The India China tea war
Chai, black tea leaves brewed in boiling water and mixed with sugar and lots of milk, is a must have drink for Indians to wake up each morning and, sipping it together, is the most important social ritual with family, friends and strangers in India.
Indians assume that tea was first grown commercially in India and that the British colonial rulers later planted it in Sri Lanka, Kenya and other lands. Then you read about wealthy Chinese - and Japanese - paying large sums for rare tea leaves. In 2002, for instance, a Chinese buyer paid $1,400 for a gram of Da Hong Pao (Big Red Robe) tea, four times the prevailing price for an ounce, or 28 grams, of gold. It cost the auction winner about $10,000 if he were to use the leaves to brew a pot of tea.
350-year-old tea shrubs in China
The leaves, a very rare tiny batch of 20 grams, came from six shrubs over 350 years old, growing in Wuyishan, China. In 2005, the last batch of leaves from the antique shrubs were gifted to the China National Museum in Beijing. The shrubs, which are guarded by the police and insured for $15 million, won’t be harvested again since they are drying out and produce few leaves, the local government announced. This may give collectors, who own leaves from the original shrubs, a huge financial gain if their scarcity drives up demand and prices.
Last year, at an auction in Assam, a kg of Manohari gold tea sold for $666 (Rs.50,000,) the highest price paid for a rare Indian tea. The price per gram, 66 cents, is a tiny fraction of that paid in 2002 for the Da Hong Pao tea leaves from the original shrubs.
As an Indian, you wonder why are collectors paying such large sums for a rare leaf from China compared to those from India. Then you find out that the Chinese have a long, culture of drinking tea, which has evolved since 200 BCE, while tea consumption in India is less than 300 years old.
China dominates the global tea market
In 2019, China supplied half of the 6.2 million tons of tea consumed around the globe, most of it consumed domestically. Chinese exports totaled $1.6 billion, twice that of India. India’s output was over 1.3 million tons, with about a quarter of it exported. Last year the global tea market was over $55 billion in revenues, much of it from expensive, blended teas sold in the U.S. and Europe, while the bulk of the volume is consumed in China and India. Global demand is expected to grow by over 5% per year during the next decade.
Much of the increase is expected to come from the rising consumption of green tea, which is considered to have health benefits. Revenues from green tea, mainly in the U.S. and Europe, are estimated to rise to $27 billion in 2027, up from $19 billion last year. This shift in demand, from the black tea grown in India, benefits China which produces much of the green tea.
The India China tea war
Tea is a plant indigenous to Assam in India as well as in contiguous areas of neighboring China, Myanmar and Thailand. But up until the 19th century, China was the sole tea supplier to the world and it was the country’s largest export. Then, the British-owned East India Company set up tea plantations in Assam and, using its global distribution reach, rapidly grew tea exports from India.
The Company was formed in 1600 to trade in spices from the East. In 1612, it secured trading privileges in India from the Mughal king. Soon it began ruling over parts of India and, by 1858, controlled much of the sub-continent, when the British crown assumed full power over the colony.
Trading tea for opium, sugar and cotton
How and why the British set up tea plantations in India is discussed by Andrew Liu in his book Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India. Liu teaches history at Villanova University, near Philadelphia. Parts of the book, which provide historic details, is informative. But the book, being based on Liu’s Ph.D. thesis at Columbia University and published by the Yale University Press, also covers abstract theories and academic arguments which are difficult to comprehend.
Since the sixteenth-century, the East India Company (EIC) began buying tea from China to sell to British consumers. Tea was its most lucrative business and so it aggressively pushed sales. The beverage was addictive, though said to have medicinal qualities. Drinking it soon became a ritual involving consumption of sugar, milk, sandwiches, cakes and other foods, boosting demand and profits from those goods. In 1738, EIC’s sales of Chinese tea in Britain reached three million pounds, up sharply from 156,000 pounds in 1712. The trade was highly profitable since EIC sold a pound of tea in Britain for ten times its purchase price from the Chinese, Liu states.
“The sugar arrived (in Britain) courtesy of the West Indies, where the British operated slave plantations for cultivating cane,” notes Liu. Tea, he adds, “was also traded for opium produced on factory-like plantations in India and cotton grown by enslaved Africans in the United States.”
British spies steal tea seeds from China
While EIC’s imports of Chinese tea kept growing rapidly, there was little that it could sell to the Chinese, except try to force them to buy more opium grown in India. So, the company had a big deficit on its trade with China, the monopoly supplier of tea.
EIC’s efforts to sell the tea leaf found native in Assam failed since British consumers disliked its taste. In the 1830s, eager to reduce its trade deficit with China and control its own supply, EIC began growing Chinese tea in Assam. To do this, it hired British botanists and merchants to spy in Singapore, Canton, and inland China and bring both Chinese seedlings and Chinese tea-makers back to India.
China was then closed to foreigners and, if they were found out, they risked death. Robert Fortune, a British botanist, was one of EIC’s most successful spies and the subject of a recent BBC story. In 1849, disguised as a Chinese with a false pigtail, Fortune traveled to the Wuyishan mountain region, where the Da Hong Pao tea is grown, the best leaf in China. Staying at a local monastery, which was founded in 827 A.D., he secretly carried out his mission with help from a Chinese servant.
Today a kilogram of Da Hong Pao tea, harvested from shrubs recently grown in the mineral-rich region of limestone gorges, from cuttings from the original plants, retails for $88 at Harney & Sons, a London tea merchant.
The British myth of India as the birthplace of tea
The seeds, seedlings and secrets of tea cultivation, stolen by Fortune and other British spies from the Chinese, were taken to Assam. There the British began growing a Chinese and Assamese blend of tea shrubs, which flourished in the soil of local hill slopes and whose leaves made a beverage which tasted good to the British.
The tea business is highly labor intensive, given the planting and tending of shrubs, plucking of leaves by hand and the drying and roasting. Adopting the same strategy they used for securing commodity supplies from other colonies, the British used indentured labor, mostly women. The business “took off only after planters employed penal labor laws to relocate indentured workers, known as ‘coolies,’ from central India to Assam, where they toiled on sprawling plantations” described euphemistically as “tea gardens,” Liu writes.
In 1889, powered by coolie labor, India’s tea exports to Britain and the rest of the world overtook that of China and then continued to climb for several decades. By the early twentieth century, the combined annual tea exports from China and India totaled nearly half a million tons.
While tea exports from India grew rapidly, propagandists for the British colonialists - as well as the Japanese - ignored historical evidence and asserted that “the true ‘birthplace of tea’ must have been in India or Japan,” states Liu. They “explained the divergent fates of Chinese and Indian tea as the inevitable product of innate and static civilizational differences, even attributing these economic reversals to the natural properties of the earth itself…” The residue of such propaganda still prevails today and explains why Indians view their country as the birthplace of the tea industry.