East India House, City of London, 12 January 1848

....Previously just another trading commodity to the Honourable Company, tea had become a staple of British life. To be English was to drink tea: wives put tea on the breakfast table; the British Government paid for an empire with Tea Tax revenue, and the bankers of the Empire understood for two hundred years that it was tea that made the Far East trade go round. Tea was an "essential" and "necessary"to British life. It was also a significant profit centre for the government, a multi-billion-pound industry, accounting for as much as 10 percent of the total British economy as measured by tax revenues to the exchequer. And the East India Company had its stamp on every single case shipped into England......

China had once been a source of pure profit to the Company; tea's margins were deliciously high, and its value by the turn of the nineteenth century equalled that of all other Chinese goods.....

.....Growing tea would be like printing money - leaves that were picked for a penny could be sold for three pounds in London.

The Company's experimental tea gardens in the Himalayas totalled little more than 600 acres in 1846.......The Government of India had over 100,000 acres ready for cultivation that every day. From such acreage, the Company could expect to bring in a profit of almost 4 million rupees a year ($100 million today). But to get to that position six years hence - it takes that long for a tea plant to mature to picking stage - the Company needed hundreds of thousands of Chinese seeds from the finest of China's green and black tea regions straight away.

The Company was not just after plants and seeds and a receipt, it was also after an economic formula: from planting to labour to processing, transport and packaging, how much of the per pound price of tea at the London auction was mark-up, and how much was actual materials, manufacturing cost and labour?.....

China's entire foreign exchange was largely built on the sale of two commodities - silk and tea - and was thus incredibly vulnerable to the loss of either monopoly. To protect tea was to defend the Chinese economy.

For the Himalayan tea experiment, the Company shopping list was short but precise: the Company sought China's materials, her best tea seeds, green and black; and China's tea knowledge, in the form of Chinese tea makers and tea manufacturing implements.

The Company was well aware therefore that getting tea out of Chia would be a difficult undertaking and impossible to achieve through normal diplomatic channels..... In other words, if the East India Company wanted tea for india, it would have to steal it.

Tea met all the definitions of intellectual property: it was a product of high commercial value, manufactured using a formula and process unique to China, which China protected fiercely, and which also gave Chia a vast advantage over its competitors.

The notion of intellectual property and trade secrets was then brand new, only first articulated in he mid-1840s .....In the dawn of 1848, the East India Company was planning a project that was nothing short of industrial espionage. If the Company's scheme was successful, the largest multinational corporation in the world, the East India Company, would enact the greatest theft of trade secrets in the history of mankind.