How Tea Came to India: The Singpho, the British and the Making of a Tea Nation

The Singphos plucked tender leaves from wild bushes, dried them in the sun, exposed them to the night dew for three days and then packed them into hollow bamboo tubes and smoked them until the flavor developed. As our founder has written, “each Singpho family owned their respective tea gardens.”

When our team visited Margherita in Upper Assam in 2016, the bamboo tea was still being made. The leaf was slow-roasted in a wok, dried in the sun, crushed and packed into bamboo hollows, then left above the hearth to smoke for as long as two months before being cut into coin-sized discs. Read the full story of Singpho coin tea on our blog.

In 1823 the Scottish trader Robert Bruce, on a trip to Rangpur, the old Ahom capital, was introduced to this brew; Tea 101 credits the Assamese nobleman Maniram Dewan with taking him to the Singpho chief. Bruce died soon after, and it was his brother Charles who sent samples to Calcutta, where the plant was identified as a tea of its own kind and named assamica.

The fuller account of the Singpho, Bruce and Maniram Dewan is in The history of Assam tea.

The idea was old. Joseph Banks had advised the East India Company on growing tea as early as 1788, but it was only taken up in 1833, when the company lost its monopoly on trade with China. Charles Bruce then set up the first nursery, with 80,000 seeds brought from China, and two Chinese tea makers were hired to teach the craft. In 1834 the company set up a Tea Committee to run the experiment.

The first attempts failed. In 1835 tea was planted in Upper Assam where the Dibru meets the Brahmaputra, but the plants could not take hold and died. The next year, saplings planted at Chubwa grew, and the estate still dates its first successful planting to 1836.

The first British plantation followed in Upper Assam in the late 1830s, and in 1839, for the first time, Indian tea went on sale in Britain; until then only Chinese teas had been auctioned there. That 1839 sale is where our founder starts the story of Indian tea’s place in the world. The same year, Maniram Dewan served as Dewan of the Assam Tea Company, which our 2021 story calls the first tea company in the world.

Growth was fast after that. By 1862 Assam had more than 160 gardens, owned by five public companies and 57 private planters.

Dr. Archibald Campbell planted it in Darjeeling in 1841, and Kangra’s first commercial garden opened in 1852. In the south, tea seed was first sown in the Nilgiris in 1835, and Munnar planted its first tea in 1880.

Darjeeling’s first gardens

Campbell’s garden was an experiment; the planters came in the 1850s. Captain Samler was the first, at Alubari in 1856, for the Kurseong and Darjeeling Tea Company, and Dr. Brougham planted Harsing and Dooteriah in 1859. The Nepali nobleman Dakman Rai brought in thousands of workers, paying them in seed, and set up Soureni in 1878, Phuguri in 1880 and Sampripani in 1883.

The numbers grew quickly. By 1866 Darjeeling had 39 gardens making 21,000 kg of tea; four years later there were 56 gardens making 71,000 kg.

Not all the early planters were British. German missionary families, the Wernickes and the Stolkes, founded Steinthal, Risheehat, Goomba and Tumsong, and managed Makaibari, Tukvar, Bannockburn and Glenburn. The German residents were arrested in 1939, and by 1949 that chapter was over; Peter Keen tells it in Tea in Germany & its Darjeeling Connection.

The Nilgiris

In the south, Lord William Bentinck’s Tea Commission sent to China for seed and for tea makers. The mansion at Ketti where the early seed was raised is now the women’s hostel of the CSI College of Engineering. Dunsandle, above 1,800 m, and Thiashola, “mother of the forests,” opened in 1859, were among the first estates. Seeds were sown at Ketti in 1835, and the first commercial estates followed in 1859.

The longer story, from China to the world, is in The history of tea.

Indians did not take to tea at first: most preferred native drinks such as thandai and sherbet. The industry set out to change that. The Tea Cess Committee of 1903, renamed the Indian Tea Market Expansion Board in 1937, promoted tea across the country, and the tea stalls at railway stations and docks are a legacy of those campaigns. Cheap CTC dust and fannings made tea affordable for everyone, and after independence the Tea Board advertised tea as “Swadeshi,” India’s own.

Some regions came to it late. In Kashmir, CTC chai arrived in the valley around the 1970s, and “by the end of 1985, every stratum in Kashmir knew about CTC chai,” as our 2020 story on the valley’s flavors records. How those habits look today is in How India drinks tea.

“The British built India’s tea industry to ship Indian tea to the world under a British flag. 79 years later, we ship from Siliguri to 125+ countries under our own.”

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