Tagged: darjeeling
The Tea Heist Everyone Remembers Wrong
Robert Fortune's mission of 1848 to 1851 delivered upwards of 20,000 Chinese tea plants and eight tea makers to the East India Company's Himalayan gardens. The industry that broke China's hold on the export trade grew in Assam, on Assam's own plant, with Chinese tea makers hired a decade before him.
The Arithmetic of a Garden Closure
A tea garden does not close on one bad season. It closes when the cost of producing a kilo of tea sits above what the auction will pay for long enough that debt outruns the harvest, and the numbers behind that threshold, from Assam's slow squeeze to Darjeeling's shuttered gates, are public.
Darjeeling's Priciest Tea Isn't Its Biggest Earner
A handful of spring-plucked Darjeeling lots sell for the price of silver, but the season's real income comes two months later, from a flush that never makes the headlines.
Darjeeling's Tea Economy
Darjeeling's tea output has roughly halved in a decade and roughly half its 87 gardens have been reported as ready for sale, while the name itself has been registered abroad and placed under compulsory licensing at home.
Geographical Indications in Tea
What a geographical indication legally is, how it differs from a trademark and a certification mark, what the WTO treaty behind it actually obliges, which tea names are registered where, and what the empirical literature says the premium is worth.
India's Tea Industry
The world's second-largest tea producer is also its largest tea-drinking nation, and the two facts explain most of the rest. How a colonial plantation crop became four distinct growing regions, a smallholder sector now growing about half of Assam's leaf, an auction system half its own producers now want to escape, and a trade caught between a record export year and three separate fights over access.
The Tea Board of India
The statutory body that licenses every tea garden in the country, forces half the crop through public auction, and owns the Darjeeling name outright. It was built on a cess that no longer exists.