Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v1.c6.s3.t3: Tea Cultivation
Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v1.c6.s3.t3
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Tea Cultivation
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Indigenous tea plants have been growing in the hilly areas of Assam and Northeast India for a very long time. The use of the leaves for brewing and drinking by local people has also been practiced. However, systematic cultivation of tea in India, based on Chinese tea plants and Chinese tea cultivation and processing methods, began in the 19th century. Given the enormous quantities of tea that Britain purchased from China, the British were very keen to find a way to cultivate tea within their own empire. The “discovery” by British botanists that a variety of tea plants was flourishing in Assam, led them to decide on the hills of Assam and north Bengal as a suitable region for beginning the systematic cultivation of tea. During the visit of the British envoy, Lord Macartney to China in 1793, tea plants were smuggled out of China to India but these failed to flourish. Initially, the British East India Company was reluctant to jeopardise its monopoly of trade with China by smuggling out tea plants and trying to undercut its own profitable trade in Chinese tea. However, with the end of the Company’s monopoly in 1833 and faced with financial difficulties in its administration in India, it began to actively encourage the cultivation of tea in India. In 1834, it set up a Tea Committee and sent G. J. Gordon to China for this purpose. Apart from acquiring Chinese tea seeds and tea seedlings, the company’s representatives were charged with recruiting Chinese tea growers and persuading them to go to India. In this venture,
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*Classic of Tea* they faced many difficulties as actual tea-growers in China were reluctant to emigrate. Efforts were then directed to recruiting Chinese labourers from Penang and Singapore, even though many of them were not at all familiar with tea cultivation. A total of about 300 Chinese were sent to Assam to engage in tea cultivation. The first Chinese tea-grower came over to Assam in 1832 and worked in the Chubwa tea estate. The first export of tea to Britain made in India by Chinese cultivators took place in 1838. The Assam Tea Company was formed in 1839. With the invention of airtight Wardian cases, it became possible to transport hundreds of thousands of Chinese tea seedlings by sea to Calcutta via Hong Kong.
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Song Dynasty (Picture of dou cha)
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The British made two innovations to the process of tea cultivation. One was the cultivation on a large scale in huge tea estates. The other was mechanisation of the processing of tea leaves including withering, rolling, breaking, drying and sifting. Together with the introduction of new methods of cultivation and plucking, these enabled the tea industry in India and Ceylon where tea cultivation on similar lines was introduced to forge ahead. The reliance on skilled Chinese tea growers was virtually eliminated by the plantation method of cultivation which could be operated with large numbers of unskilled labour sourced in India itself. From forming 91.4 per cent of tea imports into Britain in 1866-70, the share of Chinese tea exports to Britain steadily decreased to just 4 per cent in 1905 with most of the tea imported into Britain coming from India and Ceylon, instead. By the 1880s, tea planters in India also gradually came around to the view that the indigenous variety of tea plant was more suitable for cultivation than the hybrid tea plant based on Chinese seeds and seedlings that had been used earlier.
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(*Madhavi Thampi*)