Rich in exciting folklore, tea gardens in Darjeeling exude an air of mystery, adventure, and excitement immersed in the political complexities of establishing the world-famous legendary Darjeeling tea industry. After World War I , Indian and Eurasian vendors, furnished with stoves and kettles began selling tea at the historic railway stations of Bengal, Punjab, and the Frontier regions.
Darjeeling tea plantations are shrouded in fascinating tales that go back to British colonialism.
The British and Dutch Conflicts Ignited the Birth of Indian Tea
The British first landed in India during the early 1600s as traders in quest of spices and their trading organization, the East India Company, quickly spread its branches all over India. By the mid-eighteenth century, they overpowered all other European trading houses to emerge as the dominant foreign influence in India.
The Chinese had been drinking tea for 2,000 years long before the British. Once the British got the taste of tea, they loved it and were very anxious to establish tea in India. Due to financial drainage due to the Anglo-Dutch wars, by the 18th century, the English were unable to afford the silver that China demanded to continue trade with Britain. To counter smuggled tea, on the one hand, and the increasing Chinese demand for silver on the other, the British reacted by growing opium in India mainly in Bengal, Patna, Benares, and the Malwa plateau — and smuggling it into China, in exchange for their treasured tea.
The British tea cultivators were excessively eager to have Chinese tea and techniques brought to India. In 1788, The Royal Society of Arts began deliberating on a plan of bringing tea saplings from China, and in 1824, tea saplings were discovered in Assam by Robert Bruce and Maniram Dewan.
The tea industry all began with a Scottish “mandarin” who smuggled a tea plant from China in 1848 where in 1843, Robert Fortune, the “mandarin” a Scottish horticulturist travelled to China to study its tea plantations. His travels were funded by the Royal Horticultural Society which was eager to extract plant samples and botanical intelligence from China in the wake of the Treaty of Nanking, signed in 1842, that ended the First Opium War.
The Great Tea Robbery
In the autumn of 1848, Fortune entered China on a great spying mission, accompanied by his servant Wang, whom he refers to in his account simply as ‘coolie’. Fortune shaved his head disguised as a Chinese mandarin. The two headed to a factory in the hills of Wuyi Shan, travelling from Shanghai via Hangzhou to the tea plantations of Zhejiang and Anhui on an arduous three-month expedition.
After inspecting the 2,000-year-old tea manufacturing process in the Chinese highlands, Fortune returned to Shanghai in 1849, from where he contacted his employers in London. “I have much pleasure in informing you,” he wrote, “that I have procured a large supply of seeds and young plants which I trust will get safely to India.”He also relayed his discovery that the Chinese were given to doctoring their tea exports to Europe with ferric ferrocyanide (Prussian blue) and gypsum salts to achieve the preferred colour in green tea, which impressed the Europeans.
It was Fortune’s discovery, too, that black and green teas are essentially the same species of the shrub, Camellia Sinensis, except that the former variety was cured or ‘fermented’ for a longer period.Fortune robbed about 13,000 plant samples and 10, 000 seeds and managed to smuggle them out in glass bottles through Hong Kong and Calcutta. With these new plants, British planters started tea plantations in eastern India. Firms and advertisers in London began branding the teas in tandem with sugar from the plantations in the Caribbean slave colonies.
The story of Fortune’s robbery caused a corresponding extraordinary ripple in the Victorian tea industry. Fortune also looted samples of poisonous tea dyes inside the folds of his cloak.On his return to Britain, Fortune published Three Years’ Wandering in the Northern Provinces of China (1847). Rhapsodized by his discoveries in China, Dr John Forbes Royle drafted Fortune on behalf of the Company as a scout. He was to perform the great British tea heist. Fortune gladly accepted the £500 annuity from the East India Company, five times his previous earnings. Fortune true to his name would soon transform the fortunes of the tea industry in Britain!
Camellia Sinensis (Tea) Was First Planted in the Darjeeling area in 1841
Archibald Campbell, working for the East India Company in a jungle-dense sparsely-populated area planted the first tea samplings to develop a hill station specially holiday-tailored for the British as a cool resort town to escape the sweltery summers of Kolkata.
The British discovered a second variety of the plant growing in the wilderness of Assam and smuggled seeds and plantings out of China. The Chinese variety(Sinensis) was planted in Saharanpur Botanical Gardens and propagated in other Himalayan gardens where Campbell had acquired seeds from Kumaun via Nathaniel Wallich. While the original plantings succeeded, Campbell moved to Lebong where he and several other residents planted a new batch, in 1846, of both varieties (Sinensis and Assamica).
Suitable Geography and Climate of Darjeeling Darjeeling Tea Plantations
Darjeeling tea flourished fast in the Darjeeling and Kalimpong districts, an area bound by Nepal to the west, Bhutan to the east, and Sikkim to the north, located on the hillsides of the Eastern Himalaya, peaked between 600 and 2,000 metres. Grown on steep slopes, the soil is well-drained and deep enough for long root systems, necessary for anchoring soil on slopes, which flourishes with well-drained, slightly acidic soils, with periods of dormancy, and limited direct sunlight.
How the British Lured Tea Garden Workers to Remain in Tea Plantations
During the early years of establishing the tea industry when tea gardens were set amid wild jungles with sparse populations, workers were reluctant to stay in the extremely rugged and dangerous conditions and often would escape overnight with their families to flee back to their villages. Very often, in the morning it would be discovered that over forty families disappeared overnight. This of course, severely affected the newborn work of the tea industry thus the British struck upon a plan to make them stay.
They offered the workers free alcohol at night and being in an inebriated state, blissful and drowsy, they could not escape at night all falling into a deep slumber, and this continued night after night, until they found no means to run away. Over time, the free night drinks stopped but the gardens were already being set up. If they wanted to leave, the British imperialists recruited armed forces to control the labourers and to prevent them from leaving the tea estates.
Tukvar, Steinthal and Alubari and Makaibari Were the First Tea Estates in Darjeeling:
A year after planting the first three Company experimental tea gardens in 1852, at Tukvar, Steinthal, and Alubari, planters reported having 2,000 tea plants. It was discovered that Assamica preferred warmer and wetter growing conditions while Sinensis had been selectively cultivated for higher elevations.The first commercial tea gardens were established in 1856 and by 1866 there were 39 tea gardens in Darjeeling, including the Makaibari Tea Estate which had established the region’s first processing factory for withering and oxidation, necessary for the product to survive the months-long journey down to Kolkata and over to Britain.
The success of Assamica at the nearby Dooars-Terai tea gardens led to infrastructure investments that would be extended up the Darjeeling Himalayan hill region, allowing more machinery and supplies to reach the tea gardens.Production methods again shifted in the 1990s as Western Europe and Japan replaced the crumpledSoviet Union as Darjeeling’s principal customers and new garden managers were bringing the principles of biodynamic agriculture to their practices.
In 1988, Makaibari became the first tea estate in India to attain organic certification, followed by Tumsong and the first to gain biodynamic certification, in 1993, followed by Ambootia. In pursuit of differentiating Darjeeling tea, the Darjeeling Planter’s Association had been established in 1983, to promote the product in other countries. According to an estimate by the Tea Board of India.
In 2000, the Tea Board created new licensing requirements for Darjeeling tea exporters, including product authentication and a prohibition on blending, which allowed them to issue certificates of origin. In 2004, Darjeeling tea became India’s first product to receive legal geographical indication protection under the World Trade Organization’s TRIPS Agreement and in 2011 it was given Protected Geographical Indication status in the European Union. Also, the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, which opened in 1878, was symbiotically rooted in the growth of Indian tea. Presently, Darjeeling has 87 gardens spread over 17,500 hectares. It employs over 52,000 people of which 60 % are women. Darjeeling’s economy is heavily dependent on the tea industry. The Darjeeling Tea Estates produce approximately 9.6 million kg of tea each year. Darjeeling Tea has a unique taste attributed to its climate, soil, slope, mountain mist, and rain.