Alice Loxton

speaker

770 appearances 11 recordings 7 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 3 Sep

Alice Loxton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.

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You're Dead to Me · Why do British people love tea? (from Here For The History) · 19 Jun 2026 podcast

They're forced to open up more ports to trade to Britain.

And the eventual result of all of this is that tea starts to flow more easily and enable trade with Britain.

Now, following this, the Brits not only had they forced China to trade in this way, but they also wanted to take it a step further.

Instead of having to rely on China to trade the tea, they wanted to shortcut this and grow the tea.

tea themselves.

And so in India, they set up tea gardens and plantations.

The great problem was that they were lacking in some pretty key parts of this.

They lacked the knowledge, the know-how of how to grow the tea, but also the plants to do it.

There have been all of these attempts which just totally failed.

And this is where we introduce a new character to the story.

Get comfortable because this is quite a story.

So, let me introduce you to Robert Fortune.

He is a Scottish botanist, an explorer, and in 1848 he was instructed by the East India Company to, in an infamous episode of corporate espionage, travel to China in secret

and do something pretty daring.

Gather the tea seeds, the plants and the understanding which would enable the British to grow tea.

Now this is a pretty devious move, to put it kindly.

Fortune disguises himself in traditional Chinese clothing and hairstyle.

He sneaks into areas of China which are completely forbidden to foreigners and he goes to the factories and he sees how tea is made.

An impressive disguise.

So he brought back 20,000 live plants and convinced a small number of workers to travel to a northern province, as he called it, to grow the tea.

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