Tagged: darjeeling

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.

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 majority the estates did not see coming, 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.