The Story of Chai — Part I: An Accidental Discovery, a Risky Industrial Espionage

In her essay titled ‘Questions of Consent’, historian Samita Sen describes the tea industry in India as “the most spectacularly successful colonial business enterprise. “In the case of Assam”, she continues, “built upon a highly exploitative and draconian labour regime”.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, tea trade was a Chinese monopoly. It is a well-known fact that the Chinese Empire consumed and traded tea several hundred years before the industrialising societies of the modern West turned tea into a global commodity. The British held the Qing state’s limiting trade policies in great contempt but admired traditional Chinese tea knowledge. Tea drinking in China dates back to the fourth century and spread to Japan around three centuries later, where it became an important part of social life. It also spread to into the near-by regions of Tibet, Burma, and Thailand. In spite of being surrounded by tea consuming countries, tea did not permeate Indian borders until much later.
The first Anglo-Burmese war, which concluded in the late 1820s, resulted in the incorporation of the north-east Indian territory of Assam into the British Empire. In the 1830s, British explorers foraging this new land discovered tea forests growing in the plains of Assam. This discovery presented the British with the opportunity to break the Chinese monopoly and cultivate tea within the Empire. In 1848, industrial spy and botanist Robert Fortune was sent on a trip to the interiors of China to steal secrets of tea horticulture and manufacturing. In what author Sarah Rose calls “nothing short of industrial espionage”, Fortune smuggled tea plants and seeds into India to cross with the ‘wild’ Assamese variety. Meanwhile, in England, resolutions were passed for a public company to be formed to scale up the Assamese tea enterprise. This company was to be called ‘The Assam Company’.
British administrators believed that skilled Chinese workers would be necessary for the incubation of the tea gardens in Assam. Records quote Lord William Bentinck, the Governor-General of India, suggesting that an intelligent agent should go down to Penang and Singapore for obtaining the genuine tea plant and cultivators who shall then be employed to carry on the cultivation under the promise of liberal remuneration. Thus, Chinese cultivators were brought in to ‘tame’ the undomesticated tea forests of Assam.
In 1836, under the supervision of C.A Bruce who played an important role in the discovery of tea in India, the production of tea commenced. The first batch of tea was processed by the newly appointed Chinese workers. Once ready for consumption, this tea was shipped to London via the Indian port of Calcutta. The shipment arrived in London in January 1838 and was declared ‘satisfactory for a first experiment’ by experts. However, the British consumers welcomed ‘Empire tea’ with much gusto. British parliamentary papers from 1839 reveal that this batch of Assam tea was sold for a record breaking 21 to 38 shillings per pound, 20 times the regular price for Chinese tea.
Meanwhile, the situation was not as agreeable back in Assam. Not long into hiring these much sought-after Chinese tea growers, British supervisors found them to be unyielding and uncooperative. “Their contracts were cancelled and the whole gang, with the exception of the most experienced tea-makers and the quietest men, were dismissed” writes H.A Antrobus in his book ‘A History of the Assam Company’. Recruiters turned to indentured domestic labourers known as ‘coolies’ to work on the tea plantation.
You can read about how the coolie work force helped the plantation enterprise grown in my next story.
References:
Sen, S. (2002). Questions of Consent: Women’s Recruitment for Assam Tea Gardens, 1859–1900. Studies in history, 18(2), pp. 231–260.
Mintz, S. W. (1985). Sweetness and power: the place of sugar in modern history.
Sharma, J. (2009). ‘Lazy’ Natives, Coolie Labour, and the Assam Tea Industry. Modern Asian Studies, 43(6), pp. 1287–1324.
Sharma, J. (2009). ‘Lazy’ Natives, Coolie Labour, and the Assam Tea Industry. Modern Asian Studies, 43(6), pp. 1287–1324.
Rose, S. (2009). For All the Tea in China: Espionage, empire and the secret formula for the world’s favourite drink. Random House.
Antrobus, H. A. (1957). A History of the Assam Company, 1839–1953. Priv. Print. by T. & A. Constable.
Smith, Elder (1839). Assam: Sketch of its History, Soil and Productions, with the Discovery of the Tea-Plant, and of the Countries Adjoining Assam.
