British explorers first reported the existence of wild tracts of tea plants in Assam, in northeastern India, in 1823, but cultivation and production of tea in India did not begin until the late 1830s. According to historian Denys Forrest, author of Tea for the British, the delay in tea cultivation can be attributed to the East India Company, which at that time held a government-sanctioned monopoly on all tea imported to Britain from China, effectively making the East India Company the sole source of tea for European consumption (Forrest, 107). Rather than encouraging internal competition among its branches, the company, according to Forrest, temporarily ignored the potential for Indian-grown sources of tea, relying instead on its network of trade relations with Chinese tea merchants. Parliament dissolved the East India Company’s China monopoly in 1833, opening up the China tea trade to independent British interests. A decade after the discovery of tea in Assam, the East India Company turned its attention to the possibility of producing Indian tea.35 The first shipment of Indian-grown tea was auctioned on the London tea market in 1839.36
In September 1839, Charles Bruce, credited with first discovering tea growing in India, issued a report detailing his experiences and encouraging the cultivation and production of tea by British planters in India.37 Bruce, whose byline includes his title as “Superintendent of Tea-Culture,” ends his report with a resounding paragraph emphasizing his role in the discovery of tea in India and intimating the great possibilities stemming from it:
In looking forward to the unbounded benefit the discovery of this plant will produce to England, to India,—to millions, I cannot but thank God for so great a blessing to our country. When I first discovered it, some 14 years ago, I little thought that I should have been spared long enough to see it become likely eventually to rival that of China, and that I should have to take a prominent part in bringing it to so successful an issue. Should what I have written on this new and interesting subject be of any benefit to the country and the community at large, and help a little to impel the tea forward to enrich our own dominions, and pull down the haughty pride of China, I shall feel myself richly repaid for all the perils, and dangers, and fatigues, that I have undergone in the cause of British-Indian tea. (160–61)
Bruce conveys his thanks to God for conferring such a blessing upon England, and he also suggests that his countrymen owe him a debt of gratitude as well. Part of the “successful . . . issue” brought about by the discovery of tea in India comes from its effect on England’s trade with China; Bruce is proud that Indian tea will one day “rival that of China,” and his goal, he admits, is to “pull down the haughty pride of China.” Published in 1839, the year the First Opium War broke out, Bruce’s piece echoes the jingoism of, for example, Thomas de Quincey’s essays on China.38
G. G. Sigmond’s Tea: Its Effects, Medicinal and Moral was published in London that same year, and he celebrates Bruce’s discovery of the tea plant growing wild in the jungles of Assam.39 Connecting botany and medicine with commerce and politics, along with a generous interest in the social habits of England, Sigmond’s text appeals to a broader audience than Bruce’s details regarding the exact expenditures needed to establish a successful tea plantation in Assam. Sigmond describes the momentous discovery of the Indian tea plant: “At the present moment every circumstance which relates to the tea-plant carries with it a deeper interest. A discovery has been made of no less importance than that the hand of Nature has planted the shrub within the bounds of the wide dominion of Great Britain: a discovery which must materially influence the destinies of nations; it must change the employment of a vast number of individuals; it must divert the tide of commerce, and awaken to agricultural industry the dormant energies of a mighty country, whose wellbeing must be the great aim of a paternal government” (3). The simple tea shrub, Sigmond declares, affects the destinies of individuals, societies, and nations, shaking economic and political systems across the globe. Sigmond carefully delineates the “bounds of the wide dominion of Great Britain” in this passage, asserting firmly that the tea plant was discovered growing within those borders and thus within British territory. By placing the well-being of the dormant but mighty resources of India within the hands of “a paternal government,” Sigmond articulates the connection between the budding Indian tea industry and British imperial goals. Cultivating tea in India would contribute to a new agricultural industry for British colonial planters and simultaneously participate in an enlargement of imperial territory and power. The investment of British industry and energy into the slumbering resources of its colony would, according to Sigmond, fulfill the agricultural potential of the wild jungles of Assam.
Sigmond emphasizes that Indian-grown tea was not a poor substitute for the more exotic teas of China that had previously filled English tea caddies. He quotes the Agricultural Society of Calcutta, which declared that a discovery had taken place and pronounced it to be “one of a most interesting and important nature, as connected with the commercial and agricultural interests of this empire. We allude to the existence of the real and genuine tea-plant of China, indigenous within the Honourable Company’s dominions in Upper Assam. This shrub is no longer to be looked upon as a plant of doubtful introduction. It exists, already planted by the hand of Nature, through a vast extent of territory in Upper Assam” (68–69). As this passage reveals, previous attempts had been made to introduce Chinese tea seeds and seedlings into the East India Company’s territories in northern India. The discovery of the “real and genuine tea-plant of China” growing natively in Indian soil, according to the society and to Sigmond, would revolutionize the embryonic tea industry of British India. Rather than attempting to artificially create substitutes for the more desirable Chinese tea, British tea planters could cultivate the native resources of India to produce an imperial source of the national beverage. According to Sigmond, Assam tea “has a delicate and agreeable smell; it makes a very pleasant infusion, of a deeper colour than ordinary Souchong; it has every quality that belongs to a good, sound, unadulterated tea. There cannot be the slightest doubt of its being the genuine produce of the real tea-plant” (78). The identity of Indian tea plants as “genuine” would resonate with tea drinkers who had relied on tea imported from China for comfort, nourishment, and a foundation for social relationships for two centuries.40
In celebrating the potential for British-controlled, Indian-grown, genuine tea, Sigmond employs a rhetoric of discovery. He focuses on the fact that the tea found growing in India was planted “by the hand of Nature” rather than by the hands of British planters.41 According to this rhetoric, the tea plant grew wild in the jungles of Assam before the arrival of British colonists, awaiting the moment when East India Company explorers uncovered its existence as an imperial source for tea. The definition of “discovery” assumes the prior existence of the item, as it is dis-covered, uncovered, and revealed to the gaze of the discoverer, who plays a relatively passive role in the process. “Discovery” implies that the one doing the discovering did not actively create, produce, or manufacture the discovery; instead, he or she makes something visible that had been hidden, removing the intervening obstruction to reveal that the item being discovered had actually existed all along. Discovering tea, the national beverage of Great Britain, growing natively on Indian soil suggests that Nature authorized British expansion into that region, affirming the natural right and responsibility of a “paternal government,” as Sigmond puts it, to rule Indian territories and to reap the benefits of Indian resources. The tea industry had already proved profitable to the British government through the monopoly of the East India Company; finding tea growing wild in the company’s territories in India just when its China monopoly was dissolved appeared to be divine intervention, providing both the company and the nation with a new source of tea.
Even more fundamentally, the discovery of tea, a beverage that