The Perfect Tea Thief

Robert Fortune detests the Celestial Kingdom and its people the minute he lands in China after the devastating Opium Wars in 1843. Under the guise of a plant hunter for the British Horticultural Society, his secret mission is to steal China's secrets of tea production, a brazen act of industrial espionage that will devastate China's 5,000-year-old civilization. He audaciously ventures into prohibited lands to collect flowers, plants, seeds, and birds. Seduced by the Flowery Land, he pursues exquisitely beautiful Jadelin from the House of Poe, unaware she is trained as a warrior as is everyone in her family who attempts to sabotage his every move and destroy him. The Perfect Tea Thief is a tale of deceit and lies, in a country of tradition crumbling under the powers of industrialization in a clash of Empires. "The Chinese have a saying, "You don't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been." THE PERFECT TEA THIEF takes the reader back to a source of tension that resonates today between China and the West in a fast-paced and captivating read based on the real life and letters of Robert Fortune." ---Barbara Bundy, PhD. Founding Executive Director Emerita, University of San Francisco Center for Asia Pacific Studies