by Jeff Koehler
For the East India Company, the opium trade was crucial to its solvency and yielded it some £2 million a year. By the early 1800s, it was the leading source of revenue for the Company. But it was also the second-largest one for the government of British India after land taxes, regularly contributing more than 15 percent of the total.42 And taxes on tea back in Britain, which the opium effectively purchased, were adding at least £3 million annually to the coffers of the Exchequer, nearly 10 percent of the revenue from the whole of England.43 That amount covered half of the expenses of the mighty Royal Navy, which dominated the globe’s seas.44
The opium trade was too important to stop—or allow to be stopped.
However, that is exactly what the Chinese emperor—officially, “Son of Heaven and Lord of Ten Thousand Years”—tried to do. He appointed a special emissary to Canton, the morally upright Lin Zexu. (His nickname was Blue Sky, referring to his supposedly clear and incorruptible nature.)45 Lin made sixteen hundred arrests, closed the channel that led to Canton, effectively blockading the port, and publically destroyed some twenty thousand chests of opium held in foreign warehouses. It took workers three weeks to dissolve 3 million pounds of the drug in pits and watch it be swept out to sea by the currents.46
In response, Britain launched a war to force the Chinese to open their ports to the trade. The First Opium War (1839–42) was a prolonged, intermittent, and lopsided affair, with Britain’s superior weapons crushing the emperor’s far more numerous troops, who carried muskets, flintlocks, pikes, and bows and arrows. Lin, scapegoat for the humiliating defeat, was recalled to Peking and sentenced to death. “You have been no better than a wooden doll,” the emperor told him.47*
The Treaty of Nanking, ending the First Opium War, resulted in the opening of five ports for foreign trade: Canton, Amoy, Foochow (Fuzhou), Ningpo (Ninbo), and Shanghai. As well, China ceded Hong Kong, then a minor outpost, where British citizens were exempt from Chinese jurisdiction and would be held accountable by their own laws rather than local ones. It also included an indemnity payment to Britain of $21 million, about half of China’s total tax revenues for the year, to cover war costs and compensation to traders for the destroyed opium. China, though, refused to legalize opium, and Henry Pottinger, who negotiated the treaty for the British, did not insist. Opium is not mentioned anywhere in the document.
While tea imports to Britain jumped from 32 million pounds in 1834 to 56.5 million pounds by 1846,48 the terms of the treaty, and their protracted implementation, did not appease the British for long. With several of the key points disputed, they launched the Second Opium War in 1856. They handily won this, too, and burned down the vast and sumptuous imperial Summer Palace in spiteful vengeance. Not unexpectedly, the new treaty reached further with British demands. The victors demanded all ports be opened, British goods be exempt from import duties, foreigners be allowed to travel across the country, missionaries given free and unrestricted right to spread Christianity, and the establishment of a full embassy in Peking (Beijing) with a British diplomat in residence. Another large indemnity payment was also stipulated—and continued access to China’s tea. “It secures us a few round millions of dollars and no end of very refreshing tea,” the Illustrated London News happily reported.49
And this time, opium was to be completely legalized.
On the eve of the First Opium War, some forty thousand chests of the drug—about 5.5 million pounds—had been shipped to China;50 within two decades after the Second Opium War, the opium trade had more than doubled. Imports hit 93,000 chests in 1872 and 112,000 chests—nearly 16 million pounds—a decade later.51
By the time the British had launched the First Opium War in 1839, though, the East India Company had begun intensively searching for other sources of their national addiction: tea. Under public pressure demanding cheaper tea, the Crown broke the Company’s long-running monopoly on importing it in 1833. The first non-Company consignment of tea shipped out of China was by Jardine, Matheson & Co., the largest and most famous of the opium merchants.*
The East India Company scrambled to find a place where it could dictate not just the price but all aspects of production. After decades of ignoring rumors and reports that tea had been found growing in India, the Company could no longer wait.
* * *
* In Britain, the legendary soldier Robert Clive was one of the most famous casualties of opium, and his suicide at forty-nine is blamed on his addiction to the drug and years of steadily increasing dosages for a stomach ailment.
* Lin had his sentence commuted to exile in the farthest northwestern hinterlands of Xinjiang. He returned some years later, though, forgiven and with his reputation somewhat resurrected; today he is a national hero and symbol of Chinese resistance to European imperialism.
* It and its Scottish founders were models for James Clavell in his novels Tai-Pan and Noble House. Today, Jardine Matheson is a highly respected Fortune Global 500 company.
CHAPTER 4
An Indian Tea Industry
The northeastern section of India hangs like a limb between Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, and Myanmar (Burma), a lazy-T-shaped expanse connected to the rest of the country by a slender 125-mile-long strip of land called the Siliguri Corridor. (Colloquially, and more evocatively, it’s known as the Chicken’s Neck). Stretching to the foothills of the eastern Himalayas, Assam—now the area’s central state and, until recently, the name for the entire region—is largely at low elevation, hot, and tropical. The mighty Brahmaputra River cleaves Assam in half with a four-hundred-mile-long valley as it slithers southwest toward the Bay of Bengal. Altering its path and shifting its braided strands from year to year, the river widens to a dozen miles in places.
In 1823, Robert Bruce, a Scottish adventurer, explorer, and businessman, was trading along the upper Brahmaputra Valley when he came across indigenous tea growing in the dense jungle. Local Singpho tribes pickled the leaves and ate them with oil and garlic and sometimes dried fish, much in the manner of the Burmese dish lahpet, which is still popular today. The Singphos also made a primitive tea with the leaves.
Bruce befriended a Singpho chief named Bisa Gam and made arrangements to get some tea seeds and plants. But then two events interceded. In 1824, the First Anglo-Burmese War opened in response to Assam’s being largely overrun by invading Burmese. That same year, Bruce—by then a major in the Bengal Artillery—died. His story ends abruptly, and the thread gets taken up by his younger brother, Charles Alexander (C. A.) Bruce, who was commanding a flotilla of gunboats in the area.1
The younger Bruce, evidently tipped off by his sibling before he died, got ahold of the tea samples. Exactly how is not clear. One version says Gam delivered the samples to C. A.2 Another claims that Gam came to pay respects,3 found Bruce’s younger brother, and passed him the tea. A third relates that C. A. retraced his brother’s steps and met with the chief, who presented the younger Bruce with several hundred plants.4
With Britain’s unquenchable thirst for tea, C. A. Bruce suspected the impact of this discovery could be immense. He sent the samples on to the East India Company’s man in Assam, who, in June 1825, forwarded the packet of leaves and seeds to the Company’s botanic garden for verification.5
The Calcutta botanic garden was the Empire’s nursery. It had been established in Sibpur, across the Hooghly River and just around the downstream bend from Calcutta, in 1787 by Colonel Robert Kyd. Using his own private garden as the foundation, Kyd conceived the new initiative “not for the purpose of collecting rare plants (although they also have their use) as things of curiosity or furnishing articles for the gratification of luxury,” he explained in his initial request for funding, “but for establishing a stock for the disseminating [of] such articles as may prove beneficial to the Inhabitants [of India], as well as the natives of Great Britain and which ultimately may tend to the extension of the national Commerce and Riches.”6
Coming on the heels of the 1770 famine that killed some 10 million Bengalis, about
a quarter of the population, Kyd meant to improve Indian agriculture with better food crops. This was the moral imperative for the gardens. But Kyd also appealed to the Company’s mercantile character in his brief. He planned to introduce items that could make a profit: teak plantations for shipbuilding, rubber, indigo for dye, spices, tobacco, cotton, and sugar. And medicinal ones, too, such as cinchona. Its bark was used for quinine, the only known treatment for malaria, a significant obstacle in conquering and ruling many tropical areas—including vast parts of India—and in expanding Britain’s dominion. Botanical science was part of the Empire—with an eye on commerce.
By the nineteenth century, botanic gardens in India had also been established in Saharanpur, Bombay, Madras, and Poona (Pune), with the one in Calcutta as the subcontinent’s nerve center.* Under Kyd’s successor, William Roxburgh—the first salaried man to take charge and often called the Father of Indian Botany—it developed into a top-notch institution. Along with splendid gardens and beds, it had a herbarium with dried species for taxonomical reference, a vast library that held key works from around the globe, and the domed-toped, octagonal Palm House, with pink- and white-flowering climbers growing up over the ironwork to shade the palms inside.
At its helm when the packet of indigenous tea samples from Assam arrived was Dr. Nathaniel Wallich. Even in a time of unlikely success stories, he was something of a surprise to be the East India Company’s chief botanist in India.
Born Nathanael Wulff Wallich, the son of a Jewish merchant in Denmark, he studied medicine at the Danish Academy of Surgeons in Copenhagen. At twenty-one, with limited prospects in the academic world of Lutheran Denmark, he took a position as a surgeon in the Danish “factory” at Serampore, near Calcutta. He arrived in late autumn of 1807. The timing was terrible. Denmark had allied with France during the Napoleonic Wars, a coalition enemy of Britain’s, and the East India Company annexed the settlement in 1808. Wallich became a prisoner of war.7
But Roxburgh, then superintendent of the Botanic Garden, recognized the Dane’s skills and not only successfully petitioned for Wallich’s release, but also to have him join the East India Company as his assistant. Wallich rose swiftly. In 1815, at age twenty-nine, he became the temporary superintendent of the garden, and then, two years later, was made permanent. Under his tenure, it grew greatly in size and number of workers, employing upward of three hundred gardeners and laborers. Wallich held his post until retiring to London in 1846. Such longevity was nearly unknown in British India, especially among botanists and plant collectors, who tended to die in their thirties—or younger—from the hazards of climate and endemic diseases amplified by spending months at a time in the field.
An early and vocal advocate in protecting the forests in India and Burma,8 Wallich was also an assiduous and generous collector. In 1828, on convalescence leave in England, he took along thirty crates that contained between eight thousand and ten thousand species9 gathered over the previous quarter century and passed them out. The haul was dubbed the “Wallichian herbarium” and is considered one of largest ever brought—or distributed—in Europe.10 Institutions shared the spoils, but so did private collectors. Some of these individuals became wealthy from the gifts, while Wallich remained, as he put it himself, “as poor as a church rat.”11 Not that poverty stopped his largess. Back in India, he was even more lavishly open handed. Between 1836 and 1840, the botanic garden, under his leadership, distributed 190,000 plants to more than two thousand institutions and individuals in India and abroad, to parks and native princes, civil servants, and even European collectors.12
His future generosity aide, Wallich made a key mistake that summer of 1825. The leaves and seeds that Bruce had sent came from the camellia family, Wallich concluded, but they were not Camellia sinensis—tea. He did nothing to pursue the lead.
Was it an authentic error? The botanical authorities in Calcutta were deeply reluctant to acknowledge that tea existed in India, suggested Harold Mann. It was “always apparently the part of the botanists to doubt and deny, rather than to encourage the idea that tea was present in the country.”13
The Company simply had little reason to put its energy or money into exploring the possibility. At the time Bruce’s packet arrived, the East India Company still held a monopoly on bringing Chinese tea to Britain.
The revoking of that monopoly in 1833 jolted the Company from complacency, and in February of the following year it hurriedly formed the Tea Committee under the governor-general, Lord William Bentinck.
Aristocratic, liberal, and wealthy, Bentinck was handsome, with large, languorous eyes, full lips, and a Lord Byron–esque dashing appeal. An Anglicist heavily influenced by both the evangelical and liberal movements,14 he arrived in India with experience both political (he had been governor of Madras) and military (he had led troops in Sicily against the French and in Genoa). His term as governor-general (1828–35) was marked by sweeping social and economic reforms, and moves to Westernize Indian society. Abolishing sati—or suttee, where a widow immolates herself on the funeral pyre of her husband—and suppressing the thuggees, robber bands who ritually murdered their victims, were two famous achievements. More far-reaching was his role in anglicizing the Indian judicial system—he made English the court language—and education. A member of the Governor-General’s Council, Thomas Babington Macaulay, wrote his infamous 1835 “Minute on Education” on establishing in India English-language schooling to create “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”
Under Bentinck, the Tea Committee comprised thirteen members, including two natives and Dr. Wallich.15 It immediately dispatched its secretary, George James Gordon, to China to acquire tea seeds and plants for transplanting on Indian soil. Gordon was also to recruit “a select rather than a numerous body of planters; men qualified to conduct every operation connected with the production of good tea, from the selection of a proper site for a plantation, to the gathering of the leaf, its preparation and packing.”16
In June 1834, Gordon sailed from Calcutta on the opium clipper Water Witch to Macau. Foreign traders in Canton were not allowed to reside on the mainland year-round, and the Chinese government required them to spend from April to October in the nearby Portuguese enclave. Gordon enlisted a notorious German Protestant preacher, the Reverend Karl Gützlaff, to be his guide and interpreter to the interior. A talented linguist fluent in several Chinese dialects, Gützlaff, a tailor’s son who had arrived in East Asia in the 1820s, helped translate the Bible into Chinese (and also Thai) and actively distributed Christian literature (considered contraband).
Gützlaff, though, was known for pushing opium as well as Bibles—or pushing Bibles with opium. He worked for Jardine, Matheson & Co. as a translator for ship captains trying to open new markets along the southern-China coast. Along with receiving a commission for his work as spokesman, salesman, and interpreter, Gützlaff used the opportunity to hand out chapters of the Bible that he had translated himself.17
While Gordon was in China, the Tea Committee in Calcutta was exploring possibilities for growing tea in India. Somewhere between the Himalayas in the north and Cape Comorin at the very southern end of the subcontinent had to be a suitable site for planting tea stock, Bentinck argued in a speech, and he sent out an official circular inquiring about feasible spots.
One response, from a Captain Jenkins, came from a place that fell outside the anticipated locales and ideal geographical and climatic characteristics: Assam. Jenkins was intimately familiar with the region, which had been annexed by the Company at the end of the war with Burma a decade before. He included a letter sent to him from a Lieutenant Charlton with information on Assam as not only a good place to grow tea but where locals were actually already making it:
I have not had an opportunity of making any experiments on the leaves; they are devoid of smell in their green state, but acquire the fragrance and flavour of Chinese tea when dried. The Singphos and the Kamptees a
re in the habit of drinking an infusion of the leaves, which I have lately understood they prepare by pulling them into small pieces, taking out the stalks and fibers, boiling and then squeezing them into a ball, which they dry in the sun and retain for use.18
About six months after his initial letter, Charlton sent a packet of seeds, leaves, fruit, blossoms, and even some prepared tea leaves made by the hill tribes to Jenkins, who relayed them to the Company’s botanic garden in Calcutta to confirm that it was indeed tea.
Wallich had a second chance, and this time he didn’t balk.
On December 24, 1834, the Tea Committee informed Bentinck “with feelings of the highest possible satisfaction” that “the tea shrub is beyond all doubt indigenous in Upper Assam.” The committee was, it said, “now enabled to state with certainty, that not only is it a genuine tea, but that no doubt can be entertained of its being the identical tea of China.”19
The committee was right—to an extent.
Tea comes from the Camellia sinensis plant, classified in 1753 by the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus. Sinensis means “from China.” The genus Camellia—from the flowering Theaceae family—was named in memory of a seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary and botanist in the Philippines, Georg Joseph Kamel, who made important early descriptions and drawings of plants (although curiously not of camellias). This sturdy evergreen plant grows as a shrub or a tree. Its young, lightly serrated leaves are bright green; they darken to a leathery and shiny forest green. In fall, small, white flowers with a half dozen petals and a density of stamens blossom. The fruit is a smooth-skinned, greenish-brown drupe that ripens to a saddle brown and into the size of a hazelnut with the seed inside.