Darjeeling

by Jeff Koehler

  Although discouraged by Sikkim’s unwillingness to supply laborers, within a dozen years Campbell had gotten built a good stretch of road through the tough terrain, at least seventy European houses, a sanatorium for troops, a hotel, a bazaar, and a jail, and he introduced a justice system and abolished forced labor.25

  At the end of 1839, just a handful of Europeans resided in town. Until a rail link was established in the 1880s, the journey from Calcutta to Darjeeling took months by bullock cart to the base of the hills, and then by horse, foot, and dooly, a litter slung between long poles and carried by four bearers. The hazardous, uncomfortable trip was made only by the desperate or the determined.

  Yet the population of the area jumped from less than a hundred people when Campbell arrived to ten thousand in a decade and to twenty-two thousand by 1869.26 Most were Gorkhas from across the border in Nepal. A special commissioner from the East India Company who visited Darjeeling to check on its progress in the early 1850s stated in his report, “It is necessary to observe that whatever has been done here has been done by Dr Campbell alone.”27 (The Nepalese workers would surely have disagreed.)

  Campbell—he was called both Archibald and Arthur—came from the blustery island of Islay, known for its smoky, peat-fired whisky. He studied medicine at the University of Glasgow and then the University of Edinburgh before joining the East India Company as an assistant surgeon in 1827. A year later, he was posted to a horse artillery unit in Meerut, northeast of Delhi. Five years on he took up an appointment as surgeon to the mission in Kathmandu, where he served under B. H. Hodgson.28 Well-known for his deep love of the Himalayas, Hodgson wrote extensively on its flora and fauna, religion, and languages. Under him, Campbell’s interest in the region grew, and like his mentor, he penned a number of scholarly articles on topics that ranged from the Lepcha to taming elephants in Assam. “He was a warm friend, of a remarkably generous and affectionate disposition,” an obituary of Campbell later read; “he was liberal in his views of all matters, and averse to disputation, though tenacious of his opinions.”29

  Two years after arriving in Darjeeling, Campbell married a women fifteen years his junior30 and fathered twelve children.31 Along with the supervising tasks of his position—essentially managing the fiscal, criminal, and civil administration of the district—the energetic Scot also controlled the station funds, acted as postmaster, and was the marriage registrar.32 He started a papermaking factory that lasted for a couple of years33 and introduced various new crops, including cinchona for producing quinine to treat malaria. (Cinchona is Darjeeling’s second most important crop today.)

  And with undreamed-of consequences, Campbell was also the first to grow tea in Darjeeling.

  In 1841, just two years after arriving, Campbell planted tea in the garden of his residence, known as Beachwood, with stock that came from the nurseries in the western Himalayan foothills. The trees came to bear in the second half of that decade, and the Company inspector reported in 1853 that both Chinese and Assam varieties were doing well in Campbell’s garden. Civil Surgeon Dr. J. R. Withecombe and Major James Arden Crommelin, a Calcutta-born member of the Royal Bengal Engineers, also had extensive plantings near Darjeeling town. Campbell stated in a report dated April 28, 1853 that some two thousand tea plants, ranging from twelve years old to seedlings of a few months, were growing at two thousand to seven thousand feet in elevation.34 He requested that none other than Robert Fortune, once again back in China for the Company, personally come to Darjeeling and give his opinion on the “suitableness of the climate and soil of the Hills for the cultivation and manufacture of Tea.”35

  With governmental backing, Campbell established tea nurseries in Darjeeling and in Kurseong. While both types of leaf varieties were planted,36 Chinese ones that had largely failed to flourish down in the jungle conditions of Assam were wildly, even unexpectedly, successful. Plants from stock Fortune had smuggled out of China thrived in Darjeeling’s misty, high-elevation climate.

  The Company began to propagate plants for individuals and small companies opening up land and clearing plots for tea gardens. Nepalese laborers stripped the Himalayan foothills of their virgin forest by cutting away and burning the underbrush, and severing the lateral roots of large trees so that they toppled over under their own weight. Rocks and roots were removed, the land hoed smooth and, in places, terraced, and saplings transplanted in straight, even lines along the contours of the hills. The first commercial gardens were planted out in 1852 at Tukvar by Captain Masson, Steinthal (“Stone Valley” in German) by a German missionary named Joachim Stölke, and Aloobari. More gardens quickly followed: Makaibari, Pandam, Ging, Ambootia, Takdah, Phubsering. The first factory opened on Makaibari on 1859.

  Darjeeling was growing—but remained an enclave within the rajah of Sikkim’s domain. It was only a matter of time for the British to be intimately drawn into the kingdom’s internal affairs and conflicts, and to want to expand out of isolation.

  The situation came to a head during Joseph Hooker’s plant-hunting visit in the late 1840s. Attracted to the region’s lavish and diverse flora—four thousand species of flowering plants and three hundred varieties of ferns grow in and around the forests of Darjeeling alone37—Hooker spent three years in the Darjeeling hills, Sikkim, and Nepal identifying and collecting. “In short, there is no quarter of the globe so rich in plants,”38 he wrote in the preface of The Flora of British India, his magnum opus coming out of the trip. The seven-volume work, published between 1875 and 1897, totaling nearly six thousand pages and including some sixteen thousand species, contributed greatly to public knowledge of the region’s rich floral biotope. But Hooker’s travelogue of the journey, Himalayan Journals: Notes of a Naturalist (1854), dedicated to his close friend Charles Darwin, was an immense popular success. The book informed, inspired, and excited a public with its high-peaked Central Asian descriptions and adventures.

  Hooker was a grandee in the heroic age of scientific exploration. After completing his medical studies in Glasgow, the twenty-two-year-old Scot joined Captain James Clark Ross’s four-year-long expedition to Antarctica, which set off in 1839—the last of the epic voyages of exploration done under sail—as assistant surgeon and botanist on the Erebus. He had the opportunity not only to observe and collect at the southern pole, but at all the main areas of the southern hemisphere, from Tierra del Fuego to Tasmania and the Cape. Back in Britain, as Hooker began assembling his great work on the region’s flora (published between 1844 and 1859 in six large quarto volumes), the urge to collect in rich, unexplored regions returned. When offered a chance to go to the Himalayas, he took it and traveled with official accreditation and a government grant.

  Hooker, with tiny spectacles crowned by wild, worried brows, and with heavy side whiskers and a beard encircling his otherwise clean-shaven face, arrived in Darjeeling famous and also well connected. His father was director of Kew Gardens. (Hooker fils would succeed him at the august institution.) The young Joseph was a confidant, collaborator, and early reader of Darwin.* On the ship traveling out to India, Hooker became friends with the new governor-general, Lord Dalhousie.

  For Hooker’s first expedition into Sikkim, Superintendent Campbell himself obtained permission. On Hooker’s second one, in 1849, which would take him through Sikkim to the frontier of Tibet, Campbell, unable to resist the opportunity to fulfill a decades’-old dream to see the mysterious and forbidden kingdom, joined his esteemed visitor.

  That autumn the men, against protests of Sikkimese guards, crossed into Tibet. Once back in Sikkim territory, the two Scotchmen were immediately placed under arrest. According to a contemporary newspaper account, Campbell was beaten, tightly bound with bamboo cords, and tortured. Officials interrogated Campbell and tried to force him to sign various documents promising that the British wouldn’t exert their influence in Sikkim. Campbell refused. The men were then escorted to the Sikkimese capital, Tumlong. While Hooker remained free to collect along the way, guards restrained Campbell, w
ho, exhausted after some days of walking, had his hands bound to the tail of a mule was and pulled the final distance.39 The men remained locked up in Tumlong well into December. Eventually released, they arrived back in Darjeeling on Christmas Eve, six weeks after being seized.

  Repercussions were swift. A punitive British force crossed into Sikkim and camped for a couple of weeks. The soldiers didn’t fire a shot; they simply made their presence known. That was enough. The British stopped paying the rajah’s annual allowance for Darjeeling and, more significantly, annexed the lower part of Sikkim, called the Terai. The name translates to “moist land,” referring to its marshy grasslands and boggy forest. While Hooker called it “that low malarious belt which skirts the base of the Himalaya”40 and a “fatal”41 district, the 640-square-mile tract of land was the most fertile part of Sikkim’s largely mountainous dominion.

  For the Sikkimese, this turned their kingdom—bordered to the east and west by enemies and enclosed on the north by impenetrable Himalayan peaks—into a landlocked mountain hinterland cut off from all access to the plains below. They now had to pass through British territory to reach them.

  But for the British, the move connected Darjeeling to the adjacent lands of British-controlled India.

  Some Indian historians see Campbell’s journey as a calculated attempt to provoke the Sikkimese leaders, with whom his relations had soured, thus handing the British justification to grab land. It also made irrelevant any lingering doubts surrounding the original deed to Darjeeling that Lloyd had coaxed from the rajah of Sikkim or the circumstances in which it was obtained.42 If the wording actually meant the British had the right to more than merely reside on the tract, or even if the deed, as some suspected, had actually been written by the Sikkimese ruler himself (and not Lloyd), it was now immaterial.43

  Darjeeling was not yet done expanding. Following their loss in the Anglo-Bhutan War (1863–65), Bhutan was forced to cede the Kalimpong tract, along with a section of foothill plains called the Dooars, to the Company in return for an annual payment. These were added to the district of Darjeeling, which then had its final—and present—shape, some 1,234 square miles.44

  For the Company, the move on the Terai and Dooars proved both timely and propitious. With the tea industry in the Darjeeling hills and Assam growing quickly, it was already looking to expand. In 1860, the first experimental gardens were opened in the Terai, and in 1862—the year Campbell retired to London after twenty-two years in Darjeeling and thirty-five in Company service (without increase of pay or allowances)45—James White planted out Champta Tea Estate.46 By 1872 the Terai had fourteen estates, and in 1874 more than two dozen.

  Today, the Dooars and Terai together produce around 225 million kilograms (nearly 500 million pounds) of tea a year, about a quarter of India’s total, and some twenty-five times more than Darjeeling. Full, creamy, and good liquoring, the tea is generally mellower than those from Assam, a hint sweeter, but also thinner in the cup, with a flavor that one Delhi tea merchant calls “ropy.” The orthodox tea is dark, stylish, and twisty, while the CTC—most of the production—is grainy and hard. Dooars-Terai have a logo designed by the Tea Board of India, which shows the head of one of the area’s elephants in a brownish-orange circle. Rarely does the tea retail abroad on its own, but rather is sought after for blending.

  Having the Terai under British control directly benefited the Darjeeling tea industry. Work began on the wider, more gently sloped Hill Cart Road between Darjeeling and the plains and greater India. Its completion in 1866 was a turning point in the development of the town and its tea industry. That year, thirty-nine gardens in Darjeeling produced 433,000 pounds of tea.47 By 1874 the number of tea gardens had ballooned to 113, and production had multiplied nearly ten times to nearly 4 million pounds.48

  Once the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway opened in 1881, cutting travel time and transport costs significantly, and allowing heavy steam- and coal-driven machinery for processing tea to be pulled up the hill, Darjeeling tea found its final footing. In 1885 production past 9 million pounds.49

  That was a fraction compared to Assam standards, or even those in the Dooars and Terai. But then Darjeeling was never about quantity. It has always been about quality.

  * * *

  * Quite literally. In 1860–61, Cherrapunji set a world record of 1,042 inches of rainfall in twelve months, a record that still stands. In July 1861 alone, the monsoon dumped 366 inches—over thirty feet!—of rain.

  * Although Lloyd’s grave in the European cemetery was declared to be of national importance under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act of 1958, little public attention has been paid it. On June 6, 2011, the front page of the Calcutta Telegraph read, “Darjeeling discovers Lloyd after 146 yrs—Individuals for the first time pay homage to the man who ‘found’ the hill town.” Even that was a muted affair. The grave has a five-foot-high obelisk marker. Its blue-tinted whitewashing is fading and streaked with mold. Flowers never appear at its base.

  * Asked by Darwin in 1843 to work on his newly collected plant specimens from the Beagle voyage, Hooker went on to read and comment on Darwin’s ideas on evolution that would form On the Origin of Species. Over a friendship that spanned forty years, the two exchanged fourteen hundred letters.

  CHAPTER 7

  Terroir to Teacup

  Why did the China leaves thrive in Darjeeling? Why does the tea grown in these hills have such flavor—such unique flavor? And why can’t other mountainous areas replicate it? “You plant the bush in Darjeeling and you get Darjeeling tea,” one garden manager said. “You plant the same bush in south India and you get south-Indian tea.”

  To start, the steep, terraced terrain around Darjeeling is a perfect blend of climate, altitude, and the right soil. The weather combines sunshine—no more than five or six hours a day, and only for about 180 days a year—and humid mountain mists and clouds that protect the shoots and leaves from too much direct sunlight. The tea bush needs sun, but not all day long. Even more, it craves rain. At least fifty to sixty inches of rainfall per year is essential for good growth. Darjeeling receives an annual average of 126 and up to 160 inches. Abundant rain, but not swampiness. The steepness of the slopes offers excellent natural drainage.

  The slightly acidic soil is rich and loamy with organic material from the surrounding forests, gritty, and generally contains the right proportion of clay. To demonstrate the ideal soil on Glenburn Tea Estate, Sanjay Sharma compressed in his fist a handful of fine, light-chocolate-colored earth from a pile near neat rows of young saplings. He held his arm straight out at shoulder height. “It should explode into dust, not little balls,” he said. “If you get those balls, then too much clay, too heavy, and won’t drain, yeah? If it won’t hold together, there is too much sand.” He opened his hand. The clod fell and exploded into pure dust. He smiled and bent down to brush off his polished leather Timberland boots.

  In the cool, high elevation and thin air, the buds grow slowly, allowing flavors to develop and concentrate. The aromas of high-grown teas—as opposed to mid-grown or low-grown—tend to be more expansive and the flavors more intense.

  The yield, though, is significantly less than that in warmer climes. A tea bush in Darjeeling will produce only up to three and a half ounces of finished tea per year, enough for about forty cups. Overall, Darjeeling’s gardens produce around four hundred kilograms (nine hundred pounds) per hectare, just a third as the average in India. Such disparity comes from other reasons, too. The China variety of bushes in Darjeeling have smaller, slower-growing leaves than Assam bushes, the most common type planted across the country. The season is shorter, too. In Darjeeling the tea bushes go into hibernation for three or four months in the winter, while in Assam, the humid, low-lying conditions offer almost year-round harvesting.

  The area’s sharply pitched geography means that Darjeeling estates vary greatly in elevation from top to bottom. Lingia Tea Estate reaches from twenty-eight hundred to six thousand fe
et and yet covers a mere 220 hectares (544 acres). Tukvar is twice as large but stretches from fifteen hundred to sixty-five hundred feet. With such range, each garden contains a number of microclimates. They reach from tropical to temperate and even alpine forest, with hillsides that catch more of the sun’s rays as well as shadier, moister ones. The tea in the higher sections has more delicate flavors, but lower yields. Ripening periods also differ. When bushes on the upper reaches of an estate are just moving into the first flush, the ones at the bottom might already be starting to produce second flush teas. According to Hrishikesh “Rishi” Saria, who owns and manages Gopaldhara and Rohini tea estates with his father, harvesting on the lower-elevation Rohini starts one month earlier than on Gopaldhara, whose fields run from fifty-five hundred to seven thousand feet, and ends one month later.

  Another geographical component contributes to Darjeeling tea’s unique taste. “In the south of India we have the right conditions and more sunshine,” said New Delhi tea merchant Vikram Mittal in his cluttered Sunder Nagar shop. But Darjeeling is in proximity to the snow-covered Himalayas. “It gives a ‘crisping effect’ to flavor,” he said. The cold, dry air that blows across the icy peaks wicks away the excess moisture, reduces the relative humidity, and concentrates the flavor compounds. North-facing gardens benefit most, especially in autumn.

  • • •

  But terroir is only the first part of the flavor equation. The remainder resides in the way the tea leaves are cultivated, selectively plucked, and then turned into made tea. Walking among workers in a garden’s steep rows of tea bushes (grasping branches for support, to the amusement of the pluckers), visiting its small, on-site “factory” (more like a barn-size, well-lit workshop) that is the hub of every estate, or tasting the day’s finished batches of tea, one point is immediately clear: the hands-on (and nose-in) element remains fundamental to Darjeeling’s final, distinctive, and celebrated flavors.