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 are 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.
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.