Darjeeling: The Colorful History and Precarious Fate of the World's Greatest Tea
Jeff Koehler
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 162040513X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Darjeeling's tea bushes run across a mythical Indian landscape steeped in the religious, the sacred, and the picturesque. Planted among eighty-seven tea estates at high elevation in the heart of the eastern Himalayas, the linear rows of brilliant green waist-high shrubs that coat the steep slopes and valleys produce less than 1 percent of India's tea. Yet with its bright color and muscatel flavor, Darjeeling is generally considered the finest tea in the world.
Built from scratch, India's tea industry grew to be the largest on the globe and came to symbolize British imperial rule in India. The jewel of its production was, and remains, Darjeeling, and its story is rich in people, intrigue, and terroir. It includes Robert Fortune, whose mid-nineteenth-century smuggling of tea plants and expertise from China brought the British East India Company the quality tea it sought; the charismatic and controversial Rajah Banerjee, whose family owned the iconic Makaibari plantation for 150 years; the tea pluckers who underpin the industry; and the lone auctioneer who bangs down his hammer oversees the sale more than half of Darjeeling's entire crop. But it is also the story of how this Edenic spot in the Himalayan foothills is beset by labor and political unrest and alarming climate change that threaten its future.
With passion and perception, Koehler illuminates a historic and arcane world, such that an ordinary tea bag and the cup enjoyed by tens of millions each day take on entirely new meanings.
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Not surprisingly, the Assam Company sacked him. In 1847 new heads took over management, improved cultivation and the company’s financial structure, and quickly turned it around. In 1852 the company offered a small dividend. This grew steadily over the next few years and by 1856 had reached 8 percent.43 From the hard work and successes of India’s tea pioneers sprang an entire industry as the secrets of tea production were gradually unveiled. Commercial aspirations and imaginations were unleashed,.
Certain of the plants’ sources, as well as to gather careful notes on soil and cultivation. Apart from a handful of Arab traders and Jesuit missionaries, few foreigners had ever penetrated so deeply into China or returned alive to tell of it. Arriving in Hong Kong in August 1848, Fortune traveled immediately a thousand miles north to Shanghai and then inland to the picturesque, green-tea-producing areas around the Yellow Mountain region. A day out of Shanghai, he had his head shaved, donned.
Latest snake-catching caper. Like Rajah Banerjee, he is a splendid storyteller, although his anecdotes lack the mystical platitudes so present in Rajah’s. Sanjay’s tend to be light and never preachy, rarely long, and studded with caustic, self-deprecating zingers. He tends to stop at a good line, and the remainder of the story needs to be coaxed from him. On one muggy summer evening, the guests eventually moved to the large, oval table in the dining room with Sanjay at its head as seasoned host.
July that shut down the hills. A month later, an Indian newspaper reported, “The unusually deserted look of the popular mall road of Darjeeling is a testimony to [its effect on tourism]. Only two of the about seven hundred hotels are partially operating, where media persons are the only inhabitants.”6 The bandh was rescinded the day after the piece ran, but the damage for the busy autumn festival season ahead had already been done. Peak tourist season in the hills is during the Puja and Diwali.