Tradition · tea plantation landscape · India
Assam tea, Jorhat
Also known as Assam tea — Jorhat
The Assam tea cultivation tradition at Jorhat and the upper Assam tea belt — the Assam tea (Camellia sinensis assamica, distinct from the Chinese Camellia sinensis sinensis) industry that produces 55% of India's tea and is the second-largest tea producer in the world after China. Robert Bruce discovered Assam tea growing wild on the Patkai hills in 1823 among the Singpho tribal community. The Assam Company (established 1839 in London) planted the first commercial tea estates in 1840. The Jorhat Tocklai Tea Research Institute (established 1911) is the world's oldest tea research centre. The Assam tea industry has 820+ estates and about 1 million workers (making it India's largest formal-sector employer). The 1859 Indian Factory Act and later labour laws have been shaped by the Assam tea plantation system. GI tag 2007 for Assam Orthodox tea. The 2015 Jorhat tea tourism circuit draws international visitors.
- Date
- 1830–2026
- Function
- Trade & production
- Patron dynasty
- Company / British Raj
- Condition
- living industry
- Material
- tea
- River basin
- Brahmaputra
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 26.750, 94.200
Connections (3)
- Trade routePatna opium & Company trade
Britain bought Chinese tea with Bengal opium because it had nothing else China wanted, and grew Assam tea from the 1830s to stop having to buy Chinese tea at all. The two commodities are one policy: the opium monopoly existed to close a trade deficit, and the Assam plantations existed to make the monopoly unnecessary. Both outlived their purpose by decades.
- Patronage networkCalcutta Botanic Garden
The Assam Company's first plantings used both wild Assam stock and China seed raised in the Calcutta garden, and the garden's superintendents sat on the Tea Committee that decided the experiment. The Brahmaputra valley's tea economy, and the indentured migration from Chotanagpur that staffed it, begin as a botanical trial in a Calcutta nursery bed.
- Patronage networkDibrugarh
Dibrugarh exists because of tea. The town is the head of steam navigation on the Brahmaputra and the point at which the plantations' chests were loaded for Calcutta, and its layout — wharf, rail head, planters' club, hospital — is plantation infrastructure. The indentured recruitment from Chotanagpur that staffed the gardens is why Upper Assam's demography looks as it does.
Sources
Tea Board of India; colonial plantation records and labour histories.
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