Himalaya

by Ed Douglas

  In the hilly parts of the country Solanum tuberosum [the potato] has been introduced, and grows tolerably; but it does not thrive so well as at Patna, owing probably to a want of care.

  Buchanan-Hamilton had made a typically arrogant assumption about the competence of Nepali farmers. In fact, over the next few decades, the introduction of the potato and the success of its cultivation by local farmers would lead to a Himalayan population boom, just as it had in Europe, as experimentation yielded results and subsistence farmers benefitted from more easily won calories. Monasteries in the Himalaya were among the potato’s greatest champions, since its cultivation wasn’t as labour-intensive, and so freed up time for religious duties. Potatoes made the biggest impact at higher altitudes, strengthening the resilience of highland communities like the Sherpa and allowing them to occupy higher habitations through the winter. The crop was so productive that Sherpas didn’t have to commit so much land to get a substantial reward. They learned how to store potatoes in pits, or by drying them in the cold dry air of high altitude for use in stews or trade with Tibet, or else turned them to powder. Even today, potatoes grown in the Everest region are appreciated elsewhere in the country for their taste. The wider Himalayan region has proved astonishingly inventive with the humble alu, as it is known there. As the Nepali writer Ramyata Limbu put it:

  People in Palpa are proud of their aloo chukauni [dressed in yoghurt], plains Nepalis enjoy aloo bhujia [spicy potatoes] with roti [flatbread], those living in the highlands salivate over aloo bhat [with rice] and aloo daal [with lentils]. Sometimes even better on a cold, dark winter’s day is plain usineko aloo, boiled potatoes with marcha chillies pounded with salt and garlic. In the realm of the spud, Nepal might well be tops.

  The crop that most exercised the East India Company was not potatoes, however, but tea, Camellia sinensis. From the middle of the eighteenth century it had been the most popular drink in Britain, outselling even beer. The British drank a fifth of what the Chinese could grow. Light and easy to transport, tea and the trade in it with China were the foundation of the Company’s fate and consequently part of Britain’s strategic interest: ten per cent of British tax revenues came from the sale of tea, and the East India Company’s tea trade with China was worth as much as all its other business there – from silk to porcelain – put together. Yet in the populist, anti-mercantilist atmosphere of the 1830s, the days of the Company’s monopoly on Asian trade were numbered. In 1834 it lost its monopoly in China and the need to end its reliance on Chinese tea intensified.

  It was not that tea didn’t grow in India. Earlier in the nineteenth century, the Scot Robert Bruce had discovered a plant that looked like tea growing at sea level in Assam. The local Singpho people he met were drinking a brew made from the plant and he tried some: it tasted a bit like tea. In the 1830s, a few years after Robert Bruce’s death, his brother Charles sent the plant to Calcutta to be examined. Bruce had been right: it was tea, but a different variety. Hugh Falconer, Hooker’s contact in India, was by the 1830s superintendent of the botanical gardens at Saharanpur in the modern state of Uttar Pradesh. Falconer’s time there is famous for the fossil hunting he did in the Siwalik hills, finding the first fossilised monkey skull at the foot of the Himalaya, and for his subsequent correspondence with Darwin. But he also conceived the idea of growing Chinese tea in the Himalaya, persuading the Company to explore the idea. A committee was set up and in the Journal of the Asiatic Society, Falconer laid out in magisterial detail the growing conditions found in China and the problems of replicating them on the plains of India. ‘In the Himalaya mountains’, on the other hand,

  the case is widely different: excepting periodical rains, all the conditions of a temperate climate are here found, and here above all parts of India, we may look for the successful cultivation of tea.

  Part of Falconer’s plan was to acquire tea seeds from China. These duly arrived in 1835 and were dispersed to several sites throughout India to be grown experimentally. George William Traill, in one of his last acts as the commissioner of Kumaon, helped select sites there that would within a few years have expanded to several acres and thousands of tea bushes under Falconer’s watchful eye. A plant collector was also despatched to locate the tea bushes the Bruce brothers had discovered, and Nathaniel Wallich was commissioned to investigate the possibility of growing this indigenous tea in north-east India. At the age of forty-nine, in poor health, Wallich set out for the leech-filled forests of the north-east. With him went John McClelland, ‘a persevering Scotchman, without much ability’ according to Hooker, and William Griffith, a brilliant botanist and capable artist who was far more highly regarded. Wallich couldn’t hide his jealousy of his more able and much younger colleague and had the unfortunate habit of bursting into tears. Eventually he returned to Calcutta and Griffith continued to the Mishmi hills and Lohit valley in the modern state of Arunachal Pradesh.

  That year the Company also began growing the indigenous plant in the highlands of Assam. Falconer insisted that Chinese tea processors were hired to offer their expertise. Unluckily for the East India Company, the men came from a low-quality green tea area and over the years proved mediocre workers and reluctant teachers. Worse, the Assam leaves had a strong, malty flavour, and though there was a flurry of interest when the first cases arrived in London, it didn’t suit a British taste matured on more subtle Chinese tea. The Assam plant’s low productivity also made it uneconomic. Even so, the experiment was not a total failure. The Company was acquiring experience of growing tea in India at a commercial scale, laying the foundation for eventual success.

  Since the eighteenth century, the East India Company had been selling opium to China and buying tea with the proceeds. Not only had this pernicious trade generated colossal revenues for the British government, it was still financing expansion in India, culminating in the mid 1840s with expensive wars against the Sikh Empire on the North-West Frontier. But it was a trade that was growing ever more vulnerable. In 1839 the Qing emperor had cracked down on opium, culminating with the destruction of hundreds of tonnes held by foreign merchants at Canton. At a stroke, foreign merchants lost, in today’s terms, hundreds of millions of dollars. Britain sent gunboats, and despite Qing defiance, China’s feeble navy was overcome. The British used this, the First Opium War, to gain greater access to more Chinese ports in the Treaty of Nanking of 1842, forcing a resentful China to open a little more to foreign influence.

  This new relationship was clearly unstable. China’s humiliation, a raw nerve even now, made for a volatile situation. In 1844, Henry Hardinge, an old soldier who had fought Napoleon, arrived in India as governor general. His time in office was marked by victory over the Sikhs and the Treaty of Amritsar but he also warned of the dangers a wounded China might hold.

  It is in my opinion by no means improbable that in a few years the Government of Pekin [Beijing], by legalising the cultivation of Opium in China, where the soil has been already proved equally well adapted with India to the growth of the plant, may deprive this Government of one of its present chief sources of revenue.

  In which case, Hardinge argued, it was ‘most desirable to afford every encouragement to the cultivation of Tea in India’. More money and land was made available to speed up the development of India’s tea industry.

  The place for this cultivation had now been firmly established. The middle hills of the eastern Himalaya offered the equivalent of China’s best tea-growing regions: high in altitude, its soils richly nutritious and sufficiently wet, often clouded in dampness and in winter frosty enough to add complexity, sweetness and flavour. While British growers still had no access to China’s tea plantations, the experiments with Chinese seed were starting to bear fruit. Hardinge had given authorisation to commercial plantations at Kangra, in modern Himachal Pradesh, and the new hill station of Darjeeling. The tea was processed, packed and shipped to England, arriving at the Company’s offices on Leadenhall Street in the City of London on 12 January 1848. The tea was s
ent out to the most important brokers: the House of Twinings, Miller and Lowcock, Gibbs and Peek Brothers. Their verdict, when it came, was hugely encouraging. The tea was a far better proposition than the Assam variety. In fact, it was almost as good as the best from China: almost, but not quite. The only stumbling block was the seed available to Canton wasn’t a patch on that from the best tea-growing areas and the manufacturers lacked the finesse of their Chinese counterparts.

  *

  British imperial wealth rested heavily on botanical knowledge. From spices and dyes to cotton and opium, knowing what plants grew where was the first step in exploiting them. But Joseph Hooker’s ambitions were intellectually wider than commercial exploitation. He wanted to know why plants grew where they did. Understanding the principles – climate, altitude, soil chemistry and so on – that underpinned the geographic distribution of plants meant a greater chance of them thriving elsewhere. That was what he wanted to study in Sikkim. He travelled to India on the navy ship Sidon, docking at Calcutta on the very day that the first batch of Indian-cultivated Chinese tea arrived in Leadenhall. Also on board was the Earl of Dalhousie, Hardinge’s replacement as governor general. Dalhousie was a workaholic widely blamed for the disaster of the 1857 rebellion but someone who also brought the advances of Victorian Britain – the railways and telegraph – to India, tying its disparate regions together just as a national movement sparked into life. Hooker and Dalhousie got on famously, although the botanist’s attempts to interest his distinguished new friend in his subject were hopeless. On the voyage out, stopping briefly in the Middle East, they took a trip into the desert. Hooker found some gum arabic, a significant export from British colonies in Africa, and so perhaps of interest to a former president of the Board of Trade. But Dalhousie ‘chucked it out of the carriage window; and the Rose of Jericho, with an interest about it of a totally different character, met with no better fate’. Tea was another matter.

  The Governor-General [Hooker wrote to his father at Kew] hints to me that he would like reports on the Tea districts of India . . . I need not say that I shall lay myself out to attend to his wishes in India.

  While in Calcutta, Hooker spent much time at the botanic gardens where Hugh Falconer had recently been appointed superintendent. Until he arrived, John McClelland was in charge. Hooker found McLelland preparing William Griffith’s journals for publication following Griffith’s death at Malacca three years earlier of a liver parasite, aged just thirty-four. The clash between Griffith and Wallich had caused real damage to the gardens. While Wallich was away on sick leave, Griffith had completely remodelled their layout to better suit a scientific institution and in doing so caused many plants to fail. McLelland had tried to improve things but with only mixed success. ‘The Library is in dreadful confusion, just as Wallich left it, and the Herbarium worse,’ Hooker told his father. He wrote a long letter to Falconer with his recommendations for the future, laying the groundwork for closer cooperation between Kew and Calcutta in the coming years.

  In April 1848 the young botanist arrived at Darjeeling, where he would spend much of the next two years in its ‘Greenock-like climate’. (Darjeeling gets a lot of rain. The diabolist and mountaineer Aleister Crowley, en route for Kangchenjunga, complained: ‘The whole town stinks of mildew.’) Hooker met Brian Houghton Hodgson soon afterwards, in the garden of Hodgson’s bungalow where the former resident of Kathmandu was ‘talking Tibetan to a Chinese-looking man’ about the geography of Central Asia. Hodgson had retired to a forest clearing in the new hill station of Darjeeling, having returned to the Himalaya after an awkward period at home. Despite the concern and love of his family, particularly his sister Fanny, now married to a Dutch district court judge and living in Arnhem, Hodgson had realised he was ‘alienated entirely from European ways from the first to last’. Since returning, he had developed a new interest to set alongside his passion for the birdlife and mammals of the Himalaya: the region’s ethnically and culturally diverse human population. As a kind of proto-anthropologist, he was determined to describe in detail ‘the Aborigines of the frontier in its Mountains and its Tarai’.

  Hooker was thirty-one and Hodgson forty-eight but the difference seemed even greater. Hodgson declared he was plagued with insomnia and Hooker judged his new friend ‘ill & nervous to such a degree that he fancies the Darjeeling doctors want to kill him’. Yet although Hooker told his father that Hodgson was ‘said to quarrel with every one, and in truth is as proud a man as I ever met’, they became firm friends and during the monsoon Hooker came to live with his reclusive mentor. He told his family that they had become like brothers and that he would always regard Hodgson ‘as one of my dearest friends on earth’. Excited to have someone as knowledgeable as Hooker interested in his life’s work, Hodgson was happy to share his knowledge of Himalayan natural history, which Hooker saw as ‘the very best chance for me that could have occurred’. Later, out of gratitude, Hooker would name a species of rhododendron after his friend, despite Hodgson’s protestations.

  The young botanist was blessed in having such powerful contacts. Dalhousie could open political doors and Hodgson furnished him with the knowledge he needed to make the most of his time in Sikkim. Getting permission for his visit was more problematic. The tiny kingdom of Sikkim and its indigenous Lepcha population, with smaller numbers of Limbus and Magars, had been ruled since the mid seventeenth century by the Namgyal family, which originated in eastern Tibet. Rulers were called chogyal, dharma kings, but the geographic space they occupied was vulnerable, surrounded by more aggressive powers: Hooker likened it to Poland, despite its small size. Bhutan had invaded in the early eighteenth century and Sikkim was prey to frequent raids from the Gorkhali regime in Kathmandu. Squeezed from all sides, when the Gorkhas captured the capital at Rabdentse and the chogyal fled to Tibet, Sikkim found support from the Qing, who in 1793 pushed back the Gorkhas and restored the chogyal’s young son to the throne. This was the ruler Hooker would meet as a weakened old man.

  As Qing power waned and the British arrived, the chogyal Tsugphud Namgyal found a new ally against the Gorkha regime. In 1814 the Gorkhalis once again overran Sikkim’s eastern territory, but the East India Company restored the chogyal and in 1817 he signed a treaty with the British. Hooker thought this treaty feeble, since, as he told his mother in a letter that June,

  we did not demand even a nominal tribute from the Rajah, who at once fell under the influence of China, whose policy it is to rule the Councils and hearts, but not the people, of these three Border powers; and by teaching them a wholesome dread of the English, they exclude the latter from these several States and prevent our interfering with the Chinese Trade from the East into Thibet.

  This was disingenuous on Hooker’s part. The British had gained plenty. That portion of Sikkim occupied by the Gorkhalis was ceded to the East India Company and in 1835, when the Company decided it also wanted Darjeeling and its district, 2,500 square kilometres of territiory, the chogyal had little option but to accept the terms offered: an annual pension of three thousand rupees. The written contract was short and ambiguous. In the chogyal’s mind, he was being paid rent for Darjeeling; the British regarded the territory as theirs for good.

  The man who made Darjeeling was Archibald Campbell. Born on the Scottish island of Islay, he had studied medicine at Glasgow and Edinburgh and joined the Bengal Medical Service, serving as surgeon under Hodgson in Kathmandu before his appointment as superintendent of the new hill station in 1839. When he arrived in Darjeeling it was ‘an inaccessible tract of forest, with a very scanty population’ but in little more than a decade the energetic Scot had overseen the construction of not just the sanatorium that had inspired its acquisition but a small town as well. A road was built, scores of European houses, a bazaar and jail. A local militia was formed and the practice of forced labour ended. Campbell also experimented with the introduction of new crops, including in 1841 tea acquired from gardens in Kumaon that had planted Chinese seed. (Twenty years later one of
these bushes was twenty feet high and fifty feet in circumference.) By 1852, the year the first commercial tea garden was planted, the station was already generating revenues of fifty thousand rupees from farming and forestry, substantially more than the few hundred rupees it had earned the chogyal.

  As political agent or officer for Sikkim, Archie Campbell was a necessary ally for Hooker in getting permission to enter the kingdom. But Campbell had fallen out with Calcutta and was at first reluctant to push the request, much to Hooker’s frustration. ‘The Govt. won’t order Campbell to send me without the Rajah’s consent for fear of a war with China; Campbell won’t run the risk of committing himself without an order!’ Even so, as Campbell was an old friend of Hodgson it was almost inevitable that the two men would get to know each other well during Hooker’s stay in Darjeeling. Campbell’s young children adored Hooker who returned the compliment by naming a rhododendron for their mother, just as he had for Hodgson. While negotiations continued, Hooker explored the hills first around Darjeeling and then further north along the Rangit river, moving beyond British jurisdiction to where it met the Tista. He collected several magnolias, three of which Falconer confirmed were new to science, and three new rhododendrons, ‘one, the most lovely thing you can imagine, a parasite on gigantic trees, three yards high, with whorls of branches, and 3–6 immense white, deliciously sweet-scented flowers at the apex of each branch’. This he named Rhododendron dalhousiae for his patron in Calcutta.