Darjeeling tea: a history from 1835 to your cup

Archibald Campbell, a doctor posted as Darjeeling's first superintendent in 1839, planted tea seeds in his garden at Beechwood in 1841. The seeds were of the China type, raised in Kumaon in the western Himalaya. They grew well in the cool, misty air and the steep, well-drained slopes, and others followed with experimental plots at Lebong and elsewhere.

Around the same time the plant hunter Robert Fortune was collecting tea plants and seed in China for the Company between 1848 and 1851, and some of his stock is said to have reached the Darjeeling nurseries. The government began offering land for tea, and the first commercial gardens, among them Tukvar, Steinthal and Aloobari, opened from 1852. Happy Valley, just below the town, dates from the 1850s. By the 1870s there were more than a hundred gardens, and the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway was built in 1879–81 in large part to carry their tea down to the plains.

Many of the old garden names still carry this history. Some are Lepcha or Nepali place names, such as Tukvar and Pandam; others are British names given by early planters, such as Glenburn and Castleton. Several gardens still use bungalows and factories built in the nineteenth century, and a few original China bushes, now more than a century old, are said to remain on the oldest slopes, pruned low and still plucked.

The gardens needed thousands of workers, and the forests of the district were thinly peopled. Planters recruited labour mainly from eastern Nepal, and whole families came: Rai, Limbu, Tamang, Gurung, Magar and many others, who together formed the Nepali-speaking Gorkha community that is now the majority in the hills. Lepcha and Bhutia families, the older inhabitants, also worked on and around the estates.

Life on a garden was hard and closely controlled. Workers lived in garden lines, were paid partly in rations, and depended on the estate for housing, water and medical care. The Plantation Labour Act of 1951 set rules for housing, health and welfare that still shape the gardens. Wages and land rights remain live issues, and the history of tea labour sits close to the heart of the Gorkhaland movement. In 2017 a 104-day shutdown during the agitation stopped plucking through most of the second-flush and monsoon seasons.

Darjeeling tea is plucked as two leaves and a bud, by hand, from bushes that are mostly the China variety and newer clonal cultivars such as AV2. It is made by the orthodox method: the leaf is withered, rolled, oxidised, dried and sorted, never cut by the CTC machines used for most Indian tea. The year is divided into flushes, the growth spurts that follow rest or rain.

Grades on the label describe leaf size and quality, not taste. FTGFOP means Finest Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe, a whole-leaf tea with many golden tips; an added S for Special or a 1 marks the best lots. More useful is the garden name, the flush and the invoice or lot number, which tell you exactly where and when the tea was made.

For decades far more tea was sold as Darjeeling around the world than the hills could ever grow. The Tea Board of India fought back with a certification logo, a woman holding two leaves and a bud, and in 2004 Darjeeling tea became the first product in India to receive a Geographical Indication, the legal protection that ties a name to a place. The European Union later registered it as a protected geographical indication too.

Only tea grown and processed in the registered gardens of the Darjeeling hill areas may now use the name. Output has fallen in recent decades because of old bushes, climate stress, labour shortages and the 2017 shutdown, and it is now well under 10 million kg a year, less than 1 percent of India's tea. That scarcity is part of why a good first flush costs what it does.

Tea gardens are workplaces, not parks, and each estate sets its own rules for visitors. Several welcome guests for walks and tastings, and a few run homestays or bungalows. Go on a working morning, Monday to Saturday, between March and November, when pluckers are on the slopes and the factory is processing. From December to February the bushes are dormant and factories rest.

Easy visits we suggest:

• Happy Valley Tea Estate, a 3 km walk below Chowrasta: garden walk and, in season, a look at the factory; ₹100–300, indicative 2026.
• Makaibari, below Kurseong: garden walks and tastings, ₹200–500; one of the best-known estates in the hills.
• The gardens around Mirik, such as Thurbo, Okayti and Gopaldhara, seen from the road on the drive from Darjeeling.
• Glenburn, above the Rangeet river: a working estate with planters' bungalows for overnight guests, from about ₹35,000 a suite night with meals, indicative.
• Tea tasting rooms near Chowrasta and on Nehru Road, where you can compare flushes and gardens by the cup for ₹80–250.

Buy from a shop that lets you taste and that writes the garden, flush and year on the packet. A 100 g pack of a named garden's first flush costs roughly ₹400–1,500, indicative 2026, and the finest lots far more. Loose tea in big sacks at low prices labelled simply Darjeeling is usually blended with tea from the plains or Nepal.

Look for the Darjeeling logo on branded packs. Buy small quantities of two or three teas rather than a kilo of one, since Darjeeling tea loses its fragrance within a year. Store it in an airtight tin away from light. Brew first flush with water just off the boil, about 85–90 °C, for 3 minutes, and drink it without milk: that is how the planters and the tasters drink it, and it is the only way to find the flavour you paid for.