an essential part of the colonizing process; his history of the British colonization of Assam is integrally linked to the need for British sources of tea.
The cultivation of tea in India, on British-ruled soil, allowed the British to maintain control over the entire process of tea production, from the initial planting through the plucking and drying of leaves to the final exportation to Britain. As tea imports from the colonies in India and Ceylon increased, British cultural reliance on tea as part of national identity acquired imperialistic overtones: “A large quantity of tea is now imported from this island [Ceylon], and new plantations, it is reported, are being made every month; day by day more of the primeval forest goes down before the axe of the pioneer, and before another quarter of a century has passed it is anticipated that the teas of our Indian empire will become the most valuable of its products” (21). Tea was no longer an exotic commodity imported to Britain from uncertain, malevolent, foreign sources; instead, tea had become a product exported from within the British Empire. Reade asserts possession over Indian teas, the teas of “our Indian empire,” and he equates tea production with Victorian pride in national and technological progress. Tea, for Reade, has become an essential product of English imperialism; at the same time, he also illustrates that English imperialism was clearly a product of the growing British taste for tea.
The English tea-drinking public had to be convinced, however, to switch to drinking Indian tea. Even as late as 1861, more than twenty years after Sigmond’s ringing endorsement of British tea in India, an article in Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Arts asserts, “Reader, if you wish some little information on the subjects of tea-growing, gathering, curing, and shipping, you must come with us to China.”42 China was still considered the primary tea-producing region of the world. However, the rhetoric of periodical articles, as well as Sigmond’s and Reade’s treatises, suggests that drinking Indian tea was patriotic. An 1868 article in Charles Dickens’s journal, All the Year Round, delineates all the ways in which the Chinese were known to adulterate tea intended for English consumption and then prays, “If tea can only be grown in Assam, there may be soon found a remedy for all this cheating.”43 Even at the end of the century, in 1894, Mrs. A. H. Green attributed the increasing Indian tea imports in England to “our national—and often personal—interest in India” rather than to a taste preference for Indian tea. Mrs. Green personally favored the “softness of flavour” found in Chinese teas and asserts that they have more “romance” than Indian teas.44 But tea drinkers had to give up more than pleasantly exotic notions of Chinese pagodas and priests making tea by hand; whereas China imported both black and green teas to Britain, Chinese teas tended to be mild in flavor. Indian tea plantations produced black tea almost exclusively, and Indian teas offered bolder, more-assertive flavors. Once Britain began importing predominantly Indian tea, the nation’s beverage came to be brewed with black tea. By the late 1880s, English imports of Indian tea had outpaced England’s consumption of tea from China.45
The years surrounding the shift from a predominantly Chinese to a predominantly Indian supply of tea for English consumers produced a flurry of tea-related texts asserting the superiority of Indian tea. Samuel Baildon’s Tea Industry in India: A Review of Finance and Labour, and a Guide for Capitalists and Assistants (1882) emphasizes that India—not China—ought to be regarded as the true “home” of tea. Whereas Sigmond, writing in 1839 and working second- or thirdhand from others’ accounts of exploration of Assam, attested that the “hand of Nature” had planted the genuine tea plant of China within the bounds of India, Baildon goes a step further by asserting that the tea plant originated in India, not in China. Thus, Baildon attempts to undermine any grounds for the supremacy of Chinese tea based on authenticity or primacy: “[I]f India can be proved—as I hope I have proved it—to be the home of the tea-plant, Indian planters will have a strong base-point on which to reasonably establish their assertion as to the superiority of their produce” (5). According to Baildon, proving that tea began in India and later moved to China would necessarily help establish its “superiority”; reinforcing the link between tea and domesticity, Baildon bases his measure of the superiority of tea on concepts of “home” and origination.
Baildon’s argument initially rests on the vague and shadowy legends that surround the beginning of the history of tea. According to one popular legend circulating in China (and reported in nearly every nineteenth-century article and treatise on tea), an Indian Buddhist prince named Dharma was traveling through China during a self-imposed penance of forgoing sleep for some years. At one point, Dharma grew too tired to resist sleep any longer. When he awoke, frustrated and saddened by his failure to remain awake, he tore off his eyelids and threw them on the ground. Later, he found that an unknown shrub had grown upon the spot, and Dharma found that eating the leaves helped him to stay awake. Baildon seizes upon Dharma’s nationality: “The Chinese and Japanese versions of the first phases of tea in their respective countries are thus attributed to a native of India.” Moreover, he supposes that Dharma, rather than discovering tea growing in China, actually introduced the tea plant into those countries from India (9).
Baildon’s rhetoric draws heavily from Darwinian theories of evolution and the arguments about degeneration and devolution that followed Darwin’s work. Baildon admits that the tea industry in India was still in its infancy and in need of the boost his proof would provide, but he claims that this fact does not detract from his argument: “[The Indian tea industry] is as yet only a child, striving against the Chinese giant; but, fortunately, the natural order of things is for the giants to die before the vigorous children” (5). Baildon focuses on the “natural order of things,” casting a political and commercial battle in terms of agricultural and evolutionary cycles. He argues that the tea plant was most likely “indigenous to India, and extended its growth to China, deteriorating as it did so” (11). According to Baildon, the tea plant traveled from its indigenous India to China and, over the miles and centuries, gradually assumed an inferior appearance and form in its new Chinese guise. Baildon offers an analogy that depicts this degeneration in disturbingly human terms:
We will put this degenerated Indian tea-plant of China, in its origin, in the position of a traveller; and, remembering that plant-life is more easily influenced by climate than human life, suppose that an European was cast upon the world, and travelling gradually farther and farther from his native land, eventually settled down in a climate altogether unsuitable for his successful development. After the lapse of a great number of years, he would nominally remain an European, but virtually be an established member of another community, and affected by habits of life, climatic influences, and intimate associations with things and people around him. His nationality would have been abandoned for the adoption of that of an inferior country, and have resulted in his decline. In the course of time we see him—or his progeny—stunted, changed, coarse, in every way degenerated; in fact, changed physically from his original state.
So with China tea: originally part of the one Indian family, now a distinct and separate member. (12–13)
Remarkably, tea mutates, in this analogy, from an Indian native to a European, suggesting that tea is a British citizen—part of an “Indian family,” which necessarily belongs to the British Empire. This European traveler makes his way to China, where he gradually assimilates to the climate and culture and, in the process, loses his identity—he “abandoned” his nationality and adopted that of an “inferior country.” This process of assimilation is reported by Baildon to be a process of “decline” that presents itself in essentialized, racialized, extraordinarily physical terms that translate to his offspring and therefore taint his descendants, who appear “stunted, changed, coarse, in every way degenerated.” Describing Indian tea, Baildon offers the counterpoint to the stunted, coarsened Chinese tea plants; Indian tea, in contrast, is “[t]all, vigorous, of increased stature, with larger leaves, and full of sap; giving a greater return, and of a richer kind” (14). Employing noble rhetoric, Baildon describes Indian tea plants—nurtured by British tea planters—as standing up straight and tall next to their stunted, miniature, dried-up Chinese neighbors.
An 1889 article in Chambers’s Journal
