Darjeeling

by Jeff Koehler

  Camellia sinensis has are two main varieties. The first is Camellia sinensis sinensis, known as China leaf or China jat (variety). If left unpruned, it can grow to be twelve or fifteen feet tall. Mature leaves are matted feeling and measure roughly two inches in length. The life span of a shrub is around one hundred years. The second variety is Camellia sinensis assamica, more technically a tree rather than a bush. This is what Wallich received from Assam. While its life span is generally less than half of its Chinese counterpart, when left wild it grows much taller, reaching forty-five to sixty feet, with a large trunk and robust branches. The leaves of the Assam variety are larger and coarser than China ones but also glossier.

  The Tea Committee considered their finding momentous, however speculative it still was. “We have no hesitation in declaring this discovery … to be by far the most important and valuable that has ever been made on matters connected with the agricultural or commercial resources of this empire,”20 Wallich and the Tea Committee informed the governor-general on Christmas Eve.

  Wallich, as the committee’s acting secretary, argued strongly that with tea growing in Upper Assam, the efforts to obtain stock in China were no longer necessary nor justifiable. “The Assam plant exists in sufficient abundance to produce seeds for all the purposes of the Committee, with this great advantage, that they can be procured in a state of perfect freshness,” Wallich wrote in a missive to the governor-general, “finally, taking into consideration the great expenses necessarily incurred in obtaining supplies of seeds from China, which are now ascertained to be no longer required.”21

  At the same time, he dispatched a letter to Gordon himself that was even more direct:

  It is, therefore, useless and unnecessary to import from China, at a great expense and great risk, what may be had, as it were, on the spot, to any extent almost in point of quantity, and in a state of perfect freshness and strength for vegetating, your continuance in China, so far as regards supplies of seed, is, therefore, useless and unnecessary.22

  Gordon was immediately recalled.

  Yet Wallich’s position was not shared by all; he was most vocally refuted by a London-born botanist twenty-five years his junior named William Griffith. The Londoner logically argued that plants, selectively cultivated for generations, would produce better than wild Indian ones, and that Chinese stock planted in Assam would be superior to indigenous ones.23 He also scoffed at the idea that they could quickly compete with China’s industry.24

  Waffling on a decisive course of action, the Tea Committee hedged its bets, made another hasty reversal, and sent Gordon back to China. He was again to gather seeds and plants, but the emphasis of his brief this time was to recruit Chinese who knew how to make tea.

  Gordon’s China trips did yield not only some tea stock but also a handful of Chinese “tea manufacturers” from around Canton to help with cultivation and processing. But few of the plants and seeds survived the journey to Calcutta and then on to various experimental tea gardens being set up in Assam, the south, and the northwest Himalayan foothills for replanting. And the ones that did live were dogged by suspicion of their quality. Gordon had gathered the first batch in the Bohea Hills, but the following two were procured in his absence by emissaries.

  Griffith had been right that higher-quality Chinese stock was needed, but wrong to assume that it could grow well in the tropical conditions of low-lying Assam. The few Chinese plants that did make it struggled in the hot, humid climate. Instead, the native Assam leaves flourished.

  While Gordon flitted back and forth between India and China, work progressed in Upper Assam. The handful of Chinese tea manufacturers that Gordon had recruited worked assiduously with local laborers under the leadership of Bruce. In 1835 the first tea garden was opened at Sadiya (now Suddeya), near the confluence of the Brahmaputra and Kundil Rivers. It received the first seeds and seedlings from China, but these soon died. The site was wrongly chosen, the soil poor for tea, and Bruce recommended abandoning it the following year. He replanted sixty miles away on higher ground at Jaypur.*

  Like his brother Robert, C. A. Bruce was a tireless traveler. He spent large chunks of time looking for patches of wild tea growing around Assam. With the local chief, he would arrange the purchase of leaves, or even the land. “He was essentially an explorer, peculiarly equipped by long residence in Assam to understand the climate and the people,” wrote tea’s most thorough historian, William Ukers, “and possessed of an amazing store of good health and fine animal spirits, combined with tact and resourcefulness.”25 Locals, though, suspicious of Bruce’s travels along their bush pathways, were often cagey in revealing much about their tea bushes. “All their country abounds with the plant,” Bruce wrote, “but they are very jealous and will give no information where it is to be found.”26 According to a Tea Committee letter to the governor-general, Bruce often successfully bypassed this evasiveness by proffering “a little opium” along with a “few soft words.”27 Bruce knew “how to pioneer a jungle, and make it give up its hidden treasures.”28 By 1839, 120 such areas with colonies of indigenous tea had been found.29

  The early Assamese tea centers that Bruce, his Chinese advisers, and workers set up around the valley were not, as they are today, formal “gardens” or “plantations.” The jungle and weeds around colonies of indigenous tea bushes were cleared, and the leaves pruned to encourage new growth. Appropriately, they were called tea forests.

  Even this kind of farming was difficult. The hill tribes were not universally friendly, the area was sparsely populated, and finding labor was a huge challenge. The British regarded the local Nagas as dependable in head-hunting but less so in cultivating crops.30 The work was difficult. A Victorian tea planter described in awe an extended line of men clearing the jungle for tea: “cleaving their way steadily and surely through the dense undergrowth and bamboo jungle, dexterously swinging their peculiarly-shaped daos (half axe, half sword) in unison and in time with the barbarous refrain of some war song which they continually chant in their wild and unintelligible jargon …”31

  The early days of the industry were a massive struggle. Workers suffered malaria, cholera, jungle fever, and blackwater fever (named for the color the illness turns the urine). Tigers, leopards, and snakes patrolled the forests. Labor shortages seemed almost insurmountable. Wild elephants had to be caught, tamed, and trained to remove trees, clear roads, and transport tea.

  In 1838, the Bengal Military Orphan Press published Bruce’s short monograph, An Account of the Manufacture of the Black Tea as Now Practised at Suddeya in Upper Assam, by the Chinamen Sent Thither for That Purpose. With Some Observations on the Culture of the Plant in China, and Its Growth in Assam. Reading it shows how the early planters were still almost blindly groping their way in learning. Bruce packed all that he knew about tea planting and processing into a mere nineteen pages, including a page explaining the plates. The booklet is comprised largely of techniques garnered from the handful of Chinese manufacturers and includes “A Dialogue between Mr C. A. Bruce and the China Black-Tea Makers” with exchanges such as

  How do you plant the Tea seeds? “I dig a hole about four fingers deep and eight inches in diameter, and put as many seeds as I can hold in both hands into it, then cover it up.”32

  and

  After you have made the Tea in China, how long is it before it is fit to drink? “About one year; if drank before that, it will taste unpleasantly and of the fire, and will affect the head.”33

  Bruce also offered some observations on the native tea plant in Assam and details on the Singpho method of processing tea.

  They pluck the young and tender leaves and dry them a little in the sun; some put them out into the dew and then again into the sun three successive days, others only after a little drying put them into hot pans, turn them about until quite hot, and then place them into the hollow of a bamboo, and drive the whole down with a stick, holding and turning the bamboo over the fire all the time, until it is full, then tie the end up with
leaves, and hang the bamboo up in some smoky place in the hut; thus prepared the Tea will keep good for years.34

  But about how their tea actually tasted, he made no mention in his monograph.

  William Griffith offered a comparable description of native tea making in his private journal, kept while traveling with Bruce, Wallich, and another Company scientist through Upper Assam, looking for suitable sites for tea. In an entry dated January 16, 1836, Griffith wrote:

  We halted after gathering a crop of leaves under a fine Dillenia, which was loaded with its fruit. Here the Singfos demonstrated the mode in which the tea is prepared among them. I must premise, however, that they use none but young leaves. They roasted or rather semi-roasted the leaves in a large iron vessel, which must be quite clean, stirring them up and rolling them in the hands during the roasting. When duly roasted, they expose them to the sun for three days; some to the dew alternately with the sun. It is then finally packed into bamboo chungas, into which it is tightly rammed.35

  He also neglected to say anything about how the tea tasted.

  Given the obstacles, Bruce and his crew made surprisingly quick progress. The first teas they processed in 1836 were promising, and in 1837 they had enough tea from indigenous Assam plants to send to officials in Calcutta. (The tea plants from China jat had not yet matured, although many had already perished.) By then, Lord Bentinck had quit his post in India because of poor health. The new governor-general, Lord Auckland, sampled the tea himself and pronounced it good quality.36 The next batch was an improvement, and by the end of the year there was a sufficient amount to send to East India Company headquarters in London. Forty-six boxes made purely from Assam tea leaves were sent down the Brahmaputra River and from there by ship to Calcutta, arriving on the last day of January 1838. Moisture and dampness had spoiled most of the tea. Just a dozen boxes arrived in decent shape.

  But that was enough. Repacked in specially soldered tin cases to keep the merchandise not only dry, but to keep it from absorbing the stench of other cargo, the tea was loaded onto the Calcutta and, in May 1838, sailed for England.37

  The shipment landed at the East India Company’s warehouses in November. The Company allowed excitement and speculation to build for a couple of months. At last, on January 10, 1839, more than a year after it had been processed, eight chests of Assam tea—some 350 pounds total—went up for auction under the round skylight of India House on Mincing Lane. The Company’s experts had divided it into two qualities, with three lots classified as souchong (with larger leaves) and five lots as pekoe (smaller and slightly less coarse).

  By the end of the auction, all eight lots had been knocked down to Captain Pidding, owner of Howqua’s Mixture Tea. While tea was selling at auction for a couple of shillings a pound at the time, Pidding paid twenty-one shillings for the first lot, while the last—with almost sixty bids—cost him an extraordinary thirty-four shillings. But he recouped his enormous investment by repacking and selling the novelty tea in small bags.

  “The general opinion of the collected tea brokers and dealers, with whom the room was crowded, was, that the Assam tea is not only valuable as a curiosity,” went one typical positive notice in the press, “but that the tea itself is of very superior quality, being of a pleasant flavor, and of such strength that some asserted that the fifth water from it was as strong as the first.”38

  Another shipment arrived at the end of the year, and a second sale of Assam tea took place on March 17, 1840, and while prices dropped somewhat, industry insiders—Twinings & Co. of London among them—deemed it an improvement that contained plenty of potential.39 That wild tea grew in Assam, could be cultivated and processed, and would sell on the market had been proven. It was clearly commercially possible. Incredibly, it had all happened within a stunningly short half dozen years since Bentinck had formed the Tea Committee.

  To actualize that promise, tap its potential, and bring it to the vast marketplace, two companies formed immediately and simultaneously—one in London, one in Calcutta—that soon combined into the Assam Company. It was a rival of sorts to the East India Company, whose plans had long been to leave the tea plantation business once it had progressed out of the experimental phase. The East India Company retained just a few small gardens,40 and the government supported the Assam Company by offering it land. But extremely high production costs, mismanagement, and lack of tea-farming know-how nearly doomed the project at the outset. By the mid–1840s it was bankrupt and facing liquidation. The board admitted failure and discussed giving up the entire endeavor in Upper Assam.41

  The gardens were still under the supervision of Bruce, who was now working for the new company. Like many of the early planters, he lacked an appropriate background for the job. As a contemporary report stated of the onetime gunboat commander, he “does not seem to have possessed any knowledge of botany or horticulture, or indeed any special qualification for the post.”42 Not surprisingly, the Assam Company sacked him.

  In 1847 new heads took over management, improved cultivation and the company’s financial structure, and quickly turned it around. In 1852 the company offered a small dividend. This grew steadily over the next few years and by 1856 had reached 8 percent.43 From the hard work and successes of India’s tea pioneers sprang an entire industry as the secrets of tea production were gradually unveiled. Commercial aspirations and imaginations were unleashed, and production began to compete with China’s. One of Bruce’s goals in planting tea in Assam was not just “to enrich our own dominions” but also to “pull down the haughty pride of China.”44

  Given the rivalry in this competitiveness, comments in the newspapers were at times dismissive, possessive, patriotic, or aggrandizing. “We have also beaten the Chinese in their porcelain ware … and so shall it be with her tea,” brayed the Illustrated London News on August 15, 1857, as it reported on finding a place on the subcontinent with the right climate, soil, and abundance of labor.

  May not the day arrive when we may be independent of the saucy Chinaman, and, instead of sending our ships to Canton for our tea, we shall send them to Calcutta for the rich and well-flavoured teas of Assam, Chachar, Darjeeling-Kumaon, and other tea-growing districts, now springing up along the broad front of our splendid mountains?45

  Sauciness aside, the article was prescient. Within three decades—by 1888—Britain was importing more tea from India than China.* It was an “imperial dream come true.”46

  By then the undertaking was long out of its pioneering days, and the foundations for one of the country’s greatest industries well established. The success of the Assam Company had quickly spawned rivals.† Other companies formed and established gardens, as did some wealthy individuals. They leased or purchased property from the government, cleared it, and planted tea. The amount of tea being cultivated was rapidly increasing, and as it matured, so did yields. By the time the newly opened railway linked some of the tea-covered hills with the Brahmaputra River in 1882, Assam produced 12.7 million pounds of tea.47 By 1891 it had reached some 49.5 million pounds.48 But these numbers were still meager. Eight years later, the Brahmaputra Valley produced 75,287,500 pounds,49 and by 1913, plantations in Assam produced a staggering 199,722,000 pounds50—enough to brew somewhere between 35 and 45 billion cups of tea.

  Today Assam alone produces about 500 million kilograms—over 1 billion pounds—of tea a year.

  But quantity and quality are not synonymous. Assam’s tropically grown teas are malty, a hint woody, at times pungent, frequently a touch rough, and always strong and bracing. The British realized this back in the 1840s, as the Assam industry was just getting under way. Tea would make a profitable commodity. “It flourishes best in a jungle atmosphere of heat and humidity,” said the recent head of India’s largest tea company. “It is an easy plant to grow. But to get a good-quality tea is extremely difficult.”51

  From the beginning of their experimenting with growing tea in India, the British also wanted to produce teas that had the delicate floral aromas
of those from the hills of China: light and bright, rather than husky and earthy. The teas of Assam had plenty of body but little finesse.

  For this, the British needed better plant stock from China—and to find a way to get it back to places in India more similar to their original geography without perishing. Even if they achieved this seemingly impossible task, they also needed to learn how to better cultivate the plant. From horticulture to processing, the British still had little idea how to produce tea. Lu Yü’s thousand-year-old book-cum-manual remained a main source of information, supplemented with a scattering of monographs such as Bruce’s and travelogues such as Griffith’s, and some details from the handful of Chinese workers in Assam.

  China jealously guarded its tea and production secrets and would not give them up easily. The East India Company would have to send a shrewd plant hunter to travel to the forbidden interior regions where the best teas grew and smuggle them out.

  * * *

  * Originally known as the East India Company’s Garden or Company Bagan (garden) or Calcutta Garden, it became the Royal Botanic Garden in the early 1860s when the Crown assumed the assets of the defunct East India Company. Its current name is Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden, in honor of the physicist-turned-plant biologist.