Travel for Tea

Few things speak to a Brit abroad more than a good cup to tea, so it’s quite a surprise that not every Englishman in the Indian Subcontinent has flocked to the Makaibari tea estate in Darjeeling. Nestled amongst hectares of virgin rainforest in the foothills of the Himalayas, Makaibari was the first tea estate in the world to be given Fair Trade certification and the first in Darjeeling to become 100% organic. What is more, in 2006 Makaibari set the world record price for the most expensive tea ever sold at auction. A tea garden where it is grown, will instantly tell you why. 

Makaibari is run as a business as, inevitably, it has to make money to survive. However, it is also an experiment in environmental and social sustainability, and it is this that sets it apart. Over 30 years of innovations have clearly produced a well-oiled machine, but the estate management, a joint body of predominantly female elected representatives from the workforce, is always keen to test out new ideas. Volunteers, everyone from gap year students to environmental researchers, agriculture experts and followers of the philosopher Rudolf Steiner, are encouraged to come to Makaibari, learn, share their skills, and then to go away and spread the estate’s way of life: a belief in the inter-dependence of everything.

In the neighbouring village of Kurseong there are a number of small hotels, but the best way to get to know the estate it to live there with a family. A proportion of profits from tea sales has been put into equipping and running homestays for volunteers and tourists alike. 21 families, spread through Makaibari’s seven villages, supplement their income by hosting guests at a reasonable rate of $25 per couple per night and including all meals. Each homestay has had a western-style toilet installed, so you’re safe from having to use a squat in the garden in the middle of the night.

Volunteers can get involved with every aspect of estate life. For those with an interest in conservation, tasks range from recording sightings of snow leopards and red pandas, to assessing the extend of bio-diversity in different parts of the estate. A tail-less amphibian, believed to be extinct for over 80 years, was discovered and identified at Makaibari last year, attracting interest from both the local press and CNN. Tree planting is an ongoing activity of vital importance as tree roots hold the soil together in an area otherwise prone to landslips. The tree planting programme seems to be working as Makaibari is the only tea estate in the region that has not suffered from landslides in recent years; elsewhere, as soon as the heavy monsoon rains fall, there are insufficient numbers of deep-rooted plants to prevent the soil from being washed away, taking with it people, their homes and livelihoods.

Women’s empowerment has been at the core of Makaibari’s development strategy from the very beginning. As mentioned previously, the joint management body is dominated by women and, unusually in the tea industry, the estate also employs female supervisors. Each household has been given two cows and access to a bio-gas converter to relieve women of the burden of collecting firewood for cooking, and it also provides them with an additional source of income as they can sell the manure back to the estate as organic fertiliser. Volunteers can help by providing training for would-be entrepreneurs, many of whom already take advantage of Makaibari’s micro credit scheme. Know-how on anything from production methods to computer literacy, book keeping and marketing is invaluable, and the estate’s women are incredibly keen to learn.

Education motivates both workers and their families at Makaibari and is well-supported by the management. A regular cycle of English speaking volunteers are required to teach English in the estate’s schools; regular conversation with a native speaker gives Makaibari’s students a real head start over their peers. Education also takes place outside the classroom. Volunteers recently designed posters and other visual aids explaining the importance of good hygiene in staying healthy and took them around the estate’s villages as a mini, touring exhibition.

Makaibari is 100% organic and has been since the late 1980s. In addition to the cow dung fertiliser, a number of other biodynamic preparations are used in the fields. These include stags’ bladders, cow horns, ground quartz and other natural, if unusual, products. Rudolf Steiner, the philosopher behind biodynamic agriculture, believed that this particular combination of fertilisers, spread on the fields at the right time of the month, would channel cosmic and earthly energy into the roots of the plants, making them stronger and healthier. 

At the end of a long day’s work which, though rewarding, is inevitably tiring, a walk through the estate is a balm for the soul. Dense, lush rainforest adjoins emerald green fields, both of which cling to the mountain precariously. In picking season (approximately March to October), lines of brightly clad women spiral through the fields like flocks of tropical birds, resplendent in pink, yellow and red. In the distance you can see the land fall suddenly away as it meets the dusty plains of northern India, its hazy horizon seemingly a world away from verdant Makaibari.

An Oriental Obsession: How the tea trade influenced European design

“That excellent, and by all physicians approved, China drink, called by the Chineans Tcha, by other nations Tay, alias Tee, is sold at the Sultaness Head Coffee-House, in Sweeting's Rents… It helpeth the headache, giddiness and heaviness thereof. It removeth the obstructions of the spleen...It prevents and cures agues, surfeits, and fevers by infusing a fit quantity of the leaf; thereby provoking a most gentle vomit and breathing of the pores, and hath been given with wonderful success….It is good for colds, dropsies, and scutvies, and expelleth infection.”                                                     
                                    Advert by Thomas Garraway in the Mercurious Politicus, 1658

When tea arrived in London in the 1650s it was heralded as a miracle cure-all, brought from exotic lands at the far ends of the earth to be the salvation of the English man. What Garraway and his contemporaries could not have anticipated was that their bitter tasting health drink would become an international phenomenon, influencing aspects of life from architecture to technology, dress-making and the decorative arts to theological debate. While a great deal of work has been done on the social impact of tea drinking and its impact on public health, very little has been done on the wider influence of the tea trade on European fashions.

Tea as a commodity is very light so additional cargoes had to be carried as ballast on the ships that brought the tea from Canton and around the Cape of Good Hope to Europe. The most obvious choice was Chinese porcelain which, in the form of tea sets and dinner services, was the perfect accompaniment to shipments of tea. Porcelain was much admired for its strength, fineness and beautiful glazes but the secret of its manufacture was closely guarded by the Chinese. From the time of Marco Polo rumours had abounded of its supposed ingredients – egg shells and bones to name but two – and the techniques required to make it, but it would not be until 1709 that Europeans mastered porcelain making for themselves. In the meantime porcelain, or ‘chinaware’ as it was more commonly called, could only be acquired from direct China.

Chinaware, as with tea, was a great hit amongst society figures in London, Paris and Amsterdam, so much so that in 1659 alone 56,7000 pieces were ordered to be shipped to Holland. European customers had certain expectations for their new Chinese goods: they should be in a supposedly Chinese style but still appealing to European tastes. Chinoiserie was born. Where Chinese factories led the way producing new designs to appeal to the European market, European sprung up in Meissen, Delft, and Stafford, painting their porcelain and similar wares with scenes of an idealised China. The blue and white Willow pattern, inspired by a non-existent Chinese prototype, became an instant hit and made its way into fashionable homes everywhere.

Chinese porcelain and pieces in a Chinese style were considered the height of sophistication and so had to be displayed for all to see. Lacquered cabinets, bamboo dressers and furniture painted with exotic scenes and oriental figures were considered the perfect way to show off chinaware and so, as with the porcelain itself, both the import of Chinese originals and the production of European imitations increased.

Drinking Chinese tea from a Chinese tea set and sat upon supposedly Chinese furniture, it is hardly a surprise that the next step was to be the Chinese room so that one might have the complete, ‘authentic’ Chinese experience. Wallpaper featuring Chinese scenes, not dissimilar to those in the willow pattern, were widely produced, oriental silks hung from the windows and covered furniture, and woodblock prints and watercolours finished off the oriental look. The most famous rooms of this kind still in existence are the Chinese House at Potsdam, and the Brighton Pavilion, the epitome of the Chinoiserie style.

Two factors led the Chinoiserie style to spread outdoors across fashionable parklands and gardens. Firstly, both the wealthy and their garden designers felt an urge to recreate at home the oriental scenes with which they had become so familiar. The pagoda in Kew Gardens is perhaps the most famous example of Chinese buildings being transposed into a very European context although, perhaps more entertaining, is the suggestions of one Sir George Sitwell  that all of the cows on his estate be stencilled with a blue Chinese pattern so that they complement his many garden works and follies. Much to the disappointment of Sir George, the animals in question refused to oblige and he was forced to abandon the scheme. Secondly, unlike coffee, tea was seen to be a drink for all the family. Neither pubs nor coffee houses were fit places for respectable women and children to assemble and so purpose-built tea gardens were built so that tea may be enjoyed in suitable, oriental-themed surroundings. The Vauxhall Tea Garden was opened to the public in the late 17^th century and was one of London’s most popular attractions for nearly 200 years. Guests paid a small entrance fee and were treated to concerts, dances and theatrical performances, as well as the perfect environment to socialise.

Whether hosting a tea party at home or visiting a city tea garden, meeting over tea was the perfect opportunity for a society woman to reveal her affluence and taste to her contemporaries. Tea gowns made of chintz – hand-painted Indian calico – were a popular choice, as were oriental-inspired outfits such as silk kimonos. The latter were inevitably accessorised with fans, gloves and chop sticks to complete the look. These eccentric outfits caught the attention of artists such as Monet, Whistler and Degas, who were inspired by the colours and textures of the clothes but also by the exoticism they represented in the East. Whistler’s 1864 painting La Princess du Pays de Porcelaine reveals how fascination with the Orient had become entrenched in Europe’s fine art as well craftsmanship and flights of fancy. 

   
 

The Price of Tea

The Darjeeling district of West Bengal clings to the southern slopes of the Himalayas, nestled between Nepal, Bangladesh and India. Best known for the 10,000 tonnes of premium grade tea it produces each year, the region is wholly dependent on the tea industry for survival. Tea production comes at a high environmental price, however, and new strategies are required to protect the hillsides, forests and fauna from destruction. Numbers of red pandas, snow leopards, Himalayan black bears, Tibetan wolves, deer, wild dogs and civet are all declining due to deforestation and the encroachment of man.

There are over 90 tea estates in Darjeeling with some 22,000 hectares of land under tea cultivation. Commercial planting began in Darjeeling in 1841 with plants introduced from China, and since then large areas of virgin rainforest have been cleared to expand the tea plantations. Tea can be grown up to 7000 ft and terracing is widely used to maximise space on the hillsides and provide tea pickers with easy access to the bushes. The removal of tree cover and preference for terraced estates would not be such a problem if it were not for the fact that Darjeeling receives an annual rainfall of 110.9 inches. Almost a third of this falls in July alone, taking with it the top soil and causing devastating land slips. Not only does this wipe out fields of tea but also homes, roads and wildlife habitats. The desire to increase cultivation is in fact threatening the very survival of the hillsides that support the tea industry. 

The only way to stem the destruction of habitats in Darjeeling is to take a wider, more ‘holistic’ view of how a tea estate should be run; financial gain cannot be the sole priority if the industry is to survive in Darjeeling long-term. Rajah Banerjee, owner of the Makaibari Tea Estate, is spearheading a new approach to tea production and has made a name for himself across the subcontinent (and further afield) as one of India’s ‘Green Heroes’. Rajah runs Makaibari in accordance with the principles of bio-dynamism, believing that healthy soil, diverse flora and fauna, a satisfied community and high-quality crop production go hand in hand.

When he took control of the estate in the 1970s the first thing that Rajah did was to stop the clearing of trees for the expansion of tea planting. Today 2/3 of the 1574 acre estate is still under virgin rainforest, which provides habitats for wildlife including endangered snow leopards, red pandas and wolves, and helps keep the hillside intact; not a single landslip is visible in Makaibari in stark contrast with neighbouring estates. The rainforest provides a diverse and regular supply of vegetable matters that can be spread as mulch between the tea plants.  The ground between the tea plants is never weeded (a practice known as perma-culture) and so they break down with the added mulch into a compost rich in minerals, it protects the soil underneath from the assault of wind and rain, and it also provides a fertile breeding ground for insects. A giant earthworm unseen for the past 120 years has made its reappearance in Makaibari’s soils, and the Tea Deva, a variant of the Preying Mantis that is camouflaged to accurately imitate a tea leaf, has evolved on the estate. 

Makaibari’s workers, all of whom are stakeholder partners in the estate, are encouraged to take individual responsibility for their environment. Instead of stripping the forests for firewood each family cares for a cow, whose manure is added to biogas converters to provide fuel for cooking and can also be spread on vegetable gardens as fertiliser. Workers are given financial incentives to bring live specimens of rare insects and invertebrates to the attention of management so that they can be examined by experts before re-release back into the estate. This has allowed study to take place of breeding habits, preferred habitats, population numbers and so on. 

Rajah and his workers encourage diversity of organisms at Makaibari by using only organic fertilisers and no pesticides. The estate was the first in Darjeeling to be certified as organic (1988) and since then many others have followed in their tracks, recognising the appeal of organic farming to consumers and also its importance for good environmental practice. The alternative fertilisers used on Makaibari are all recommended in the theories of Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian Philosopher challenged to rejuvenate Europe’s soils after the ravages of WWI. They include cow manure, a not uncommon choice for a natural fertiliser, but also more unconventional products such as ground quartz, oak bark, cow horns and stag bladders. Whatever the theoretical reasons behind their use, on the Makaibari estate this unorthodox approach is certainly paying dividends: a Makaibari white tea has held the world record price for tea sold at auction ever since 2006 and soil samples taken on the estate have shown higher nitrate levels and greater biodiversity than anywhere else in Darjeeling. 

Photos C. Tracing Tea 2008