The Temi Tea Garden: How a King Gave Sikkim Its Tea

The king foresaw tea as an industry that would provide employment to his people.

Sikkim was then still a kingdom of its own; it became part of the Indian republic only in 1975. In the decade before Temi was planted, the kingdom had played host to many of the Tibetans who followed the 14th Dalai Lama into exile in 1959.

Teddy Young, remembered as “the last of the British ‘sahibs,’” spent eight years creating the garden that is now famous as Temi.

For how Temi’s organic farming works today, and what the label on each lot means, see Is Sikkim tea organic? on our main Sikkim guide.

It is the largest and oldest tea garden in Sikkim. We gave its size as 440 acres in 2020, when we called it a certified organic estate. Our product pages put it at over 435 acres and at 177 hectares, which is about 437 acres.

Our 2013 notes on the estate recorded “about 100 MT tea annually,” made by 406 workers and 43 staff. Our 2019 supplier records give the same output, about 0.1 million kg a year, and about 550 workers.

That makes Temi large by hill standards but small next to the plains. A single big Assam garden can make 2 million kg in a year, twenty times Temi’s crop, while Bermiok, Sikkim’s best-known newer garden, makes about 1,500 kg. See Bermiok, Sikkim’s boutique tea garden.

Temi’s quality has long been recognized. Our 2013 notes record that it won the Tea Board’s “All India Quality Award” in 1994 and 1995, and that its tea “fetches one of the highest prices at the Kolkata Tea Auction.”

Who runs Temi?

Temi is a Government of Sikkim undertaking, not a private company’s garden. In 2019 its managing director, Mrinalini Srivastava, told the estate’s story for Teabox, and in 2020 she joined our founder for a live “Meet the Growers” session, where he introduced her as an officer of the Indian Police Service and “a trailblazer in tea.”

Temi Tea Estate, SikkimFrom The Source · 1:41

Our earliest purchase paper from Temi is dated 3 November 2014. Because Temi is only about 116 km from our facility in Siliguri, its teas reach us within days of being made. Our training material puts the usual route through auctions, exporters and wholesalers at four to six months from factory to cup.

Our visits to Temi

• July 2017: our team visited the estate in the summer season.
• November 2017: we returned with a film crew; the sunrise at the top of this page was shot on 4 November.
• June 2018: we photographed the second flush, the summer harvest that makes Temi’s best-known tea.

The lots we have chosen

In April 2018 we prepared a launch of new teas from Temi, Mim in Darjeeling and Bermiok in Sikkim. That spring’s Temi was an FTGFOP clonal, invoiced on 4 April, and the summer lot that followed was an FTGFOP1 that reached us on 11 June. Our current summer tea is from Chinary bushes; the 2025 lot was picked and made on 10 and 11 July.

In spring 2024 our tasters singled Temi out: it “impressed us with its traditional manufacturing techniques, producing a cup with a substantial body, distinct from typical Spring Darjeeling.” For tasting notes on every lot, see What does Sikkim tea taste like?

Temi in other people’s cups

Readers of our blog met Temi in 2017, when the novelist Anjum Hasan brewed it for the writer Zac O’Yeah as “a good, strong tea for waking up,” and said a poet friend “considers Temi among the best teas he’s had.” Read the conversation in Teatime, Talktime (feat. Anjum Hasan and Zac O’Yeah).

When Temi tea reached a late-night television desk in Manhattan in 2021, our founder, Kausshal Dugarr, said he was “immensely excited to see Indian Teas reach every corner of this world,” all the way “from the Himalayan slopes in Temi Sikkim,” and called it one of his own favorites.