Even earlier at the beginning of the nineteenth century, British
traders already sensed that their reliance on China as the sole
source of tea could not continue indefinitely. China's monopoly
on commercial tea production was fast becoming unacceptable to
England, and the illicit opium trade continually aggravated the
Chinese government. For decades prior to the outbreak of the
Opium Wars, alternate attempts at tea cultivation in
climatically favorable areas controlled by the British Empire
offered little success. Several of these early attempts to bring
tea plants to Europe also failed, either because the plants
perished in transit or because the plants that survived turned
out to be varieties other than the tea-producing Camellia
sinensis. So dismal were European attempts at tea cultivation
that by 1763, members of the French Academy of Sciences
pronounced that the tea bush was so unique to China that it
could not be grown anywhere else in the world. Even while the
Academy was making its dire declaration, h