Tea Production
China and Japan both cultivated tea for several hundred years, but China was the only one to export it. Although India is one of the greatest tea producing nations today, tea was not cultivated there until the nineteenth century. Tea is indigenous to India, but the English did not realize it because of their obsession with China. The Commissioner of Assam, in the 1830’s, ordered the dense forests cleared to make way for tea planting. Thus began the cultivation of some of the world’s greatest black teas fittingly named Assam and Darjeeling (named for the state in India).
Just off the tip of India is the tea producing island Sri Lanka, formerly known as Ceylon. Until the 1880’s very little tea was grown in Ceylon. In fact, coffee was the major crop. However, when a parasite infestation destroyed the island’s coffee crops, and land prices bottomed out, Thomas Lipton bought four tea plantations and revolutionized the tea industry. Today, most of the Ceylon teas are used for the instant or filter bag tea industry.
Tea cultivation spread to other countries like Taiwan, Indonesia, and Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda and Zaire in Africa. A latecomer to tea cultivation, Africa grows some of the world’s best teas, highly sought after by traders who use them to blend and upgrade teas from other origins. Some tea trade houses use small quantities of high quality tea to improve the quality of low-grade tea. Tea is grown in many of the same places where coffee can be found.