Tea-Garden Time

Lately, between dinnertime and bedtime, I have been feeling as tired as the wrung-out dish rag in the kitchen sink. One evening, I made myself a cup of Assam tea, which, the tea container assured me, was very good with milk. ("And sugar!" I said to myself.) It gave me a little pick-me-up, did not irritate my stomach like Chinese tea does, and did not keep me up all night like coffee would have.

Assam tea is brewed from the leaves of Camellia sinensis var. assamica, the tea bush native to the river-valley lowlands of the small state of Assam in northeastern India. This tea bush is different from its cousin Camellia sinensis var. sinensis, the Chinese tea bush native to the southern highlands of China. And, by the way, these are the only two places in the world where tea bushes grow naturally.

The Chinese discovered tea five thousand years ago. According to the charming legend, emperor and herbalist Shennong had his attendants boil all his water for purity. One day they presented him with a cup of boiled water into which a leaf from the Chinese tea bush had inadvertently fallen. He noticed the restorative property of the drink and . . . end of story! Soon tea became popular throughout China. Chinese tea was introduced to the west by Portuguese priests and merchants in the sixteenth century and was all the rage in Europe by the seventeenth-century.

I am pretty sure that Assam tea was discovered at about the same time as Chinese tea, but it was not introduced to the west until the early 1800s. A Scottish adventurer, Robert Bruce, discovered Camellia sinensis var. assamica in 1823. After his death, about 1830, his brother had the bush verified in Calcutta as being similar to, but a distinct variety of, the Chinese tea bush. By the late 1830s, the East India Company test-marketed Assam tea in London and soon instituted policies encouraging British subjects to lay claim to land in Assam and plant tea-garden estates.

Note the rather deceptive use of the term "tea garden" (to say nothing of "lay claim to land"). We are talking about plantations, which, in order to prosper, depend on an owner-slave or at least a master-serf relationship to keep the cost of production down, no matter whether tea, coffee, sugar, rice, or tobacco is being grown.

Based on plantation custom, the Assam tea gardens are on Tea Garden Time, one hour ahead of the Indian Standard Time (IST) observed throughout the rest of India and Sri Lanka. It is sort of a daylight savings time, so that the workers get as much time in the fields as possible in the sunlight between 9:00 am (IST 8:00 am) and 5:00 pm (IST 4:00 pm).

So while I am sipping my restorative cup, around 8:00 at night "tea-garden time," and resting from my labors--or maybe even inspired to take them up again for pleasure--the plantation workers in Assam are just beginning their field work for the day.

1850 engraving of Assam tea production.