Those are the final lines of Fortune’s book. It ends not on tea, the purpose of his journey, the obsession that drove the three-and-a-half-year undertaking, but rather an ornamental water lily gathered in the South American Amazon.
Fortune returned to the Far East thrice more—once in the service of the U.S. government to find tea that could grow in the southern states—and traveled to China as well as Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan, and the Philippines in search of plants. He is credited with introducing some 120 new species into Western gardens.
But little is known about Fortune himself outside the adventure- and plant-filled travelogues. As fascinating as these are to read, they are, for the most part, impersonal. Given his restraint in writing nothing of Agra or its sumptuous Taj Mahal to a society hungry for the exotic, it is no surprise that he was equally reticent of himself.
When Fortune died in 1880, his family—who are absent from his works—burned his diaries, letters, and personal effects. The few photos that remain show a stern-looking man with a high forehead and heavy lamb-chop whiskers. He looks remarkably similar throughout the years. In the final portrait, his forehead is higher and the whiskers friskier and fringed in white.
But the tea plants he smuggled from China carry on. From Saharanpur, they spread to various Himalayan plantations. And some of that exceptional stock eventually made its way to Darjeeling, where it would eventually produce the world’s finest and most expensive teas.
* In 2001 Calcutta changed its name to its Bengali equivalent, Kolkata, losing the longer, languid u to something sharper. The shift to its precolonial moniker was an effort to help preserve its Bengali identity.
† Its great rival, the Tollygunge Club, would be founded in 1895.
‡ In the 1860s, the Auckland Hotel was expanded and renamed the Great Eastern Hotel. Mark Twain stayed here and called it the finest hotel east of the Suez Canal.
Second Flush
(May through June)
After the first flush, a month or so of dormancy follows from mid-April to mid-May, called the banji period—a brief time when pluckers can only take two leaves but no bud—beset by sudden, sporadic, and intense showers, with sharp claps of thunder, power outages, and pulsating rain. The moisture spurs on the second flush, and the tea bushes again sprout new shoots and leaves.
Summers* in the Darjeeling hills are hot and dry, the sky generally cloudless but not vibrant: azure with a cataract of haze. While days are balmy, the nights remain fresh, offering relief from the sweltering plains below that can top 115 degrees Fahrenheit, even graze 120. Azaleas and orchids blossom, Himalayan golden eagles and griffon vultures wheel above on mountain updrafts, and down in the lower foothills, the breeding season for the hawk-cuckoo is under way. The size of a slender pigeon and known in Hindi as papiha, it’s usually called the brainfever bird for its repetitious and progressively more urgent three-syllable call—brain-FE-ver—that runs up in shrill, spiraling crescendos and gets repeated all day, all night.
“The slumbering life forces come alive, the birds, the bees,” Rajah Banerjee said one sunny morning in the Makaibari tasting room. “A midsummer night’s dream!” Lanky as a cricket star, with a thick shock of pewter-colored hair that crests up in a swooping, offset front part like that of a slightly rebellious prep-schooler, he walks with the gait of a man who has spent many hours on a horse (and has the bad back of someone who has been thrown from one).
On these warm days, workers pick leaves that are larger than first flush ones and have a slightly purplish bloom and high number of silvery tips. With summer kicking in, the tea changes. It is the preferred season for many enthusiasts. Describing this flush and the sublime teas it produces, the reedy timbre of Rajah’s voice softens, his clipped syllables become drawn out, and he finishes, abruptly, with a broad, silent smile.
The fired leaves have a darker hue than those in the first flush, moving from spring tea’s grayish greens to oxidized coppers and mahogany. The hot weather gives more color to the liquor, turning it a bright, deep amber, even tawny, tone. “The color of a newly minted copper penny,” Banerjee said. In white sneakers and pant cuffs tucked into gym socks, he moved among the row of a dozen teas with a jaunty pride.
The body of a second flush tea is fuller but still relaxed, the flavors deeper and less grassy, a touch more prominent on the palate, yet roundly mellow with a sweetish, fruity, often peachy note. And, important for connoisseurs, Darjeeling tea’s renowned muscatel flavor—a musky spice with sweet hints—is more pronounced. So pronounced that the season often carries the moniker “muscatel flush.”
The year’s opening harvest might garner excitement and attention, but this second one, famed for its concentrated signature flavors, fetches just as high prices.
It also offers a special quirk of nature when an infestation of insects is actually beneficial. For a couple of weeks, tea jassids (Empoasca flavescens)—commonly called green flies in Darjeeling, even though they look more like mini-grasshoppers just one-tenth-inch long—come and feed on the leaves. “They suck out the moisture and the leaf shrivels downward,” said Sujoy Sengupta at the Chamong Tee group’s headquarters in Kolkata on a steamy, late-summer afternoon. Holding out a hand, he curled his fingers down into an arthritic claw. “It is called, in Nepali, kakreko patti. Patti is ‘leaf,’ and kakreko is ‘curled,’” he explained, noting that this doesn’t kill the leaf completely but stunts its growth, which further concentrates flavors. “This is the topmost quality of leaf.”
The pinpricks the tea jassids make as they feed start natural fermentation. Fine veins of brown appear on the edges, like the dark fissures in an old tea-stained porcelain tasting cup. There is a patina of death while the leaf surrounding it remains wholly alive and freshly green, a dichotomy that offers, for Banerjee, “symmetry for the senses.”
* Summer in Darjeeling is the premonsoon season, beginning sometime in April and running to July. The hottest month tends to be May.
CHAPTER 6
Darjeeling
Darjeeling as it exists today began as a strip of isolated, heavily forested ridges that the rajah of the Kingdom of Sikkim deeded to the East India Company. It was not part of a specific, long-term plan of British colonial expansion, but a more piecemeal and opportunistic move among Himalayan kingdoms. Similar small steps were being taken elsewhere as the disjointed puzzle of the subcontinent was being pulled together under a unified British rule and aligned princely states, and the map of India gradually became further shaded in British red.
In the 1780s, Gorkhas from Nepal marched into Sikkim and began wrestling away territory in the lower foothills and skirting flatlands, and eventually seized land as far east as the Teesta River. But when the Nepalese looked to take the rest of Sikkim, the British intervened with the 1814–16 Anglo-Gorkha (or Nepalese) War. The East India Company signed a treaty with Sikkim in 1817 and returned some four thousand square miles of reclaimed territory to the rajah and guaranteed his sovereignty over it. The British essentially wanted a forty-mile-wide buffer zone—Joseph Hooker fittingly called it a “fender”1—between Nepal and Bhutan to keep them apart for two reasons: to prevent them from fighting with each other, but also to prevent them from forming an alliance against the British, who controlled the bordering territory to the south.