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.