“The general opinion of the collected tea brokers and dealers, with whom the room was crowded, was, that the Assam tea is not only valuable as a curiosity,” went one typical positive notice in the press, “but that the tea itself is of very superior quality, being of a pleasant flavor, and of such strength that some asserted that the fifth water from it was as strong as the first.”38
Another shipment arrived at the end of the year, and a second sale of Assam tea took place on March 17, 1840, and while prices dropped somewhat, industry insiders—Twinings & Co. of London among them—deemed it an improvement that contained plenty of potential.39 That wild tea grew in Assam, could be cultivated and processed, and would sell on the market had been proven. It was clearly commercially possible. Incredibly, it had all happened within a stunningly short half dozen years since Bentinck had formed the Tea Committee.
To actualize that promise, tap its potential, and bring it to the vast marketplace, two companies formed immediately and simultaneously—one in London, one in Calcutta—that soon combined into the Assam Company. It was a rival of sorts to the East India Company, whose plans had long been to leave the tea plantation business once it had progressed out of the experimental phase. The East India Company retained just a few small gardens,40 and the government supported the Assam Company by offering it land. But extremely high production costs, mismanagement, and lack of tea-farming know-how nearly doomed the project at the outset. By the mid–1840s it was bankrupt and facing liquidation. The board admitted failure and discussed giving up the entire endeavor in Upper Assam.41
The gardens were still under the supervision of Bruce, who was now working for the new company. Like many of the early planters, he lacked an appropriate background for the job. As a contemporary report stated of the onetime gunboat commander, he “does not seem to have possessed any knowledge of botany or horticulture, or indeed any special qualification for the post.”42 Not surprisingly, the Assam Company sacked him.
In 1847 new heads took over management, improved cultivation and the company’s financial structure, and quickly turned it around. In 1852 the company offered a small dividend. This grew steadily over the next few years and by 1856 had reached 8 percent.43 From the hard work and successes of India’s tea pioneers sprang an entire industry as the secrets of tea production were gradually unveiled. Commercial aspirations and imaginations were unleashed, and production began to compete with China’s. One of Bruce’s goals in planting tea in Assam was not just “to enrich our own dominions” but also to “pull down the haughty pride of China.”44
Given the rivalry in this competitiveness, comments in the newspapers were at times dismissive, possessive, patriotic, or aggrandizing. “We have also beaten the Chinese in their porcelain ware … and so shall it be with her tea,” brayed the Illustrated London News on August 15, 1857, as it reported on finding a place on the subcontinent with the right climate, soil, and abundance of labor.
May not the day arrive when we may be independent of the saucy Chinaman, and, instead of sending our ships to Canton for our tea, we shall send them to Calcutta for the rich and well-flavoured teas of Assam, Chachar, Darjeeling-Kumaon, and other tea-growing districts, now springing up along the broad front of our splendid mountains?45
Sauciness aside, the article was prescient. Within three decades—by 1888—Britain was importing more tea from India than China.* It was an “imperial dream come true.”46
By then the undertaking was long out of its pioneering days, and the foundations for one of the country’s greatest industries well established. The success of the Assam Company had quickly spawned rivals.† Other companies formed and established gardens, as did some wealthy individuals. They leased or purchased property from the government, cleared it, and planted tea. The amount of tea being cultivated was rapidly increasing, and as it matured, so did yields. By the time the newly opened railway linked some of the tea-covered hills with the Brahmaputra River in 1882, Assam produced 12.7 million pounds of tea.47 By 1891 it had reached some 49.5 million pounds.48 But these numbers were still meager. Eight years later, the Brahmaputra Valley produced 75,287,500 pounds,49 and by 1913, plantations in Assam produced a staggering 199,722,000 pounds50—enough to brew somewhere between 35 and 45 billion cups of tea.
Today Assam alone produces about 500 million kilograms—over 1 billion pounds—of tea a year.
But quantity and quality are not synonymous. Assam’s tropically grown teas are malty, a hint woody, at times pungent, frequently a touch rough, and always strong and bracing. The British realized this back in the 1840s, as the Assam industry was just getting under way. Tea would make a profitable commodity. “It flourishes best in a jungle atmosphere of heat and humidity,” said the recent head of India’s largest tea company. “It is an easy plant to grow. But to get a good-quality tea is extremely difficult.”51
From the beginning of their experimenting with growing tea in India, the British also wanted to produce teas that had the delicate floral aromas of those from the hills of China: light and bright, rather than husky and earthy. The teas of Assam had plenty of body but little finesse.
For this, the British needed better plant stock from China—and to find a way to get it back to places in India more similar to their original geography without perishing. Even if they achieved this seemingly impossible task, they also needed to learn how to better cultivate the plant. From horticulture to processing, the British still had little idea how to produce tea. Lu Yü’s thousand-year-old book-cum-manual remained a main source of information, supplemented with a scattering of monographs such as Bruce’s and travelogues such as Griffith’s, and some details from the handful of Chinese workers in Assam.
China jealously guarded its tea and production secrets and would not give them up easily. The East India Company would have to send a shrewd plant hunter to travel to the forbidden interior regions where the best teas grew and smuggle them out.
* Originally known as the East India Company’s Garden or Company Bagan (garden) or Calcutta Garden, it became the Royal Botanic Garden in the early 1860s when the Crown assumed the assets of the defunct East India Company. Its current name is Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden, in honor of the physicist-turned-plant biologist.
* A wise decision. River water soon flowed freely over the original site, while the Jaypur garden still exists today.
* One of Bentinck’s most significant achievements was pushing for the development of a tea industry on Indian soil. Yet it is never mentioned among his accomplishments. Full biographies on the man, including Demetrius Boulger’s Lord William Bentinck (1892) and John Rosselli’s Lord William Bentinck: The Making of a Liberal Imperialist, 1774–1839 (1974), make not a single reference to his role in tea or the Tea Committee, even though the industry is one of the Raj’s most profitable and lasting legacies.
† The Assam Company still exists today as a large, publicly traded company that, along with producing tea, has expanded into oil and gas exploration and transportation.
CHAPTER 5
China Leaf