Tea Comes to India

Tea already grew in India. In 1823 the British trader Robert Bruce was shown a tea plant in Assam, in India’s northeast, which the local Singpho people brewed. Samples reached Calcutta, where the botanist Nathaniel Wallich at first did not accept it as the same plant as China’s tea; it was later recognized as the same species.

The East India Company set up a Tea Committee in the 1830s to develop tea growing in India. In 1838 the first chests of Assam tea were sent to London, where they were auctioned in January 1839. By 1840 the Assam Company had been formed to grow tea commercially.

Britain also turned to China for plants and expertise. In the late 1840s the Company sent the botanist Robert Fortune into China’s tea districts. Often disguised in Chinese dress, he gathered tea plants and seeds and engaged skilled Chinese tea makers to work in India. He shipped thousands of plants and seedlings to the Company’s gardens in the Himalayas, including Darjeeling.

Indian tea grew quickly. By the late 1880s Britain was importing more tea from India than from China.

The plantations needed workers from outside Assam. From the 1860s, recruiters brought laborers from other parts of India, often through misrepresentation or force. Their contracts were enforced by criminal law: a worker who broke one could be fined or imprisoned. Mortality was severe. Of some 85,000 laborers brought to Assam between 1863 and 1866, more than 30,000 had died by 1866.