The History of Kangra Tea: Rise, Fall and Revival

Dr William Jameson, superintendent of the botanical gardens of the North West Provinces, surveyed Kangra and judged the lower Dhauladhar slopes right for tea. Tea 101 dates his visit to 1849. “A feasibility survey was conducted and in 1848 the area was declared suitable for tea plantations,” our founder wrote in his own account of the valley.

Commercial planting began in 1852, twelve years after the first plantings in Darjeeling, as Tea 101 and Frank Miller both count it, with the first estate at Holta, near Palampur. The bushes were of China origin: “most of the seedlings were pure China jat, Camellia sinensis var. sinensis,” Miller wrote. By 1892 more than 9,000 acres were under tea.

The 1850s to 1900s: a promising start

For about 50 years the industry grew at a brisk pace, and Kangra became one of the leading tea regions of British India. The tea earned a remarkable name. In 1883 the Gazetteer of the Kangra District called it “probably superior to that produced in any other part of India,” and Kangra teas won a gold medal in London in 1886 and a silver in Amsterdam in 1895.

Most of the handmade, orthodox green tea went west, through the market towns of Pathankot and Amritsar, to Afghanistan and the Middle East, though it was known and liked in Europe too. Green tea suited both the China bushes and those buyers, and it set the style the valley would fall back on after 1905.

At about 6 in the morning of 4 April 1905, one of the great Himalayan earthquakes struck the valley. Frank Miller gives its magnitude as 7.6 to 8.0 and calls it “India’s worst earthquake ever.” It leveled villages, temples, forts and tea factories and killed about 20,000 people.

Many British planters sold their gardens to local buyers and left. Capital and labor to rebuild were scarce, and repairs were slow: “Garden productivity plummeted. Production languished.” The Kolkata auctions were some 2,000 km away, and the world’s taste was moving toward black and CTC teas, never Kangra’s strength. Darjeeling, Assam and the Nilgiris pulled far ahead. (CTC is explained in Orthodox vs CTC tea.)

Each of those problems fed the next. Without working factories the gardens could not make black tea for the auctions, and without auction sales there was no money to rebuild the factories. Miller, writing 110 years later, called it “an almost mortal blow,” a shock “from which it has not yet fully recovered.”

The Dharmsala Tea Company, founded in 1882 when Gurdayal Singh Mann bought his first estates, is one of the companies that came through. It is still run by the Mann family, now in its sixth generation, and its estate bungalow, built before the earthquake and restored after it, still stands.

“For 135 years now, the company and these estates have been a part of the Mann family,” the company told us in 2017, which it believes makes it one of the few estates in India to have stayed with a single owner for so long. Its factory, which also dates from 1882, had by then become an ISO and HACCP-certified factory making black, green, oolong and white teas.

That long run of green tea is why Kangra was, “for the longest period,” the main supplier of green tea to Central and West Asia and Russia. What those greens taste like is on our Kangra tea types page.

The 1960s: a new start

The 1960s changed the valley. In 1960 the Dalai Lama moved from Mussoorie to Dharamsala and established a “little Tibet” there, putting the district on the world map. In 1964 a tea auction center opened at Amritsar for the small growers of northwest India, represented by the Kangra Tea Planters Supply & Marketing Co-operative, and later in the decade Kangra moved from Punjab into Himachal Pradesh.

By the late 1960s the state government was offering cooperative factories, loans to old gardens, farm extension, tea research, bush replacement schemes and laws to stop old tea estates being turned to other uses. “These programs, it has to be said, were not as successful as they might have been,” Miller wrote.

With state help, four cooperative factories opened at Palampur, Bir, Sidhbari and Baijnath between 1964 and 1983, so that small growers without a factory of their own could process their leaf. Running costs proved too high, and by 2004 only Palampur was still working.

The Tea Board and a new generation

The Tea Board of India then stepped in, training and funding small growers and inviting larger planters to invest. Old cooperative factories were leased to private operators, and a new generation of owners arrived, some with decades of experience in Darjeeling. Research centers sponsored by the Government of India and the Himachal Pradesh Department of Agriculture also began to work on the local tea industry. In 2005 Kangra tea was registered as a Geographical Indication; see Does Kangra tea have a GI tag?

By 2010, the average auction price of Kangra tea (Rs 109 a kilo, about $2.40 at the time) had edged above the all-India average (Rs 104), a sign that buyers were taking it seriously again. It was still below the north India average of Rs 119. Anirudh Suri of the Dharmsala Tea Company told us in 2017 that building ties with buyers, blenders and tea writers abroad had taken years: “Thankfully, it’s starting to pay off.”

Kangra (regions clip)Teabox Masterclass · Short

For the wider story, see The history of tea.