The Story of Tea

by Mary Lou Heiss

  Tea pickers queue up to have their shift’s pluck weighed and notated. Precise records are kept at every shift to ensure proper compensation for work (Assam, India). Photo courtesy of Saunam Bhattacharjee.

  The geography and terrain of India’s tea-growing areas feature considerable differences in climate and geography. Northeastern India can be divided into the Brahmaputra and Barak valleys in Assam, the northern Bengal plains of Dooars and Terai, and the Darjeeling Hills. The Nilgiri Mountains provide the only major tea-producing region in southern India, with production in the states of both Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

  ASSAM: THE BRAHMAPUTRA AND BARAK VALLEYS

  Located at the foothills of the eastern Himalaya, in the far northeastern corner of India, Assam’s lush, dense jungles are where indigenous, wild-growing India tea plants, called Camellia sinensis var. assamica, were discovered in 1823. Assam shares a small portion of its northwestern border with the mystical Dragon Kingdom of Bhutan, while the tip of northeastern Assam abuts the jungles of Myanmar. Present-day Assam is encircled by the Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Mizoram, and Meghlaya—all of which were carved out of the original Assam state in the British colonial era. The northwestern tip of Bangladesh juts far into Assam, creating a narrow passage of land that isolates and nearly severs Assam from the rest of India. Assam’s eastern border is peopled by a diverse mix of nearly four hundred ethnic groups, including Assamese, Boros, Khasis, Kukis, Nagas, Nishis, Tagins, and Tiwas, to name a few. Today, as in the past, this quadrant of India is a country apart from the mainland, largely undeveloped and left to itself.

  BASKET-CARRYING DAMSELS

  Tea pickers are mostly female, and when they fan out into the tea gardens, their garments cut a colorful, multihued swath through the tea fields. Some of these tea pluckers wear woven bamboo hats (in China women in different regions sport different styles of hats), while in India and Ceylon multicolored woven head wraps are favored.

  Assamese tea pickers tend to use woven head straps to support their tea sacks while they pick. These cloth sacks are lighter in weight than baskets and are made from local fabric (Assam, India). Photo courtesy of Eliot Jordan.

  To catch the freshly plucked tea leaves, woven bamboo baskets are slung over the shoulder or carried on the back or steadily held aloft atop one’s head in a deft and steady balancing act. Other times cloth sacks are secured and suspended from atop one’s head (cloth pads are used to keep the sacks from slipping and from being uncomfortable). The sacks are used in the same manner to catch and contain freshly plucked tea leaves.

  An assortment of tea containers: a ceramic container in the shape of a tea picker from Sri Lanka; an antique tin from Darjeeling, India; and a tin from Nepal.

  The tension applied by slender, nimble fingers to the base of the tea leaf is done with studied skill and care. The pluck of the leaf from the stem must be made with a clean, swift break. The action of separating the leaf from the stalk is done with a twisting motion of the hand that is controlled at the wrist, not by clipping the leaf away with fingernails. Doing so would result in a rust-colored stem end. Efficient tea pickers pluck with both hands at once until they can no longer hold any more leaf. Then they toss their catch into their bag or basket.

  Assam is essentially a large, tropical river valley, with few areas of high elevation. In the north and central part of the state the Brahmaputra River courses down through the middle of the region, descending into Assam from the far reaches of Tibet. The Brahmaputra, which is one of the longest rivers in the world, also harbors the largest river island in the world, Majuli. Meeting with the sacred Ganges River in Bangladesh, the Brahmaputra comes to the end of its journey in the Bay of Bengal in Bangladesh. The Brahmaputra watershed provides rich, fertile plains that sustain Assam’s plentiful tea gardens. In the southern region of Assam the Barak River forms the Surma valley, where the small Cachar tea district is located. Restricted by the backdrop of the distant Himalaya, the weather of Assam is a microclimate of its own. The sheer height and mass of the Himalaya prevent the hot, humid monsoon air from dispersing north away from Assam, so in turn the rains come and the rivers overflow, washing the fields and plains with a new coat of fertile topsoil each year.

  Assam produces the largest quantity of tea in India, which comprises both premium and mass-market quality. Many growers see the high-end, specialty tea market as the means to change their way out of the price slump that Assam’s mass-market tea has fallen into. The price for these teas is so low that many growers are giving up and abandoning their gardens. Estimates are that 100 to 150 gardens closed in the thirty-six-month period from 2003 to 2005. There is a lot of tea produced in the world, and much of it competes for the same market. Without a distinctive difference, many of these teas end up playing the pricing game, which always means a lower price for the producer. As the costs of production rise while tea prices fall, many tea gardens go out of business. Assam also has a great deal of political instability, which presents a dangerous situation for visiting foreign tea buyers and discourages both foreign capital investment and investment by local tea garden and factory owners. Tea buyers therefore do not visit Assam, and the Assam market suffers from a lack of hands-on exposure and management. This hinders any improvements that might otherwise be made, out of fear of losing one’s investment in these politically charged times.

  Fortunately, many Assam tea gardens are striving to upgrade the quality of the leaf produced. As demand for low-grade tea diminishes, interest in the specialty tea market shows no signs of slowing. Worldwide demand for quality leaf has reached its highest pitch ever, and Assam is poised to benefit from this by increasing quality. By law land classified as a tea garden in Assam must be used only to grown tea. So today’s tea growers choose between growing tea or not growing anything. Modifications in these land-use laws would allow farmers to expand their cash crops to cover their expenses when tea is losing money. At present, however, upgrading the quality of the tea is the option of choice, but this requires the government’s help to upgrade infrastructure and assist with marketing a higher-grade product.

  ASSAM’S TWO TYPES OF PRODUCTION

  Orthodox tea production in Assam takes place at Balijan Estate, Borbudi Dikom, Doomar, Dulling Estate, Gingia Estate, Greenwood Estate, Hajua Estate, Halmari, Harmutty Estate, Hattiali, Koomsong, Kopili Estate, Mangalam, Marangi, Meleng, Mokalbari, Oaklands Estate, Orangajuli Estate, Rani, Rembeng Estate, Sarupta Estate, Sibsagar Estate, Teen Ali Estate, Tingalimbam Estate, and Toonbarie Estate.

  CTC tea production in Assam occurs at Hunwal, Keyhung, Monkooshi, and Tarajulie.

  Assam’s tea-growing regions. The tea-growing regions in Assam are divided into Upper Assam (at the far end of Assam close to the Chinese–Myanmar border), North Bank (at the northern banks of the Brahmaputra River), Central Assam, and Lower Assam (which lies in the western half of Assam). The tea gardens located in the red loam soil of the Doom Dooma tea belt in Upper Assam generally produce the region’s best teas. The tea-growing districts of Upper and Central Assam (such as Dibrugarh, Golagat, Jorhat, Sibsagar, and Tinsukia) produce the largest volume of Assam’s tastiest leaf. In British colonial days the Sibsagar region of Upper Assam was known as Burmese Assam, and it was here and in the Lakkimpur region where the British propagated cuttings taken from indigenous tea trees. These cuttings were used to plant the fledgling tea nurseries that eventually resulted in Assam’s vast cultivated tea gardens. In this vast region counting the number of tea producers is not an easy task. According to the Indian government, approximately 800 to 850 tea estates (each of which has more than 500 acres of land) are statistically counted and classified in Assam. However, there are another 500 to 800 new tea gardens that are not yet eligible to be classified; it can take as long as fifteen to twenty years for a garden to be counted as a classified garden. What’s more, there are another 200,000 to 300,000 individual tea growers who have landholdings of fewer than ten acres each who turn their freshly plucked leaf over to
“bought-leaf” factories. These leaf processors do not own tea gardens but merely process leaf tea for others. These factories easily number between 150 and 200, and neither they nor the individual tea growers are counted in the government’s numbers.

  According to the government’s tea production figures, Assam produces on average 400,000 metric tons of tea each year, a figure that represents 45 to 50 percent of India’s total tea output. But remember, these numbers are just production for the classified gardens; if the total production from the small tea growers and nonclassified gardens were included, this estimate could conceivably jump to being closer to accounting for 75 percent of India’s total tea output.

  ELEPHANTS IN ASSAM

  Our Assamese friend and tea grower Saunam has a pet elephant, Lokhi, who lives and works at one of his tea gardens.

  Saunam explained Lokhi’s work in the garden: “Lokhi is retired. He came to my family when he was in his mid-thirties. He is a wild-born elephant who was captured when he was a teenager and domesticated. Lokhi spends 50 percent of his time in the jungle just hanging out. The other 30 percent of his time is spent walking up and down, stopping to eat whatever his trunk can reach. The other 20 percent of his time is presently being spent uprooting tea plants in order for us to replace them with new clonal varieties. It is very hard work for humans to dig out the roots of the plants, but it is not much work at all for an elephant—he simply grabs the bush and yanks it out of the ground and then moves on to the next one. Also, if he is around when one of our trucks gets stuck in the mud, he will push it out. He costs me a well-spent ten dollars a day to pay for his maintenance, which includes food, two full-time caretakers, medicines, and supplies.”

  Assam’s humid, tropical weather. Assam has a humid, lowland climate with ample rain that creates an environment perfectly suited to the India tea bush and for producing characteristically strong, full-bodied, and malty teas. Winter comes to Assam in December and lasts until February, and although temperatures rarely dip below 55°F (13°C) this seasonal change in the weather makes the tea plant go into hibernation until the following spring. March brings the spring harvest of first-flush teas, the most delicate leaves produced in Assam. Late May and early June produce the tippy summer teas, the second-flush teas, which are covered on the underside of each leaf with fine, delicate silver hair. Considered by tea connoisseurs to be the most distinctive of Assam teas, these teas have two main flavor profiles: mature, tippy leaves that brew a creamy, full-bodied cup, and crisply defined, brisk flavors with more highly nuanced aromas.

  Assam’s tea production. Assam produces both orthodox tea and cut-tear-curl (CTC) leaf. Although all Assam tea is picked by hand, the quality of the final product is a result of each particular gardens’ focus: producing quality or producing quantity. In the early cropping season, careful, fine plucking and attentive processing ensure a stylish leaf and a smoother cup. CTC teas, which account for most of the annual volume of tea produced in Assam, are given a coarser plucking, and are processed faster during the time of heaviest yield from the gardens. The monsoon season arrives in June, bringing drenching rains and sweltering, hot, humid tropical weather that lingers as late as November. The hearty India tea bush happily thrives in this nurturing heat and moisture, and grows thick and lush with abundant leaves. Last comes the autumn harvest, a late-season October and November picking that is still influenced by the effects of the end of the rainy season. December to March is the off-season, when no plucking occurs. Most tea gardens are plucked on average twenty-five times a season, from March to December, with plucking spaced at least one week apart.

  DARJEELING: THE QUEEN OF INDIAN TEAS

  In 1835, not many years after the discovery of wild-growing tea trees in Assam, the English established a hill town health resort and sanatorium for military families in the cool, clean air and high elevation of a remote region of western Bengal. The Tibetan Buddhist monks occupying this place had named it “Dorje-ling” (Darjeeling) in honor of the Dorje, the sacred ritual object of holy lamas that symbolizes eternal strength and constancy and a fixed axis point around which all else turns. With its prominent position across the valley from a majestic lineup of soaring Himalayan peaks, this was considered a transcendent place by the Tibetans.

  Dr. A. Campbell, the chief government official posted in Darjeeling, tried unsuccessfully to grow an English flower garden, but he did have luck growing some tea bushes nearby his residence that he had started from seeds obtained from the governor general of India in Calcutta. Some of these seeds had been smuggled out of China, although Campbell also used seeds from the newly discovered Assam tea bushes. Other English civil servants in Darjeeling had success cultivating small tea gardens, so much so that by 1856 these experimental government test gardens proved that tea of both types of bush favored the high altitude, cool thin air, ample rains, golden sunshine, and overall lush environment of this remote Shangri-la.

  Fewer than a hundred locals lived in this paradise at that time. Workers were brought from Nepal and the northern region of Sikkim to Darjeeling to clear jungles, construct roads, terrace the hillsides, build rudimentary tea-processing factories, and establish towns and villages. The English sent additional men and their families to plant and operate these burgeoning tea gardens. Much like their compatriots in Assam, these early English pioneers had to rely on their own stamina and fortitude to establish the tea industry in Darjeeling, as there was no blueprint of success for them to follow. The rugged terrain and the severe Himalayan weather constantly challenged the mettle of the tea planters.

  By 1866 the number of tea gardens in Darjeeling had grown to thirty-nine, and many of today’s famous gardens—Ambootia, Badamtam, Makaibari, and Singell, to name a few—were established. By 1881 the population had swelled to 95,000, and the tea gardens numbered just over 100. Eventually, trucks began replacing horses as better roads were being carved out of the mountains. More sophisticated processing factories were built, and living facilities for workers were created on the larger tea estates. In the past few years, however, the number of gardens in the seven valleys of the Darjeeling hills has dwindled from eighty-six to a number that hovers around seventy-five due to garden closings and reopenings and other organizational changes. An estimated 42,000 to 50,000 acres are under cultivation, which makes each garden small in comparison to the large gardens situated in less vertical, high-altitude places. Darjeeling’s tea gardens range in elevation from 2,000 to 7,000 feet, and they blanket the hills and valleys in a patchwork of verdant green. Despite the fame and popularity that Darjeeling teas enjoy worldwide, however, the annual output from this region is tiny—about 10 metric tons of tea, only 1 percent of India’s total.

  Kingdom in the sky. Wedged between Nepal and Bhutan, the Darjeeling region lies just south of Sikkim, the northernmost region of western Bengal, which touches on the Tibetan Himalaya. Visitors wend their way up to Darjeeling town (elevation 7,100 feet), where monasteries and nature reserves provide another facet to the history of this magical place. Signs point to winding roads that twist through valleys toward such tea towns as Ghoom, Kurseong, Mirk, Sonada, Sukhiapokhri, Tiger Hill, Tindharia, and Tung. At Tiger Hill (elevation 8,482 feet) visitors can view a spectacular sunrise over the impressive Kanchenjunga, the third-highest peak in the Himalaya, whose name roughly translates into Five Treasures of the Snow. So named for each of its five massive peaks, Kanchenjunga was once believed to be the highest montain on earth, until that claim was dethroned by Mount Everest in 1849. On a clear day, if the weather cooperates, visitors can catch a glimpse of majestic Mount Everest.

  THE DARJEELING PLANTERS ASSOCIATION

  Formed in 1983 by tea garden owners, this association has created a single platform for the development, promotion, and global protection of the name Darjeeling. The finest plucking of Darjeeling tea is sold as 100 percent Darjeeling estate-specific teas, and these usually indicate which seasonal flush the tea is from. Coarser tea from the summer rainy season is plucked and sol
d for use in less-expensive Darjeeling blends. Only teas from gardens within the designated parameters of the Darjeeling region are allowed to legally carry the green circular Darjeeling logo that signifies 100 percent pure Darjeeling tea.

  For example, Castleton Garden, first-flush Darjeeling, is clearly marked as being a Darjeeling from a specific garden and certain time of year. Tea that is marked 100 percent Darjeeling and bears the Darjeeling logo is more specific about its contents than a package that is just marked as pure Darjeeling. It is important to purchase Darjeeling tea that carries the official government-sanctioned tea logo and from retailers that you can trust. There is more worldwide demand each year for Darjeeling tea than there is enough authentic tea produced to fill the orders. In the best of years Darjeeling tea accounts for less than 1 percent all the tea produced in India.

  Because of its many high ridges, deep valleys, and changes in elevation throughout the hills, Darjeeling has a great variation of climate. Winters are long and cold, but the summer months of April through June bring cool breezes and lavish, bright sunshine. Late summer brings quenching monsoon rains. Because of the variations in elevation, Darjeeling has several different types of forest: tropical semievergreen in the foothill regions, tropical moist deciduous forests, subtropical forests, eastern Himalayan wet temperate forests, and high alpine forests. Each of these forests contributes to the diversity of flora and fauna. Most of the arable places on the hills are fully planted with tea gardens. Splendid displays of rhododendrons, orchids, and azaleas add splashes of color to the hills and valleys.