Tea (20 page)

Camellia sinensis
var.
sinensis
grows only
5
.
7
meters (
17
feet) high, although it, too, is kept pruned to a height of a little over one meter (three to four feet) in cultivation. It prefers the cool temperatures of high elevations between two and six thousand feet, has narrow, small leaves, and grows slowly. It is a hardy, long-lived plant that can last a century or more. It takes approximately twice as many harvested China variety leaves to equal the weight of the larger-leafed assam variety.

Although the Bruce brothers and others tried to grow both varieties in their region of India, not surprisingly, the assam variety proved to grow much better than the varieties indigenous to high elevations in China. In the future, however, the Chinese variety would prove to do exceedingly well in the mountain region of Darjeeling.

When the East India Company lost the monopoly on trade to China in
1834
, their interest in growing tea in India escalated quickly. One of the employees of the company, George James Gordon, was sent to China to collect plants and seeds, and to find experts to teach the British plantation owners how to grow and process tea. This latter assignment was not an easy one, for China guarded its tea secrets obsessively. Gordon did manage to purchase three batches of tea seed, but was not allowed to be present when these were collected, packaged, and shipped. When they were unpacked in India, the quality of the plants and seeds was so inferior, or they had been packed so poorly, that nothing had survived.

In spite of the challenges presented by growing tea in India, Charles Bruce painted such a rosy picture of the possibilities in his letters that many people in London became extremely interested in the idea. A group of investors banded together to form The Assam Company in
1839
.

Charles Bruce tried growing both tea varieties in many different ways on his plantations and searched continually for better information and expertise. It took him several years to cultivate the shrubs and actually process tea, but by
1840
, Bruce had produced five thousand pounds of tea.

In trying to convince businessmen to invest in the Assam Company, Bruce pointed out that labor in India was cheap and that the “peaceful habits of the Assamese” made them particularly well suited to the work of growing and processing tea. He also mentioned, however, that relations with labor might be difficult, a casual remark that was to prove a monumental understatement. In spite of the warning about labor problems, his report fired such enthusiasm in England that many new investors joined the ranks of the Assam Company.

How to Grow It?

The Chinese government strictly prohibited Chinese citizens from divulging information about growing or processing tea. Anyone who offered information about tea or who sold tea plants or seeds to foreigners was severely punished. In spite of this, the British were successful in convincing or bribing a few Chinese tea masters to come to India—but with questionable results. These men were probably not true tea masters and proved to know little about growing and processing tea. They were also very uncooperative in working with the British in India.

Ignorance about how to grow and process tea was just the first of many problems on the tea plantations in India. The heat and humidity in Assam were almost unbearable for the workers. Mosquitoes and the diseases they caused, including malaria, were widespread. Many of the British planters not only mistreated workers, making them work long hours with insufficient amounts of food and water, but also proved to be dishonest and corrupt, absconding with company funds.

The directors of the Assam Company in England received little information about what was actually happening at the plantations in India. Plantation owners kept sending back optimistic reports, and the Assam Company directors kept sending more money.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, massive amounts of money had been poured into the project, even though there was little information about how the funds were being spent. All anyone knew for sure was that, for many years, the British tea venture in India had shown little profit.

But the lure of great profits seemed to make everything worthwhile. The directors of the British East India Company knew that, potentially, there were fortunes to be made in Indian tea, which certainly proved to be true. They determined that the key lay in learning more about how to grow the plants and how to process the tea. To this end, in
1848
, the company hired the British botanist and plant hunter Robert Fortune (
1812
–
1880
) to go to China and find robust plants and accurate information.

Robert Fortune

Robert Fortune's first gardening job was working in the Edinburgh Royal Botanic Gardens, a position that left him with a lifelong fascination with plants. He first went to China to collect plants as an agent of the Royal Horticultural Society, in
1843
, shortly after the Treaty of Nanking had been signed and many ports in China were opened to the West for the first time. Fortune left Britain aboard the ship
Emu
, arrived in Hong Kong four months later, and immediately sailed to Amoy. Arriving in early September, he found the town itself filthy and left quickly to go inland looking for plants.

Fortune apparently attracted a great deal of attention as he traveled the country. His journals from this time say that he was often surrounded by a couple of hundred curious locals, who wanted to know what he was looking for. At the end of September, he endured a harrowing sailing trip to Chusan, an island off the eastern coast of China, having heard that there were many new species of plant life there. In spite of almost losing his life on numerous occasions due to shipwrecks, bandits, and disease, he considered this leg of the journey well worth the risk because of the rich diversity of plants he found. He collected and brought back many plants that were new to the West, including what is now known as the Chusan palm.

It was on this initial trip to China that Fortune saw tea growing for the first time. As he studied the tea plants and the procedure of withering and drying the leaves, he became the first Westerner to realize that green and black tea come from the same plants, despite their very different tastes. As Fortune discovered, the variations are due to the process, not the plant. Green tea is unoxidized, while black tea is produced by oxidizing the leaves.

In June
1844
, Fortune decided to travel to the forbidden city of Soochow (now spelled Suzhou), which was still closed to Westerners. This necessitated his traveling in disguise. By this point, he had become proficient in Mandarin, and by shaving his head except for a pigtail and adopting Chinese dress, he was able to pass himself off as a Chinese merchant. It's said that his disguise was so good that his British friends took some time to recognize him, when he returned to Shanghai. Fortune not only collected plants on all of his adventures, he also kept careful notes on the soils and climate, and paid particular attention to how tea was planted, harvested, and processed.

In August
1848
, he made his second journey to China, sent this time by the East India Company. His goal was to find the best possible tea plants and seeds for transplanting and planting in India. He managed to collect and send twenty thousand tea plants to India, using four different ships to minimize the danger of losing all the plants to one possible catastrophe. Because he did not know whether or not the tea seeds would stay viable throughout a long journey, Fortune used the newly invented Wardian cases to germinate the seeds en route. The Wardian case, the invention of Dr. Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, a London physician and amateur botanist, was a miniature glass greenhouse, much like a terrarium. It allowed plant explorers to immediately plant seeds they had collected, then return to their home ports with small plants, rather than bags of seeds that might not have survived many months or even years at sea.

Fortune was also able to hire eight Chinese tea experts to travel with him and to purchase implements and materials needed for processing the tea. The East India Company was ecstatic with his successful forays into China, and, on the basis of what he had learned in China, Robert Fortune was able to help tea production in India increase quickly and dramatically. Profits soon improved, and the Assam Company was able to pay its first dividend in
1853
.

Robert Fortune went back to China between
1853
and
1856
, sponsored this time by the United States government, which wanted to establish its own tea industry. The scheme was eventually abandoned, however, as a result of the onset of the American Civil War.

By
1862
, two million pounds of tea were produced in India. In
1866
, the amount had grown to six million pounds,
although
90
percent of the tea imported to England during this year was still from China. Although a great deal of tea was being produced in India, the production was very expensive, and the tea itself was of inferior quality. The banks and businessmen who had invested so heavily in Indian tea began recalling their loans, resulting in the— temporary—collapse of the Indian tea market in the late
1860
s. After a few years, the tea industry was able to reorganize, and the result was increased production and better-quality tea, particularly from the Assam region. Eventually, Indian tea was sold more cheaply than that imported from China. In
1888
, eighty-six million pounds of tea were produced in India, and imports from India finally surpassed those from China.