Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Posted by 醉茶生 at 08:54 AM | Comments (0) | Permalink
Categories: Tea Related

In 1833, the British East India Company lost its monopoly of the tea trade. As tea made up the bulk of the Company’s revenues, this incited panic in London.

Charles Bruce, an employee of the Company, was despatched to China entrusted with the mission of retrieving 80,000 tea seeds (Camellia sinensis). This was not an easy task as China guarded its cultivation of tea jealously, and the Ch’ing Dynasty government exacted severe penalties on those attempting to export tea seeds or plants out of China, ferociously pursuing any ships attempting to smuggle out seeds or plants. Nevertheless, Bruce’s mission was successful, and the seeds were planted in the Botanical Gardens in Calcutta. The seedlings were transported 1000 miles to Assam, where it was thought the climate was suitable for making tea. Dozens of Chinese merchants and laborers were recruited from Calcutta by the Company to act as “advisors”, despite the fact that most of them had never seen a live tea plant before in their lives, and had no more idea of how tea was made than the employees of the Company.

The experiment was a failure. The Chinese seedlings died in the hot Indian climate, but instead, a native variety, Camellia assamica, thrived (first identified by Bruce in 1823). The first twelve chests of Indian tea were received in London in 1838 and declared a resounding success, and tea plantations were subsequently established in Darjeeling, Nilgiri and Ceylon. In 1853, India exported 183 tonnes of tea, and by 1885, this had grown to 35,274 tonnes. Today, India is one of the world’s largest exporter of tea, producing 850,000 tonnes annually, coming second only to China’s 855,000 tonnes.

In addition to the creation of Indian tea, the British East India Company may also be blamed for the invention of the CTC or “crush-tear-curl” process, which is a means of breaking up the huge bulk of larger, older (and less valuable) leaves harvested during the Indian Monsoon. This led to the use of larger, tougher, more bitter, more stringent leaves that would never be used for making Chinese tea, and accounts for the fragmented appearance of most Indian tea leaves. The unpleasant taste of CTC tea is primarily responsible for the necessity for adding milk and sugar to most Indian tea before it is drinkable. Today, largely because of the British, India has the unique distinction of producing both some of the finest tea in the world (as represented by first flush Darjeeling) and some of the worst. Unfortunately, CTC tea represents the bulk of Indian tea exported today.

The interested reader is referred to the more complete account given by Lizzie Collingham in Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors (2007), published by the Oxford University Press, ISBN 0195172418.

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