atruscans.

[00:16:56]The Latin League, including Rome itself, may have totaled 3 to 400,000 at this point. Rome was still a minor city of perhaps 30,000, only a few years removed from the expulsion of its last king and still well within the orbit of its larger Atruscan neighbors. The Samites, Oscans, and other inland italic peoples added perhaps another million. The total italic speaking population came out to somewhere around 3 million, though large pockets of southern Italy had already been culturally helenized.

[00:17:33]Egypt under Persian rule since 525 BC held probably 3 to 3 1/2 million people in 500 BC.

[00:17:43]This was an extraordinary density for the ancient world that owed entirely to the agricultural productivity of the Nile flood plane.

[00:17:52]Egypt was individually larger than the mainland Greek population by a comfortable margin, but Egypt was also a single political and ethnic block, while the Greek world was a thousandpiece mosaic stretched across 4,000 m of coastline.

[00:18:10]Then there's the rest of what the ancient Greeks called Asia Minor, or what we now know as Anatolia, roughly modern-day Turkey. The Lydians, whose former kingdom Cyrus the Great had swallowed in 547 BC, still numbered somewhere over a million in 500 BC.

[00:18:30]Their wealth was famous in the Greek world since the days of King Cryus a generation earlier. The Kerrans and Lissians along the southern coast of Anatolia, the Friians of the central plateau, and the Capidosians further east each accounted for a few hundred,000 more.

[00:18:49]Taken together, the non-Greek peoples of Anatolia probably outnumbered the Greeks of Asia Minor by something like 2:1.

[00:18:58]Many of these non-Greek people would in time come to view themselves as Greeks.

[00:19:04]In the centuries following the conquests of Alexander the Great. East of them, the heartland of Mesopotamia still held probably four to five million people, the densest settled landscape in the entire Persian Empire.

[00:19:21]The Thrians north of Greece are usually estimated at around a million, and the Yrianss of the Eastern Adriatic, perhaps half that. The Kelts expanded rapidly across central Europe by 500 BC, but were only just beginning to touch the Mediterranean directly. They contributed only marginally to the western Mediterranean's demographic picture at this date, though that would soon change.

[00:19:48]The Iberians of the southern Spanish coast, partly helanized through contact with Greek and Phoenician traders, may have numbered around a million across the entire peninsula.

[00:20:00]North and east of the Black Sea, the Cythian Confederation, semi-nomeadic horsemen ranging across the step from the Danube to the Vulga are more difficult to estimate.

[00:20:12]They probably totaled somewhere between 1 and 2 million, but the usual methods of estimating population don't work well with people who aren't fully settled.

[00:20:22]Still, they did engage in significant agriculture, and they supplied the grain and other goods that fueled the Pontic Greek trade.

[00:20:30]As an interesting aside, they would also be the last historically attested people that the Greeks claimed you would encounter on the way to Hyperoreia.

[00:20:40]Lay these figures side by side, and the Greek world was actually the largest civilization in the Mediterranean basin in 500 BC.

[00:20:50]While the Persian Empire dwarfed it in raw numbers, this was a multithnic empire with very few actual Persians, at least comparatively.

[00:21:00]Egypt rivaled mainland Greece in concentrated density, but the Egyptians didn't branch out and settle other lands like the Greeks did. Instead, preferring the comfort of the Nile. What was distinctive about the Greeks was their wide distribution, unmatched by any other group in the region.

[00:21:20]There were Greek speakers on three continents, separated by hundreds of miles of saltwater.

[00:21:26]They could still understand each other when they spoke and still send athletes to compete every four years at the same festival in a small valley in the western pelpineese.

[00:21:39]In the end, there were 5 to 7 million Greek people in 500 BC and over the next centuries helanization would produce millions more. The entire world population in 500 BC was about 100 million people total which made Greeks perhaps the most populous people in the world. At the highest estimate, this means that 7% of the entire world was Greek at that time. The only other group who could compare were the Senitic people who would eventually be known as the Han Chinese, though they were less unified than they would be a few centuries later. Today, for reference, we've got about 8 billion people on the planet. And using the most broad definition of Greek, ethnic Greeks form about 2% of the planet.

[00:22:33]A Scottish gardener walks into the Wui Mountains in 1848 wearing the wrong clothes, speaking the wrong language, and carrying a forged identity stitched together out of rumors. He's there to commit one of the largest acts of corporate theft in human history. To lift an entire industry plant by plant from a country that's guarded it for centuries. He's doing it all while he's dressed up in a Chinese outfit, convincing the locals that he's from beyond the Great Wall of China, where people look a bit different.

[00:23:07]The strangest part isn't that he tried.

[00:23:10]It's that he succeeded and that almost nobody outside the tea trade today remembers his name.

[00:23:18]Robert Fortune wasn't anyone's first pick for an international intelligence operation. He was born on the 16th of September 1812 in a tiny Burwickure farming hamlet. He served a gardening apprenticeship locally, worked at Mortyn House south of Edinburgh, and eventually earned a steady position at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh.

[00:23:39]This was about as ambitious as a man in his trade could reasonably aim at the time, or so most people thought.

[00:23:47]In 1840, he and his family moved to London to take a job with the Horicultural Society at its garden in Chisik. It was a respectable post but a long way from anything resembling international corporate espionage.

[00:24:02]What changed his life was a conflict and the first opium war ended in 1842 with the treaty of Nank King. This forced China to seed Hong Kong, pay a heavy indemnity and open five new treaty ports to foreign merchants. The settlement shifted the regional balance of power almost overnight. The Horicultural Society saw the opportunity and in the early spring of 1843 sent fortune to China on a three-year plant collection trip. He arrived in Hong Kong that July after a 4-month sea voyage, and he spent the next 3 years exploring the regions a European could now legally reach.

[00:24:44]These were places like Guangdong, Fujian, and Yunan. and he was collecting ornamental flowers and taking careful notes. He was for the moment exactly what he seemed, a British gardening expert on a trip to acquire and document plants that had been unknown in Europe.

[00:25:07]When fortune sailed back to England in 1846, he probably thought his China days were over. He published a book about his travels in 1847, settled into his new role as curator of the Chelsea Physic Garden, and seemed headed for a quiet horicultural career.

[00:25:25]But behind the scenes, an enormous problem was building inside one of the largest commercial enterprises in human history.

[00:25:34]For more than a century, the British East India Company had effectively held a monopoly on tea coming into Britain.

[00:25:42]That monopoly had built fortunes, paid for fleets, and propped up a meaningful slice of the national books.

[00:25:50]By the mid1 1840s, though, it was crumbling, and the company had lost its exclusive trade privileges.

[00:25:59]Competitors were entering the market, and every leaf of tea sold in London still had to be bought from China at whatever price China decided to set. Tea was leaving the country in colossal volumes and silver was leaving with it.

[00:26:14]The opium trade had been one way of balancing that ledger, but it wasn't a permanent fix and the company knew it.

[00:26:22]The only real solution was to grow tea somewhere else and India looked obvious.

[00:26:28]The company had its own botanical garden at Saharanpur in the foothills of the Himalayas, originally run by a Scottish surgeon named John Forbes Royal.

[00:26:38]Royal and his successors had been arguing for years that tea could be cultivated on British controlled land if only the right plants and the right knowledge could be obtained.

[00:26:49]A native Asam tea variety had already been identified in northeast India. But the problem was it hadn't been bred over millennia for the desired taste.

[00:27:00]It was the prestigious Chinese strains with their delicate flavor and millennia of refinement behind them that the company really wanted. As it would turn out, many of those flavors were actually a result of the Chinese methods of processing the leaves. But that wasn't known at the time. The plants and the expertise both sat inside China behind imperial laws that forbade their export inside an industry whose specialists had no interest in giving up their craft.

[00:27:32]The company eventually decided that if China wouldn't sell the seeds and the knowledge, the company would simply take the tea and the experts themselves.

[00:27:42]They needed a man inconspicuous enough to do it and someone who already knew the ground a little.

[00:27:49]Fortune was approached in 1848 and accepted the contract, though he was apparently quite concerned about the danger at first. Fortune was, after all, not a great adventurer, but a man of science, and more than anything, a gardener. The terms were generous, his expenses were covered, and the company gave him a degree of operational freedom. No government department of the day would have offered an outsider.

[00:28:17]The plan called for him to enter parts of China offlimits to Europeans and identify the best tea growing regions.

[00:28:25]He was to document the entire process, recruit experienced Chinese tea workers willing to relocate and somehow get everything back to British India. It was a profoundly illegal mission and foreigners weren't permitted to travel more than a day's journey inland from the treaty ports.

[00:28:45]The export of tea plants and seeds without authorization was forbidden by theQing government, which treated the trade as a matter of strategic national security and wealth.

[00:28:57]Being caught wouldn't just mean a ruined career. It could mean imprisonment, expulsion, or much worse, depending on which official happened to find him.

[00:29:09]That said, he likely wouldn't have found his head up on the chopping block due to the power imbalance between theQing and the British, but it was a possibility.

[00:29:20]Fortune knew the only way through was a disguise. And honestly, this is how I found out about this guy to begin with.

[00:29:27]He arrived in Shanghai in the autumn of 1848 and set about transforming himself.

[00:29:33]He hired a servant who could vouch for him, paid the man to shave the front of his scalp in the style required byQing law, and attached a long false braid, the Q, down his back. He swapped his western clothes for loose Mandarin robes. He practiced eating with chopsticks and walked with the small, careful steps expected of a wealthy traveler. He could speak some Mandarin from his earlier trips, and what he couldn't manage, he covered by claiming a far-off provincial dialect.

[00:30:05]Reportedly, he gave himself a Chinese name, translating roughly as brilliant flower, which isn't too subtle, but it worked. The vast majority of the people in the area he was going to had never seen a European face.

[00:30:20]They saw an odd, slightly awkward gentleman from some distant northern town, and treated him with the polite distance owed to a stranger of evidently decent means.

[00:30:31]He claimed to have been from somewhere just beyond the Great Wall, and since it was known that people from this area were different, they just accepted it.

[00:30:41]It was on paper a ridiculous disguise, but in practice it worked well enough.

[00:30:49]His first target was the green tea district around Slo Mountain in what's now Ane Province, which had supplied much of the green tea sent to Europe for generations.

[00:30:59]Reaching it meant a long, slow journey by sedan chair and riverboat with a handful of hired locals, weeks of muddy roads and narrow river towns where one wrong word could end everything.

[00:31:12]When he finally got to the tea hills, he watched everything. He watched how the leaves were picked at first light, how they were withered on bamboo trays. He observed how they were panfired in heavy iron walks to stop oxidation, how they were rolled by hand on hot tables, and how they were sorted by grade.

[00:31:34]Finally, he noted how they were finally packed into leadline chests for the long journey down river to the coast. He noted it all in coded shortorthhand and rough sketches, so if any official found what he was carrying, it wouldn't look suspicious.

[00:31:51]It was here that he stumbled onto something that would later cause a significant scandal in London. The green tea being prepared for export wasn't the same product the Chinese themselves drank. Workers were dying it, and Fortune noticed that the men handling the export batches had bright blue stains on their fingers.

[00:32:11]When he pressed further, he found a foreman grinding gypsum and Prussian blue together with a mortar and pestle.

[00:32:18]The bluish powder was being stirred directly into the leaves to give them the bright uniform green color that English drinkers had come to expect. The dye contained a compound built around iron and cyanide, something nobody outside the trade had reason to suspect.

[00:32:36]When Fortune later published the finding, it nudged British taste away from green tea and toward black tea, and the shift has more or less stuck.

[00:32:47]He collected seeds, took cutings, and packed plants carefully into wwardian cases, the small portable glass and wood boxes that worked like miniature greenhouses.

[00:32:58]The cases were the secret weapon of the operation because for decades the great frustration of plant hunting had been that almost everything died at sea. The Wian case fixed that by trapping moisture inside a sealed environment that needed no attention during a voyage. Fortune arranged for the first shipments to be carried down to Hong Kong and then onward to Kolkata. He stayed behind and turned south heading for an even more dangerous prize.

[00:33:28]The Wui Mountains in northern Fujian, known to Europeans of the day as the Bohea Hills, were the source of the famous black teas that filled British porcelain cups every afternoon.

[00:33:39]Few outsiders had ever seen the region, and reaching it meant moving through hill country, where any westerner caught poking around would at the very least have his journey ended quickly.

[00:33:52]Fortune got there and he spent weeks in the area lodging in Buddhist monasteries whose monks proved unexpectedly generous. He quietly watched the entire production cycle from morning harvest through the long oxidation and roasting process that turned the same tea leaf into black tea instead of green.

[00:34:12]He noticed that the timing was a matter of skill rather than written rule, that the older men did it by smell and feel, and that the entire industry hung on a few thousand experienced hands.

[00:34:25]This was for a European botonist a revolutionary moment. Back in London, scientists had argued for years that black tea and green tea must come from two different species. The general consensus at the time was that they were almost certainly different, though a few dissenting voices argued the contrarian position.

[00:34:47]Fortune now had firsthand proof that they were in fact the same plant process differently. He kept his findings to himself, gathered up more seedlings, and hired several experienced Wui tea makers on long-term contracts.

[00:35:03]By the start of 1849, he was back in Shanghai, possessed of plants, seeds, processed samples, written notes, and a small group of skilled Chinese workers.

[00:35:17]Notably, these workers had been tricked into believing they were being recruited to a remote northern Chinese province.

[00:35:24]They were, of course, going somewhere else entirely.

[00:35:28]Getting the hall out of China nearly went wrong more than once. At one point, Fortune was traveling along the coast in a small Chinese passenger vessel with some of his most valuable plant specimens stowed below when five junks full of pirates closed in. The captain and other passengers, by his own later account, hid their valuables in the ballast and changed into worn clothes to look unworthing.

[00:35:54]Fortune himself, who was down with a severe fever at the time, dragged himself up on deck, armed with a pair of pistols and a heavy rifle. He watched the lead junk fire two broadsides that fell short, waited until the third came within roughly 30 yards, and then opened fire. He emptied his weapons into the crowded deck of the first pirate boat, dealt with the second in the same fashion, and watched all five vessels break off and turn back into the coastal haze.

[00:36:25]Whether this last part was an exaggeration on his part or not isn't entirely clear, but given the generally unbelievable narrative that's been confirmed, I don't personally doubt it.

[00:36:38]That was the closest the operation came to a complete disaster.

[00:36:43]Though it wasn't the only close call, and he also ran into some problems withQing officials along the way.

[00:36:51]Once he'd reached safer water, the precious wardian cases were transferred to larger oceangoing ships. They sailed first to Hong Kong, then onward to Kolkata, and finally up to Saharanpur in the Himalayan foothills.

[00:37:07]By 1851, the cases had reached their destination in good shape. the seedlings alive and the seeds viable. One shipment alone is recorded as containing nearly 13,000 healthy plants in the gardens after arrival.

[00:37:22]Over the course of the operation, the total number of tea plants Fortune is credited with delivering to India runs into the tens of thousands alongside seeds in vastly greater numbers.

[00:37:36]What came next was less dramatic, but in some ways more important. The first generation of plants Fortune brought into the northwestern Indian provinces didn't do especially well. The climate there wasn't always right. The Chinese variety he'd selected wasn't ideal for the strong, dark brew British drinkers preferred, and many of the original specimens failed in the ground. He simply hadn't quite grabbed the right plants or recruited the people who produced the best processed tea.

[00:38:08]The Indian tea industry that grew up over the following decades ended up relying mostly on the local Asam variety of tea rather than the Chinese plants Fortune had risked his life to obtain.

[00:38:21]From a strict botanical standpoint, this tea heist had partly failed. But there was, of course, much more to the story.

[00:38:29]From a strategic standpoint, it succeeded almost completely. The Chinese tea makers taught their craft to Indian workers in the gardens around Saharanpur and later in the steeper cooler ground of Dargiling.

[00:38:43]The processing techniques they passed on, the withering, the rolling, the careful timing of oxidation, the firing in iron pans became the technical backbone of the dargiling industry.

[00:38:57]Some of the Chinese workers stayed on in India for the rest of their lives.

[00:39:01]Others eventually returned home, by which point the secret they'd carried west was no longer a secret at all.

[00:39:09]Within a generation, India was producing tea on a serious commercial scale. By the early 20th century, Chinese exports had been overtaken in the British market by Indian and Selines brands. China's centuries old monopoly was effectively finished, and a single Scottish gardener had been the practical instrument of its ending.

[00:39:31]Fortune himself wasn't finished, and he returned to China several more times through the 1850s in a less covert fashion, looking for more plants. He also traveled onto Japan, wrote four books, and quietly amassed a reputation as one of the most successful plant hunters of the Victorian age. He brought home hundreds of new ornamental species and lent his name to dozens of them in the botanical record.

[00:39:58]He retired to London, kept gardening, and passed away there on the 13th of April, 1880 at the age of 67.

[00:40:07]He was buried in Brmpton Cemetery beneath a modest stone that doesn't mention tea at all. A man can change the economic balance between two empires and still end up under a plain marker, with passers by having no idea what's underneath their feet. Fortune's name survives now mostly in the Latin labels stuck to garden plants like the fortunaria and the roodendran fortune.

[00:40:32]He pulled off one of the largest acts of botanical theft in recorded history.

[00:40:37]Until this day, almost no one remembers it.

[00:40:44]Hey everyone, it's Jimmy with my usual reminder to hit the notification bell and the subscribe button. Also, don't forget to leave a comment saying what you've learned from this video or what you like to do while you watch or