The History of Nilgiri Tea: From the Ketti Valley to Mincing Lane

Most of what follows comes from our 2016 history of the region by Nina Varghese, who grew up in the Nilgiris and whose grandfather came to a tea estate there in 1914 as an Indian assistant.

The Italian Jesuit Giacomo Fenicio wrote to his superiors of “barren mountains and valleys without a fruit tree or wild tree except in certain damp places,” in a letter now in the British Museum. He was describing the shola forests and grasslands of the plateau. Between 1804 and 1818, a few Englishmen climbed up and reported “the existence of a tableland with European climate.”

The climb was hard. In 1819, John Sullivan led an army party up the steep slopes of the “Neilgherries,” and it took six days and six deaths to reach the Kotagiri plateau. He was so taken with the cool air, the streams, the grasslands and the sholas that he built himself a house there the next year.

The hills were not empty. Sullivan found them home to the Todas, pastoral people living in hamlets called munds; the Badagas, farmers and the largest community; the Kotas, potters, smiths and musicians; and the Kurumbas and Irulas. After his petition to make the hills a sanatorium for English troops, the next ten years saw a large number of British move up.

Christie and the Ketti farm

The first story, which our 2016 history calls apocryphal, is of Dr. Christie, an assistant surgeon from Madras on special duty in the hills. He noticed camellia shrubs growing near Coonoor that closely resembled the tea bush, applied for land to plant tea and ordered seed from China, but died before it arrived.

Two years later, the Governor General, Lord William Bentinck, set up the Tea Commission and sent it to China for seed and tea makers. That seed went to the Ketti farm, which failed and closed in 1836. Its mansion was leased to the Marquis de Saint-Simon, governor of the French colonies in India, and is now the women’s hostel of the CSI College of Engineering, Ketti.

Perrottet, Sullivan and Mann

Saint-Simon’s botanist, Georges Perrottet, found the nine surviving plants at Ketti and published an account of their recovery in the Asiatic Journal, which drew a lot of attention. In 1840 John Sullivan sent the first tea from Ketti and Billikal to the Madras Agri-Horticultural Society.

Henry Mann went further, ordering better seed from China for his Coonoor Tea Estate. His tea was well reviewed at the London auction in 1856, but he was refused more forest land and gave up. Around the same time, Rae planted Dunsandle near Sholur, at over 1,828.8 meters; it is now owned by the Bombay Burmah Trading Company.

Left to “work out their own salvation”

The government gave the planters little help. When Dr. Cleghorn, the Conservator of Forests, asked for a trained Chinese tea maker, the Governor of Madras, Sir Charles Trevelyan, refused, feeling the planters were being spoon-fed. A later governor, Sir William Denison, did send for tea makers from the North-West Provinces, but by and large the planters were left to “work out their own salvation.” Many of the early estates still keep their old China bushes, more for the interest of botanists and tea historians.

Did the Chinese prisoners teach the planters to make tea? It is a popular story, and our own posts have told it, but the tea historian Sir Percival Griffiths called it “an improbable legend,” and nobody knows whether the prisoners had any tea skills at all. What is certain is that they worked the estates: Thiashola still has a field called Jail Thottam, the jail garden. Our founder retold the whole tale himself: “How an Italian priest, French Botanist & Chinese prisoners came together that led to the beautiful teas of the Blue Mountains!”

Who the prisoners were

They came between 1856 and 1860, after the Second Opium War, and from the Straits Settlements of Singapore, Malacca, Dinding and Penang. They were sent up because the Madras jails were overcrowded and, once found to be good workers, put on the new tea and cinchona plantations and building sites. Our 2016 story calls them “most probably sailors or pirates,” who would hardly have known tea growing, which was then a closely guarded Chinese secret.

Some were housed at Thiashola, “mother of the forests,” when tea planting began there in 1859, and anecdotal evidence says they planted it. A Miss Cockburn, daughter of the Collector of Salem, also used Chinese labor to plant tea near Kotagiri.

Escapes and a new life

In 1868 seven prisoners escaped from sheds at Lovedale and were caught, and in July 1869 twelve escaped again; a police party sent after them was found killed. The largest camp was at Naduvattam, where W. G. McIvor, the former Kew gardener who ran the Ooty Botanical Gardens from 1848, wanted convicts for his cinchona plantation; 566 arrived in 1866. The old jail is now a museum. After their sentences, many Chinese settled there, married local women and farmed coffee, vegetables and dairy. The full story is in Prisoners’ tales from the Nilgiris.

Coffee came first. Dawson planted the first coffee on the plateau in 1838, followed by Cockburn and others, on both the western and eastern slopes. Then blight hit “sometime between 1869 and 1880,” and most of the coffee, especially on the western slopes, was uprooted and planted with tea.

• Bugs: In the early 1900s the green bug wiped out coffee grown without shade. In 1898 an amateur entomologist, H. O. Newport, released Australian ladybirds against mealy bugs, “perhaps the first natural enemy deliberately introduced into India.”
• Gold: In the Nilgiri-Wynad gold rush of 1879 to 1882, planters uprooted coffee to dig for gold; the shafts were later filled in and planted with tea.
• Cash every week: Tea gave growers an income every week, against coffee’s single yearly harvest.

All three are told in our 2016 story on the region. Coffee came first, though, and how blight, bugs and gold fever turned the hills over to tea is told in When King Coffee Bowed Out to Tea.

Many of the early Nilgiri planters had already lived through coffee blight in Ceylon, and brought that experience with them, along with Ceylonese carpenters and masons; the steep Nilgiri roof seen on old estate houses and churches is their work.

By the end of the nineteenth century the planters were sending teas to Mincing Lane, London’s tea market, where they were judged “good” and “very good” and fetched from 1 shilling 4 pence to 6 shillings a pound. A strong Scottish streak shows in estate names such as Glenburn, Glendale and Glenmorgan.

By then there were about 3,000 acres under tea, and eighteen planters showed their produce at that year’s Ooty Agricultural Show. It was the Commissioner, James Wilkinson Breeks, who suggested sending teas to the London brokers. The planters tried to sell at home to escape the middlemen’s commission, but tea drinking took a long time to catch on among Indians.

From mud huts to bungalows

The early planters “lived in mud and grass huts,” battling malaria and wild animals and living on rice gruel and game they shot, as P.C. Kurian, a second-generation planter, used to tell his daughter. The historian S. Muthiah, who wrote the centenary history of UPASI, 1893 to 1993, compared them to “frontiersmen in the Wild West.”

As tea paid, the bungalows came, with tennis courts, dance floors, bars and even Royal Doulton commodes, and managers’ wives competed for the best estate garden at the Ooty Flower Show. More on the bungalows in A House for Chinna Dorai – Estate Bungalows in the Nilgiris.