DARJEELING - A HISTORY OF THE WORLD'S GREATEST TEA
By Jeff Koehler
Bloomsbury,
304 pages, Rs 699
Long before it acquired the coveted Geographical Indication (GI) tag, Darjeeling and its teas - intertwined as they are - have remained one of India's most recognised symbols. Jeff Koehler's Darjeeling - A History of The World's Greatest Tea contends with the formidable challenge of imparting a fresh twist to popular literature on how Darjeeling Teas came to be what they are.
The introduction, aptly captioned "Two Leaves and a Bud", takes one to the auction room of India's largest and oldest firm of tea brokers and we hurtle through the quaint and enigmatic bidding process. The bid time (usually two to three lots are knocked down per minute) gets magically stretched to capture the nuances and excitement in the auction room, climaxing a Raj-era gavel smacking the table -- all this in the midst of a "crowded room smelling of sweat, tension and humidity as fans whirled overhead". It is almost cinematic and Le-Carresque in its setting. The scene, wonderfully contrasted, then shifts to a 60-year-old Sunder Nagar tea shop and to the up-market Mariage Freres in Paris and the Afternoon Tea Institutions of the great London hotels, capturing the passage of Darjeeling Teas to fame and glory.
The narrative is set against the wider canvas of the origin of tea in China during the Zhou Dynasty, its spread through the Chinese merchants who commissioned the gifted Lu Yu to write the first book on tea - Cha Ching (The Classic of Tea). Mr Koehler is at his best in the chapter "Journey from the East", tracing the passage of tea from China into Europe - through Dutch and Portuguese traders - reaching The Hague and London in the early 1600s and shortly thereafter to the American colonies. His research is rigorous and rich in its sweep of the political economy of the times. The narrative then shifts to opium and tea - a masterly commentary laying bare the strategic objectives of the First Opium War to force open China's ports of trade. Through these turbulent times the East India Company -- engaged so far in purveying opium to a region full of addicts -- began to intensively search for other sources of their national addiction and it found it in tea.
The section on the "Indian Tea industry" is comprehensive and cleverly avoids the pitfalls of a dry narrative. Two parallel paths converge to create the makings of a thriller: the discovery of indigenous tea plants by the Bruce brothers in Upper Assam (Suddea) and the perilous passage of tea plants from China to India, which the book's jacket describes as "one of the most audacious acts of corporate smuggling in history". This is the story of Robert Fortune - a curator at the Chelsea Physic Garden in London and a seemingly unlikely candidate for such high adventure --- who sourced tea plants around China's Yellow Mountain region and Fujian province and had them shipped to Calcutta. India's brush with tea began with the discovery of indigenous tea plants in Assam in the 1820s and expanded through a planned commercial stratagem - by the Tea Committee set up under Lord Bentinck -- to other parts of the country.
Interspersed in this maze of geo-political manoeuvres and skullduggery are delightful interludes of life in Calcutta, the Second City of the Empire and the City of Palaces, and how Darjeeling, home to the Lepchas, came to be. The latter is the saga of a Captain Lloyd who had been dispatched by the East India Company to develop Darjeeling as a sanatorium and a vantage point, and perhaps to keep watch over the Lepchas and Nepalese towards securing firm access to trade with Sikkim and Tibet. But Darjeeling's real story, as Mr Koehler unfolds it, lay with Dr. Archibald Campbell who joined East India Company as an Assistant Surgeon. Hailing from blustery Islay --- known for its smoky and peat-fired whisky --- it was Dr. Campbell who planted tea in the garden at his Darjeeling residence Beachwood in 1841 - with undreamed of consequences. The rest, as they say, is history.
The Chapter "Terroir to Tea-Cups" is a bit of a mish mash. The description of how tea is plucked, processed and tasted is culled from lingering and somewhat self-indulgent interviews with estate owners, planters and tasters. The magical names of Makaibari, Castleton, Jungpana, Lingia, Chamong, Ambootia and Glenburn jostle for space as do the often bewildering descriptors of tea grades -- only to be made light by a local wit describing the FTGFOP as "Far Too Good For Ordinary People"!
The book also dwells in great measure on the micro climate of the Darjeeling tea estates offering its treasure of flora, fauna and insect life only to sound the warning bells of the effects of climate change and the ways in which Darjeeling Tea has gone organic --- not perhaps by choice but compulsion. The elements of bio-dynamic farming resplendent in the Makaibari experience enjoy pride of place. It is fitting that the theme of sustainable agriculture is secure and well in the heart of the Darjeeling tea planters with their refrain "Whatever we do …. it is > about nature".
By Jeff Koehler
Bloomsbury,
304 pages, Rs 699
Long before it acquired the coveted Geographical Indication (GI) tag, Darjeeling and its teas - intertwined as they are - have remained one of India's most recognised symbols. Jeff Koehler's Darjeeling - A History of The World's Greatest Tea contends with the formidable challenge of imparting a fresh twist to popular literature on how Darjeeling Teas came to be what they are.
The introduction, aptly captioned "Two Leaves and a Bud", takes one to the auction room of India's largest and oldest firm of tea brokers and we hurtle through the quaint and enigmatic bidding process. The bid time (usually two to three lots are knocked down per minute) gets magically stretched to capture the nuances and excitement in the auction room, climaxing a Raj-era gavel smacking the table -- all this in the midst of a "crowded room smelling of sweat, tension and humidity as fans whirled overhead". It is almost cinematic and Le-Carresque in its setting. The scene, wonderfully contrasted, then shifts to a 60-year-old Sunder Nagar tea shop and to the up-market Mariage Freres in Paris and the Afternoon Tea Institutions of the great London hotels, capturing the passage of Darjeeling Teas to fame and glory.
The narrative is set against the wider canvas of the origin of tea in China during the Zhou Dynasty, its spread through the Chinese merchants who commissioned the gifted Lu Yu to write the first book on tea - Cha Ching (The Classic of Tea). Mr Koehler is at his best in the chapter "Journey from the East", tracing the passage of tea from China into Europe - through Dutch and Portuguese traders - reaching The Hague and London in the early 1600s and shortly thereafter to the American colonies. His research is rigorous and rich in its sweep of the political economy of the times. The narrative then shifts to opium and tea - a masterly commentary laying bare the strategic objectives of the First Opium War to force open China's ports of trade. Through these turbulent times the East India Company -- engaged so far in purveying opium to a region full of addicts -- began to intensively search for other sources of their national addiction and it found it in tea.
The section on the "Indian Tea industry" is comprehensive and cleverly avoids the pitfalls of a dry narrative. Two parallel paths converge to create the makings of a thriller: the discovery of indigenous tea plants by the Bruce brothers in Upper Assam (Suddea) and the perilous passage of tea plants from China to India, which the book's jacket describes as "one of the most audacious acts of corporate smuggling in history". This is the story of Robert Fortune - a curator at the Chelsea Physic Garden in London and a seemingly unlikely candidate for such high adventure --- who sourced tea plants around China's Yellow Mountain region and Fujian province and had them shipped to Calcutta. India's brush with tea began with the discovery of indigenous tea plants in Assam in the 1820s and expanded through a planned commercial stratagem - by the Tea Committee set up under Lord Bentinck -- to other parts of the country.
Interspersed in this maze of geo-political manoeuvres and skullduggery are delightful interludes of life in Calcutta, the Second City of the Empire and the City of Palaces, and how Darjeeling, home to the Lepchas, came to be. The latter is the saga of a Captain Lloyd who had been dispatched by the East India Company to develop Darjeeling as a sanatorium and a vantage point, and perhaps to keep watch over the Lepchas and Nepalese towards securing firm access to trade with Sikkim and Tibet. But Darjeeling's real story, as Mr Koehler unfolds it, lay with Dr. Archibald Campbell who joined East India Company as an Assistant Surgeon. Hailing from blustery Islay --- known for its smoky and peat-fired whisky --- it was Dr. Campbell who planted tea in the garden at his Darjeeling residence Beachwood in 1841 - with undreamed of consequences. The rest, as they say, is history.
The Chapter "Terroir to Tea-Cups" is a bit of a mish mash. The description of how tea is plucked, processed and tasted is culled from lingering and somewhat self-indulgent interviews with estate owners, planters and tasters. The magical names of Makaibari, Castleton, Jungpana, Lingia, Chamong, Ambootia and Glenburn jostle for space as do the often bewildering descriptors of tea grades -- only to be made light by a local wit describing the FTGFOP as "Far Too Good For Ordinary People"!
The book also dwells in great measure on the micro climate of the Darjeeling tea estates offering its treasure of flora, fauna and insect life only to sound the warning bells of the effects of climate change and the ways in which Darjeeling Tea has gone organic --- not perhaps by choice but compulsion. The elements of bio-dynamic farming resplendent in the Makaibari experience enjoy pride of place. It is fitting that the theme of sustainable agriculture is secure and well in the heart of the Darjeeling tea planters with their refrain "Whatever we do …. it is > about nature".
(The reviewer is Secretary General of the Indian Tea Association)