Jason Goodwin's grandmothers spent their lives in China and India, daily observing the imperial custom of afternoon tea. Inspired by their memories, the author set off to explore the disappearing relics of their age - an exploration that reaches back into the extraordinary history of the tea trade. His journey takes him through the lost European cities of the south China coast, rediscovering a forgotten world of foreign concessions, islands and vanished mercantile clubs, and inland to the mountainous tea gardens of Fujian. On the trail of nineteenth-century tea imperialism, he travels on to India, to the cumbling city of Calcutta, held together by this most traditional of trades, with its 'tiffin-time' and Anglo-Indian etiquette. From the high tea gardens of Bohea and Darjeeling, he returns to the great tea metropolis - London, which reveals a fascinating hidden life of broking and arcane tea connoisseurship. Jason Goodwin evokes past and present with a lively sense of the ironies of history, following the tea trade from its origins in the Canton 'factories' through the Opium Wars and the settlement of British India, when planters were also empire builders, to its influence on the present day.Full of brilliantly observed detail, both historical and personal, The Gunpowder Gardens is informative, moving and funny, and was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.