Tea-planters carry baskets of harvested tea leaves back to base, on a tea garden in Darjeeling. Plucking tea is a skilled business; George Williamson was one of the first successful managers of the Assam Tea Company, and the eminent tea historian Harold Mann attributed this mainly to his understanding of how to pluck tea. Indeed, Mann felt that it was the company directors’ failure to listen to Williamson that was primarily responsible for the industry’s slow start.
Part 1 of 2
IN January 1834, under the Governor-Generalship of Lord William Bentinck, a committee was appointed ‘for the purpose of submitting a plan for the introduction of tea-culture into India.’ In the following year, plants and seed were brought from China,* and widely distributed throughout the country. Government itself undertook the formation of experimental plantations in Upper Assam,* and in the sub-Himalayan Districts of Kumaun and Garhwal in the North-Western Provinces.* A party of skilled manufacturers was brought from China, and the leaf which they prepared was favourably reported upon in the London market.*
Forthwith private speculation took up the enterprise. The Assam Tea Company was formed in 1839, and received from the Government an extensive grant of land, with the nurseries which had been already laid out. In Kumaun, retired members of the civil and military services came forward with equal eagerness. Many fundamental mistakes as to site, soil, and methods of manufacture were made in those early days, and bitter disappointment was the chief result.
* China was not the only place where tea was grown, but it was the only place where tea was grown that the English could stomach. “It had been naturalised in Brazil, where it had grown magnificently,” tea historian Harold Mann tells us, “in St Helena, in Java, in Prince of Wales’ Island, — but the tea made in these places was very unsatisfactory. Of that made in Prince of Wales’ Island (Penang) it was stated that it had ‘acquired the appalling property of a nauseating and slightly emetic drug.’” The need for an alternative source was felt strongly for political reasons: the great fear was that China would do as Japan had done, and cut itself off from European trade altogether.
* Assam is a State in northeast India, on the eastern side of Bangladesh (Assam is joined to the rest of India by the narrow Siliguri corridor at the top of West Bengal). See Google Maps, and also ‘A Numbered map of India’s states’ at Wikimedia Commons, where Assam is numbered 3 and West Bengal is numbered 28.
* Garhwal and Kumaun or Kumaon are the two constituent Divisions of the State of Uttarakhand in northern India, to the north of New Delhi. The administrative centre of Kumaun is Nainital. See Google Maps.
* The first auction of Indian tea took place in London on January 10th, 1839, and a product that could be produced for a shilling a pound sold for many times that, reaching 34s per lb for one lot of Assam pekoe after frenzied bidding among sixty rivals. The winning bid for this and every other lot came from Captain John Rhodes Pidding (1803-50). He was a former East India Company employee and now a tea merchant, who sold Chinese tea through licensed distributors all over the country and declared in local newspapers from London to Newcastle-upon-Tyne that his Howqua’s Mixture Tea was ‘as supplied to the Royal table.’
Précis
Concern over the country’s dependency on China for her lucrative market in tea led the British Government to set up a committee in 1834, tasked with establishing a tea industry in India. Under William Bentinck’s supervision, Chinese tea and experts on its cultivation were brought to Assam, but a series of costly mistakes sapped the confidence of investors. (57 / 60 words)
Part Two
A tea set made by the firm of Josiah Wedgwood in 1775-1777, in his distinctive blue jasperware. In 1839, the first Indian tea was auctioned off in London. “Upon the whole” Twinings of London declared “we think that the recent specimens are very favourable to the hope and expectation that Assam is capable of producing an article well suited to this market, and although at present the indications are chiefly in reference to teas adapted by their strong and useful flavour to general purposes, there seems no reason to doubt but that increased experience in the culture and manufacture of tea in Assam may eventually approximate a portion of its produce to the finer descriptions which China has hitherto furnished.”
BUT while private enterprises languished, Government steadily persevered. It retained a portion of its Assam gardens in its own hands until 1849, when the Assam Company began to emerge from their difficulties. In 1856, the tea-plant was discovered wild in the District of Cachar in the Barak valley,* and European capital was at once directed to that quarter. At about the same time, tea-planting was introduced into the neighbourhood of the Himalayan sanitarium of Darjeeling.*
The success of these undertakings engendered a wild spirit of speculation in tea companies, both in India and at home, which reached its climax in 1865. The industry recovered but slowly from the effects of the disastrous crisis, and did not again reach a stable position until 1869. Since that date, it has rapidly but steadily progressed, and has been ever opening new fields of enterprise. There is no reason to suppose that all the suitable localities have yet been tried; and we may look forward to the day when India shall not only rival, but supersede, China in her staple product.*
* Cachar is a district in western Assam.
* Darjeeling is a city in the northernmost part of West Bengal, just north of Siliguri in the slim corridor that leads across the top of Bangladesh to Assam. A sanitarium for invalid servants of the East India Company was founded there in 1835, and it became the summer capital of the Bengal Presidency in 1864. The town’s growth was driven rapidly by the tea industry, railways and numerous educational establishments.
* For a simple graphic of where the UK gets its tea today, see Where Britain’s tea comes from, mapped from indy100/The Independent. Most of our black tea comes from Kenya, with India in second place.
Précis
Although private investors briefly lost confidence in the new Indian tea venture, the Government persevered and the investors returned. This time there was even a brief ‘tea mania,’ before the industry stabilised in the late 1860s. Thereafter, tea gardens in Assam and Darjeeling flourished, and hopes rose that India might eventually displace China in the British tea market. (59 / 60 words)
