For All the Tea in China

by Sarah Rose

  Rarely in company documents is there any record of the voices of the powerless or colonized people with whom the company had dealings. Yet the dispatches from the North-West provinces of India include a copy of this rather remarkable communication from the Chinese tea manufacturers to Jameson listing their demands:1. We were ordered to remain at Almorah [a plantation] on a salary of Rs 33-2 annas per mensem, which we always have obeyed. To remove to any other stations we beg to say that if we get our pay increase of Rs 7 each in addition to that we now get we will go.

  2. As we have been about 7 years in Government employment as no hope held out to us of an increase of pay, we object to go to Dehra and to Porree [other plantations in the western Himalayas]. We have no objection to go any where the Government like to send us, but in the event of our leaving this station, we request for more pay than we at present enjoy.

  3. If on the other hand Government want to send us to any new station without giving us an increase we beg to resign our situation and hope that it will be considered and accepted.

  4. If Government increase our pay Rs 7 per mensem we are working to enter into an agreement of three years to the effect that three of us will serve at [satellite plantations] Dehra, three at Porree, and four at Hawalbaugh and to remain stationary for that period at the above mentioned places.

  Patiently Jameson reiterated to the men that they were already under contract and that this could not now be renegotiated; he showed each of them the original agreement marked with his very own chop, the stamp that stood for his signature. Although they could see their names on paper next to the unintelligible English writing, the tea makers flatly refused to be reassigned to other gardens. Perhaps sensing that Jameson was not the most forceful of authorities, they repeated that they would not be separated from their countrymen and sent alone into the wilds of India. Their position was that they had been hired to work together at a single plantation and that employing them individually on different estates constituted a breach of the agreed-upon terms. If the government could unilaterally amend a deal, so could the manufacturers. They also insisted upon the validity of their complaint that seven years of service was too long a period to go without a raise, and the government ought to have been sympathetic to their circumstances. Finally, after much debate in the absence of a translator, Jameson arrived at a compromise and agreed to amend the contract. He consented to most of the tea experts’ new terms: The men would be assigned in pairs rather than singly, and at higher wages; in exchange they would stay for an extra three years beyond their original contract.

  Jameson was ultimately rebuked for the increased expense to the enterprise. “The Lt Governor considers it necessary to urge upon you the importance of observing the strictest economy in all your proceedings. You must be aware that the success of the experiment will be in a considerable degree tested by its economical results,” wrote the authorities in Calcutta, displeased with the idea that stealing secrets from a sovereign nation also meant overpaying the Chinese minions who implemented them. In fact, the tea manufacturers’ wages were never so high as to be unduly burdensome to the company. The objection to their demands was more a matter of principle in that the Chinese were paid higher-than-market wages, which offended the British sense of fair play (even as the company remained unperturbed by the fact that the British in India were paid substantially better than the Chinese).

  Ironically the original tea manufacturers had not been especially useful to Jameson’s experimental gardens. By everyone’s assessment they were lazy and poor workmen. They taught the natives and malis little about tea’s proper cultivation, processing, packing, or scenting. As Jameson complained, “If the Chinese Tea Manufacturers are left to themselves . . . they would never be particularly interested in instructing natives in the art of making good tea (though they would willingly and readily show the process) nor would they, themselves, pay such attention to its manufacture and packing as is necessary to ensure its good quality.” He cajoled, he insisted, he raged, but he could not get what he needed from the Chinese under his employ. They remained deaf to Jameson’s request, however aggressive and impolitic, for teas of higher quality.

  Yet they were essential to the British plan. Finally, Jameson conceded that a Western overseer was necessary to keep the Chinese experts and Indian gardeners up to the mark. An overseer would increase the cost of the operations, but Jameson could not be everywhere at all times. “To superintend the plucking of leaves, or rather to order the leaves to be pulled when ready, the presence of an European is very necessary [because] if they are allowed to remain too long on the bushes they become hard and are only fitted for making the coarser kind of tea and finally, in transplanting on a large scale the presence of an European overseer is of importance in order to see that it is properly done and also that the plants are regularly watered.”

  Of course, Jameson’s constant watering of the plants contributed to the problem. Fortune’s plants would have been better off left to the regular rains of the monsoons, as the Chinese experts had suggested. But Jameson was by now so frustrated with his Chinese experts that he would not listen to their recommendations—even when those recommendations were right.

  Jameson, thoroughly frustrated by their obstinacy, finally lobbied hard for their replacement—an awkward argument to make, given how much they had already cost the government. “The Chinese manufacturers who were obtained some years since . . . are, in my opinion, far from being first-rate workmen; indeed, I doubt much if any of them learned their trade in China. They ought to be gradually got rid of and their places supplied by better men, for it is a great pity to teach the natives an inferior method of manipulation.” Ultimately the government heartily agreed, noting that none of the original Chinese tea makers was “first rate.”

  In the chilly February air the emigrating tea experts stood on deck and faced the Chinese mainland, watching it slip farther and farther away.

  “The boat was immediately pushed out into the stream. Now the emigrants on board, and their friends on shore, with clasped hands, bowed to each other many, many times and the good wishes for each other’s health and happiness were not new, nor apparently insincere. Next morning the Island Queen, Captain McFarlane, got under way, and we bade adieu to the North of China.”

  By Fortune’s count, 12,838 tea seeds were germinating en route to the Himalayas.

  16

  Himalayan Mountains, May 1851

  Behind a bungalow in mountainous Darjeeling, rosy-faced children were playing on a hillside, their laughter echoing off the steep slopes. White magnolias flourished their cupped blooms toward the sky, and rhododendrons glowed scarlet on every rock face; there is nowhere on earth with more floral abundance to herald the spring. The children’s father, a Scottish surgeon-major by the name of Archibald Campbell, bent down, trowel in hand, beside malis to dig a new home for some seeds and seedlings recently sent to the eastern Himalayas from the company’s gardens at Saharanpur. In keeping with the ad hoc administrative style of the government in India, Campbell was the one man given the task of administering, planning, overseeing, building, policing, planting, and dreaming up the newest addition to the Indian empire: the mountain town of Darjeeling, which was home to twenty British families. If Robert Fortune can be said to be the father of Himalayan tea, then Archibald Campbell was its guardian.

  The Darjeeling hill station was a real-life Shangri-La, charming and green, picturesque and pleasant. The Himalayas do not resemble Chinese mountains; there are no elegant karsts shrouded in wispy cloud but, instead, a line of enormous, rough-hewn, craggy peaks. Darjeeling is an island of beauty set in this landscape that is remarkable for the sheer diversity of its flora. Just below the rugged crests, streaked with snow and crowned with firs, are lush tropical valleys. Orchids grow on palms just under the snow line, while temperate hardwoods such as oak and birch mingle with jungle fruits such as bananas and figs. Drier than the western Himalayas, at nearly 7,000 feet above sea level, and shaded from
the afternoon heat by mountains and mist, Darjeeling was a welcoming new home for Fortune’s black tea.

  Bordered by other small mountainous kingdoms—Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim—the isolated mountain paradise had been only recently added to the growing mass of British India. Darjeeling’s warring neighbors had passed the little district back and forth for generations until, in 1836, the rajah of Sikkim granted it to the British government as a token of friendship and fealty. Darjeeling was a concession or, more accurately, a bribe to the East India company: The rajah believed that if Britain ruled Darjeeling, it would not try to annex the greater kingdom of Sikkim in its quest to conquer China from the West. (Sikkim did in fact remain a semi-independent state until it joined India in 1975.) The company paid rent, or tribute, on the territory of Darjeeling for some years, until Campbell accidentally and providentially ended the arrangement.

  Campbell was among the world’s leading experts on all things Himalayan. In his service to the company he had learned the mountain people’s language, published articles on their customs, and had carefully recorded all key statistics for the region: its geography, zoology, ethnography, and, of course, local agriculture. He was as avid a hunter and herbalist as he was a student of Ghurka and Lepcha rituals. Educated in Scotland, like so many in the Indian medical service, Campbell had been laid low several times by illness and so was put in charge of the company’s government in Darjeeling. He was among the many enthusiasts who helped collect and catalog the opulence of the Himalayas for the professional botanists at Calcutta and Kew.

  Quiet and unobtrusive is how people remembered Campbell. He was a perfect functionary, a good, solid company man, and he had the distinction of being among the first imperialists arrested for botanical theft. Although Fortune was in genuine danger in China, he survived his spying trips largely unmolested by those from whom he stole. Campbell, on the other hand, had only recently been released from a Himalayan prison for his botanical crimes.

  While prospecting in the mountains for plants with the botanical eminence Joseph Hooker, son of the director of Kew and close friend to Charles Darwin, Campbell was arrested by the rajah of Sikkim in 1849. On an impulse he had followed Hooker to reach “the Snows” of the Tibetan plateau on a botanizing trip. Campbell had initially remained behind when Hooker departed, worried that prospecting in Sikkim would jeopardize his dearly desired promotion to resident to the Court of Nepal, but he ultimately decided that he could not forgo an expedition that was “the kind of opportunity for which you would give gold.” He caught up with Hooker five months into his journey and surprised him one night in camp. His was the first “white face” Hooker had seen in months, and they reunited with “unspeakable joy.” Campbell was a mine of information for the young naturalist; he shared a wealth of local botanical and geographical knowledge and provided Hooker with coolies, guides, and supplies. Mrs. Campbell had sent along plum puddings, mince pies, and English sherry to remind the men of home’s comforts. But at the Chola Pass, in the eastern Himalayas, they were captured. Campbell was “seized, bound, treated with brutal violence, and called upon, at the risk of his life, to put his signature to whatever might be dictated to him.” They heard rumors that their execution was under discussion at the Durbar, the Sikkimese court. Even their Lepcha porters were harassed and “barbarously treated.” When news of their arrest reached Calcutta, European “outrage” was tempered by government anxiety. The company, stretched to the breaking point with border wars in the Punjab and Afghanistan, warned against taking “extreme measures” to secure their release. Troops were dispatched to Darjeeling in a display of company force, although the government had no intention of deploying them.

  Finally, after six weeks of confinement, Campbell and Hooker were released. Sikkim was rebuked: The rajah’s allowance for the annexation of Darjeeling was canceled, and he forfeited a section of Sikkim’s southern territory. Hooker thought the punishment hardly fit the seriousness of the crime; he wanted a further show of strength from the company in the form of total annexation of Sikkim, but Campbell was happy to be restored to his family.

  The two men remained friends for the rest of their lives. Campbell used the botanical trip to the high Himalayan plateau to his advantage, saying he “had gained that knowledge of its resources which the British Government should all along have possessed as the protector of the Rajah and his territories.” In a characteristic display of administrative perversity, Campbell was made British Resident of the territory in which he had all too recently been imprisoned.

  Comfortable in a carriage in which he was protected from the dust of the high Gangetic Plain, Fortune traveled to the government plantations in the western Himalayas. Having set sail in February, he had arrived in Calcutta on the fifteenth of March, spending a few weeks with Falconer and his Ward’s cases, marveling at the state of his tea seeds. “The whole mass of seeds, from the bottom to the top, was swelling, and germination had just commenced.” In late April, Fortune met Jameson at the Saharanpur gardens and was able to inspect the small tea settlements scattered around the hills and valleys. Most of these gardens were not yet two years old, and all had been planted with Fortune’s seeds and seedlings.

  The encounter was frosty, for although the superintendent was overjoyed at the eventual success of Fortune’s tea, the tea hunter himself surveyed Jameson’s gardens and found them wanting. The plants looked mangy and badly tended, and were showing poorly per acre.

  The two men sat down in Jameson’s bungalow, where Fortune was forthright about his views of the enterprise, indicating what he would write in his report to the company and to the government in Calcutta. He praised the scheme of leasing the tea lands to the local zamindars (which translates roughly as “caretakers” but refers instead to a kind of sharecropper). As rich as the mountain soil was, it would otherwise have been left fallow had Jameson not been so dedicated to promoting the zamindar scheme. It pleased Fortune to see that the Indian natives took so readily to tea growing. “I am happy to add that amongst these hills there are no foolish prejudices in the minds of the natives against the cultivation of tea,” he told Jameson and the company. He also related a story about a zamindar approaching him directly to beg two thousand tea plants from him so that the man could begin growing tea immediately. “It is of great importance that the authorities of a district and persons of influence should show an interest in a subject of this kind. At present the natives do not know its value but they are as docile as children and will enter willingly upon tea cultivation providing the ‘sahib’ shows that he is interested in it. In a few years the profits received will be a sufficient inducement.”

  His was not a popularly held opinion, however, for many of the company men in the Himalayas balked at the zamindar arrangements and at any attempts to educate the natives so they would become practiced horticulturalists. “I regret that it should have been deemed necessary to make stupid pedants of Hindu malees [malis] by providing them with a classical nomenclature for plants. Hindostanee names would have answered the purpose just as well. . . . If these names are unpronounceable even by Europeans, what would the poor Hindu malee make of them? The pedantry of some of our scientific Botanists is something marvellous. One would think that a love of flowers must produce or imply a taste for simplicity and nature in all things,” wrote a contemporary with scorn.

  But beyond his approval of the zamindar scheme, Fortune had some severe words for the gardening decisions of Superintendent Jameson. In particular Fortune took him to task for irrigating tea. Fortune had never once, in three years’ traveling in China, seen tea under flood irrigation, and his tea manufacturers said the method was used only for rice. Although tea cultivation was practiced with slight variations from region to region in China, no farmer there would dream of using such a procedure. The heavy rains that come with India’s monsoons and the runoff from the annual glacial melt are sufficient to water mountain tea. In every experimental garden Fortune visited where there was tea growing in a
valley, it was rotting. At least a third, and as much as half, of his early crops were lost to failed experiments in irrigation.

  Fortune’s report to the company on this misjudgment was emphatic:I have already observed that good tea-land is naturally moist, although not stagnant; and we must bear in mind that the tea shrub is NOT A WATER PLANT, but is found in a wild state on the sides of hills. In confirmation of these views, it is only necessary to observe further that all the BEST HIMALAYAN PLANTATIONS ARE THOSE TO WHICH IRRIGATION HAS BEEN MOST SPARINGLY APPLIED.

  Indeed I have no hesitation in saying that in nine cases out of ten, the effects of irrigation are most injurious. When tea will not grow without irrigation, it is a sure sign that the land employed is not suitable for such a crop.

  Fortune’s last shipment of Wardian cases had arrived in Saharanpur in stupendous shape. He counted no fewer than 12,838 living plants when he opened his cases, and many more seeds were germinating—too many to count. To Fortune, the plants seemed as “green and vigorous” as if they had never left their home ground. It was crucial that his last shipment, the crowning achievement of his time in China, not be lost to bad gardening and Jameson’s faulty decision making.

  Tea proved to be so suited to the Himalayas, however, that even the eighty surviving plants from Fortune’s earliest shipment were now thriving. As Jameson and Fortune sat down to discuss the evaluation, those precious plants imported in the first season were about 4 feet high and “profusely covered with blossoms.” They had taken well to their new ground and were yielding a good return of seeds, if not a high volume of tea shoots. They had produced several thousand offspring, Jameson reported.