Darjeeling (9 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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?
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Sauciness aside, the article was prescient. Within three decades—by 1888—Britain was importing more tea from India than China.
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It was an “imperial dream come true.”
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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.
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By 1891 it had reached some 49.5 million pounds.
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But these numbers were still meager. Eight years later, the Brahmaputra Valley produced 75,287,500 pounds,
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and by 1913, plantations in Assam produced a staggering 199,722,000 pounds
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—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.”
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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.

The East India Company’s agent was Robert Fortune, a curator at the Chelsea Physic Garden in London. Unlike many of his colleagues, Fortune was neither titled nor wealthy nor even well connected. He was born in Edrom, in rural, southeast Scotland, a few miles from the border with England, and on his birth entry his father’s occupation is listed as “hedger.”
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Having little formal education, Fortune began as an apprentice and then obtained a qualification in horticulture (though not medicine like most botanists). Skilled and ambitious, he worked in positions at the botanic garden at Edinburgh and then gardens of London’s Horticultural Society
²
(now the Royal Horticultural Society). He lacked the financial self-sufficiency generally expected for such gentlemanly expeditions, even those taken at the behest of others. But as a talented botanist, experienced in the delicate process of sending plants back to Europe, and, quite exceptionally, widely traveled in China, he was the perfect man for the job.

Fortune had not long returned from a lengthy trip in China. Six months to the day after the signing of the 1841 Treaty of Nanking, following the First Opium War, the Horticultural Society had dispatched the thirty–year-old on a flora-gathering mission. Surely, the parts in his subsequent book,
Three Years’ Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China
, about traveling into prohibited areas of the Middle Kingdom in disguise particularly caught the attention of the Company’s board.

For this new mission, Fortune’s brief was different—and difficult: to gather tea plants, as well as production secrets, for both green and black tea. The consensus of British botanists was that green and black tea came
from different plants rather than different ways of processing the leaves; Fortune suspected otherwise. While five ports were then open to foreigners, the great tea-producing regions of the interior remained off-limits. Fortune knew that he could not rely on agents but had to go himself to be certain of the plants’ sources, as well as to gather careful notes on soil and cultivation. Apart from a handful of Arab traders and Jesuit missionaries, few foreigners had ever penetrated so deeply into China or returned alive to tell of it.

Arriving in Hong Kong in August 1848, Fortune traveled immediately a thousand miles north to Shanghai and then inland to the picturesque, green-tea-producing areas around the Yellow Mountain region. A day out of Shanghai, he had his head shaved, donned Chinese robes, and had his servant sew on a braided hair tail that hung nearly to his heels.
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Like this, Fortune became his alter ego, Sing Wa, a respected businessman from some country “beyond the great wall” that justified his height and pale skin, heavy accent, and inability to speak the local dialects, and perhaps the reason he lacked a certain intrinsic fluency with chopsticks. Traveling by boat and on a sedan chair carried by teams of locally hired “coolies,” he reached his target and found tea growing luxuriantly on the hillside. He didn’t collect tea himself, but obtained plants and seeds from nurseries.

Back in Shanghai, Fortune readied his first shipment for the Calcutta Botanic Garden. At that time, a major problem for plant hunters was getting species back to sponsoring gardens in good shape. With stowage at a premium and freshwater always in short supply, ships were reluctant to transport them. Salty sea spray and merciless tropical sun were enemies of a plant’s survival, as were livestock on board, which would nibble on the tender shoots and flowers whenever possible.

To combat this, Fortune used Wardian cases, sealed glass boxes that had been recently developed by a physician in London’s East End named Nathaniel Ward. Acting like mini-greenhouses, they allowed the plants plenty of light and a fairly stable temperature. By recycling moisture, the plants could stay alive for years within the closed environment.

Fortune packed the first batch of plants in the glazed cases. Tea seeds were particularly sensitive and, Fortune observed, only retained their vitality for a short period of time. Unsure as to the best approach, he tried several. “Some were packed in loose canvas bags,” he wrote, “others were mixed with dry earth and put into boxes, and others again were put up in very small packages, in order to be quickly forwarded by post.”
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Not until the following year (1849) did word reach him that the plants had arrived in Calcutta in good shape. The seeds, though, had failed to germinate. None of his methods, he wrote drily, “were attended with much success.”
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Although his travelogue,
A Journey to the Tea Countries of China; Including Sung-Lo and the Bohea Hills; with a Short Notice of the East India Company’s Tea Plantations in the Himalaya Mountains
, does not record it as such, the loss must have been a deep blow.

By then, Fortune had long since headed back into the interior. This time he traveled southwest to the famed black-tea-producing hills up the Min River and into the Bohea Hills of Fujian Province. Again, Fortune was successful in obtaining stock. With this load he tried new ways to send the seeds.

Having procured some fine mulberry-plants from the district where the best Chinese silk is produced, I planted them in a Ward’s case in the usual way, and watered them well. In two or three days, when the soil was sufficiently dry, a large quantity of tea-seeds were scattered over its surface, and covered with earth about half an inch deep. The whole was now sprinkled with water, and fastened down with a few crossbars to keep the earth in its place. The case was then screwed down in the usual way, and made as tight as possible.
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When the cases arrived in Calcutta, the mulberry plants were in good condition, and, encouragingly, the tea seeds had germinated. “The young tea-plants were sprouting around the mulberries as thick as they could come up,” wrote Dr. Hugh Falconer,
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who had recently taken over from Wallich as superintendent of the botanic garden, upon their receipt.

Fortune continued to hone his techniques as he filled and sent on more Wardian cases to Falconer. They arrived in good shape and were sent on to experimental tea gardens newly established in the western Himalayan foothills.

Now confident in his system of getting the plants and seeds to India in good shape, Fortune gathered his final, grand batch, the one that he would accompany himself to Calcutta. When this was accomplished, Fortune set out to fulfill what he deemed the most difficult part of his commission. He needed to convince experienced Chinese tea manufacturers from the
best tea districts to go to India and teach their techniques to the fledging industry.