Tea & Text Book Club: Tea Lovers’ Journey
Join Kintsugi House for an immersive reading experience with the Tea & Text Book Club! This four-month series, Tea Lovers’ Journey, explores a new tea-themed book each month, alternating between fiction and nonfiction. There’s no commitment required—sign up for the months that interest you!
Each gathering includes:
🍵 A professionally-led discussion (guided by a former librarian)
🍵 A new loose-leaf tea to taste, carefully selected to complement the reading
🍵 Thoughtfully paired treats
🍵 A take-home sample of the month’s featured tea
This Month’s Book: For All the Tea in China by Sarah Rose
In the dramatic story of one of the greatest acts of corporate espionage ever committed, Sarah Rose recounts the fascinating, unlikely circumstances surrounding a turning point in economic history. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the British East India Company faced the loss of its monopoly on the fantastically lucrative tea trade with China, forcing it to make the drastic decision of sending Scottish botanist Robert Fortune to steal the crop from deep within China and bring it back to British plantations in India. Fortune's danger-filled odyssey, magnificently recounted here, reads like adventure fiction, revealing a long-forgotten chapter of the past and the wondrous origins of a seemingly ordinary beverage.
Sarah Rose is the author of D-Day Girls: The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis and Helped Win World War II, and For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History. She was the Dynasties columnist at the Wall Street Journal, and her features have appeared in Outside, Departures, The New York Post, Travel + Leisure, Bon Appetit, The Saturday Evening Post, and Men’s Journal. In 2014, she was awarded a Lowell Thomas Prize in Travel Writing.
Choose from two options: A) Attend with your own copy of the book (Or check it out at your local library!), or B) Purchase a copy through Kintsugi House when you sign up to participate.
Participation: $10 per session, or $30 with a copy of the book.
📍 Location: Treats Studios, 216 Oak Street, Spruce Pine