The History of Darjeeling Tea: From Campbell’s Seeds to the GI Tag

When Campbell planted his seeds, he found about 25 families living on the ridge. As the land was parceled out, about 40% of each lot was cleared for tea and the rest left as forest.

Getting tea out of the hills was the next problem. The first road up from the plains, the Pankhabari road laid out by Lieutenant Napier, was replaced by a cart road in 1861, two decades before the toy train.

Some of the oldest gardens still trade on those years. Puttabong traces its start to 1852 “under the stewardship of Dr. Archibald Campbell.” Namring was founded in 1855 with “high quality Chinese tea bushes grown from seeds,” and Badamtam was first planted in 1858.

The growth was fast. By 1866 there were 39 gardens making 21,000 kg of tea; four years later there were 56 gardens and 71,000 kg. Contractors such as Dakman Rai brought in thousands of Nepali workers, paid in seed, and Rai himself set up the Soureni (1878), Phuguri (1880) and Sampripani (1883) gardens.

Families stayed for generations. Arun Kumar Gomden, the veteran Darjeeling tea maker and master taster, is the fourth generation of his family in tea. His great-grandfather came from Nepal in the late 1870s as a labor contractor for the British planters and rose to the coveted post of Tea Maker Sardar. “In my family, there is a little joke,” Gomden told us: “there is more tea in our body than blood.”

Faith came with them. Most of Jungpana’s workers are Nepali Hindus, and a small Hanuman temple stands at the top of the garden’s “1,300-foot climb, up some 600 steps” to the factory. Missionaries left their mark too: German families founded Steinthal, still known informally as the “priest’s tea garden,” as well as Risheehat, Goomba and Tumsong.

The planters mechanized early. W. O’Brien Ansell brought power rollers and sorting machines to the factories and laid electric cables to run them. The toy train, from 1881, took the finished tea down to the plains.

Independence changed who owned the gardens rather than how they worked. A few British planters, such as C.W. Emmett and T.J. Hardingham, stayed on after 1947. Over the following decades the estates passed to Indian families and companies:

• Namring: bought from Lord Inchcape in 1973 by the grandfather of Prateek Poddar, who runs it today.
• Goomtee: held by Henry Lennox from 1899 and by G.W. O’Brien until the Second World War, then by the royal family of Nepal, before passing to the Kejriwal family and Mahabir Prasad by the mid-1950s.
• Glenburn: owned for years by a large company with 52 estates, which sent a new manager every three years, until the Prakash family bought it; they spent their first night there on New Year’s Day 2001.

The story of the gardens themselves, from Castleton to Makaibari, is in Famous tea estates of India and in Darjeeling tea estates; the wider story is in The history of tea.

Gomden joined Singbulli in 1968 and moved to Thurbo in 1976. In spring 1979 he made a batch of 101 kg from buds with silver hairs, which took about a month “because a worker could only pluck about 100 g in a day.” At auction it sold for Rs 370, a world record at a time “when the best teas would fetch only about Rs. 100.”

In 1984 he was sent to Castleton as senior assistant and put in charge of building its new Springside factory. The muscatel he made there set new auction records, and the tea went on to be savored by Japan’s former Emperor Hirohito. The word itself, and the jassids and bushes behind it, are in Darjeeling muscatel tea.

Falling output

Today about 87 registered gardens produce roughly 7 million kg a year, down from 14 million kg in 1947. Margaret’s Hope, one of the best known, makes only about 230,000 kg of it.

The money is concentrated in a few months. “The central problem is that the entire year’s profitability depends on a small percentage of the production, produced between March and June every year,” Ashok Kumar, who owns Goomtee, told us in 2015. Prateek Poddar of Namring added: “The mistake we have always made is to put all our eggs in one basket. We focused on a single market, whether it was Russia or Germany.” Our 2018 market note puts the first flush at about 20% of the crop but about 40% of the revenue.

The lost summer of 2017

The Gorkhaland agitation of 2017 shut the gardens from mid-June to the end of September and wiped out the second flush; the plantations had made only around 20% of their summer teas before the halt. The demand for statehood is more than 100 years old, and the agitation of 1986 had been the worst until then. When work resumed, most gardens went into early skiffing, because the untended bushes had overgrown.

The lockdown spring of 2020

The pandemic lockdown came at the time of the most prized harvest of the year. Darjeeling lost about 0.8 million kg of prime spring flush tea, and when work restarted for the second flush, estates were allowed only 25 to 50% of their workforce.

What comes next

The quality is still there. In 2022 our founder found Darjeeling’s output excellent, with “excellent Moonlights and decadent spring teas,” but warned of a “dire need for upkeep of the gardens with proper pruning or skiffing.” Our buying team has also noted that the “new generation among plantation family itself doesn’t want to get into the business.”