The northeastern section of India hangs like a limb between Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, and Myanmar (Burma), a lazy-T-shaped expanse connected to the rest of the country by a slender 125-mile-long strip of land called the Siliguri Corridor. (Colloquially, and more evocatively, it’s known as the Chicken’s Neck). Stretching to the foothills of the eastern Himalayas, Assam—now the area’s central state and, until recently, the name for the entire region—is largely at low elevation, hot, and tropical. The mighty Brahmaputra River cleaves Assam in half with a four-hundred-mile-long valley as it slithers southwest toward the Bay of Bengal. Altering its path and shifting its braided strands from year to year, the river widens to a dozen miles in places.
In 1823, Robert Bruce, a Scottish adventurer, explorer, and businessman, was trading along the upper Brahmaputra Valley when he came across indigenous tea growing in the dense jungle. Local Singpho tribes pickled the leaves and ate them with oil and garlic and sometimes dried fish, much in the manner of the Burmese dish lahpet, which is still popular today. The Singphos also made a primitive tea with the leaves.
Bruce befriended a Singpho chief named Bisa Gam and made arrangements to get some tea seeds and plants. But then two events interceded. In 1824, the First Anglo-Burmese War opened in response to Assam’s being largely overrun by invading Burmese. That same year, Bruce—by then a major in the Bengal Artillery—died. His story ends abruptly, and the thread gets taken up by his younger brother, Charles Alexander (C. A.) Bruce, who was commanding a flotilla of gunboats in the area.
The younger Bruce, evidently tipped off by his sibling before he died, got ahold of the tea samples. Exactly how is not clear. One version says Gam delivered the samples to C. A. Another claims that Gam came to pay respects, found Bruce’s younger brother, and passed him the tea. A third relates that C. A. retraced his brother’s steps and met with the chief, who presented the younger Bruce with several hundred plants.
With Britain’s unquenchable thirst for tea, C. A. Bruce suspected the impact of this discovery could be immense. He sent the samples on to the East India Company’s man in Assam, who, in June 1825, forwarded the packet of leaves and seeds to the Company’s botanic garden for verification.
The Calcutta botanic garden was the Empire’s nursery. It had been established in Sibpur, across the Hooghly River and just around the downstream bend from Calcutta, in 1787 by Colonel Robert Kyd. Using his own private garden as the foundation, Kyd conceived the new initiative “not for the purpose of collecting rare plants (although they also have their use) as things of curiosity or furnishing articles for the gratification of luxury,” he explained in his initial request for funding, “but for establishing a stock for the disseminating [of] such articles as may prove beneficial to the Inhabitants [of India], as well as the natives of Great Britain and which ultimately may tend to the extension of the national Commerce and Riches.”
Coming on the heels of the 1770 famine that killed some 10 million Bengalis, about a quarter of the population, Kyd meant to improve Indian agriculture with better food crops. This was the moral imperative for the gardens. But Kyd also appealed to the Company’s mercantile character in his brief. He planned to introduce items that could make a profit: teak plantations for shipbuilding, rubber, indigo for dye, spices, tobacco, cotton, and sugar. And medicinal ones, too, such as cinchona. Its bark was used for quinine, the only known treatment for malaria, a significant obstacle in conquering and ruling many tropical areas—including vast parts of India—and in expanding Britain’s dominion. Botanical science was part of the Empire—with an eye on commerce.
By the nineteenth century, botanic gardens in India had also been established in Saharanpur, Bombay, Madras, and Poona (Pune), with the one in Calcutta as the subcontinent’s nerve center. Under Kyd’s successor, William Roxburgh—the first salaried man to take charge and often called the Father of Indian Botany—it developed into a top-notch institution. Along with splendid gardens and beds, it had a herbarium with dried species for taxonomical reference, a vast library that held key works from around the globe, and the domed-toped, octagonal Palm House, with pink- and white-flowering climbers growing up over the ironwork to shade the palms inside.
At its helm when the packet of indigenous tea samples from Assam arrived was Dr. Nathaniel Wallich. Even in a time of unlikely success stories, he was something of a surprise to be the East India Company’s chief botanist in India.
Born Nathanael Wulff Wallich, the son of a Jewish merchant in Denmark, he studied medicine at the Danish Academy of Surgeons in Copenhagen. At twenty-one, with limited prospects in the academic world of Lutheran Denmark, he took a position as a surgeon in the Danish “factory” at Serampore, near Calcutta. He arrived in late autumn of 1807. The timing was terrible. Denmark had allied with France during the Napoleonic Wars, a coalition enemy of Britain’s, and the East India Company annexed the settlement in 1808. Wallich became a prisoner of war.
But Roxburgh, then superintendent of the Botanic Garden, recognized the Dane’s skills and not only successfully petitioned for Wallich’s release, but also to have him join the East India Company as his assistant. Wallich rose swiftly. In 1815, at age twenty-nine, he became the temporary superintendent of the garden, and then, two years later, was made permanent. Under his tenure, it grew greatly in size and number of workers, employing upward of three hundred gardeners and laborers. Wallich held his post until retiring to London in 1846. Such longevity was nearly unknown in British India, especially among botanists and plant collectors, who tended to die in their thirties—or younger—from the hazards of climate and endemic diseases amplified by spending months at a time in the field.
An early and vocal advocate in protecting the forests in India and Burma, Wallich was also an assiduous and generous collector. In 1828, on convalescence leave in England, he took along thirty crates that contained between eight thousand and ten thousand species gathered over the previous quarter century and passed them out. The haul was dubbed the “Wallichian herbarium” and is considered one of largest ever brought—or distributed—in Europe. Institutions shared the spoils, but so did private collectors. Some of these individuals became wealthy from the gifts, while Wallich remained, as he put it himself, “as poor as a church rat.” Not that poverty stopped his largess. Back in India, he was even more lavishly open handed. Between 1836 and 1840, the botanic garden, under his leadership, distributed 190,000 plants to more than two thousand institutions and individuals in India and abroad, to parks and native princes, civil servants, and even European collectors.
His future generosity aide, Wallich made a key mistake that summer of 1825. The leaves and seeds that Bruce had sent came from the camellia family, Wallich concluded, but they were not Camellia sinensis—tea. He did nothing to pursue the lead.
Was it an authentic error? The botanical authorities in Calcutta were deeply reluctant to acknowledge that tea existed in India, suggested Harold Mann. It was “always apparently the part of the botanists to doubt and deny, rather than to encourage the idea that tea was present in the country.”
The Company simply had little reason to put its energy or money into exploring the possibility. At the time Bruce’s packet arrived, the East India Company still held a monopoly on bringing Chinese tea to Britain.
~~Darjeeling- The History of The World's Greatest Tea -by- Jeff Koehler
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