The Scots are coming
For thousands of years, from the very beginnings of tea production, China was the only show in town. Every tea leaf brought to Europe to fuel our growing obsession with a daily cuppa came from plants grown in China, and leaf processed in China. But two hundred years ago that began to change, with tea cultivation being developed in new countries, and it was Scottish pioneers who played an enormous part in that.
The Production of Tea, 1790-1800, Guangzhou, China (CC)
From the mid-seventeenth century, one group of traders had the monopoly on importing all shipments of tea into Britain. That was the East India Company, and by the end of the 18th century a significant number of the Company’s employees and traders were Scottish. These traders would travel to international ports in China, buy tea directly and ship it back to Britain, but by the early nineteenth century they were desperate to find alternatives to China’s dominant position in the tea market.
Two parallel endeavours drove this change. Robert Fortune, a trained gardener from the Scottish Borders, was sent by the East India Company to China to bring back tea plants and, perhaps more importantly, the knowledge of how to process the leaves into tea. Until then, no westerner had been allowed to see China’s tea fields and processing methods. Fortune travelled extensively in China, disguising his appearance and taking secret notes, and finally returned to India with samples of tea plants and a number of Chinese workers who knew how to make tea.
Meanwhile, in northern India, Scots brothers Robert and William Bruce had been developing cultivation of the indigenous Assam tea variety. Local peoples had traditionally used the leaves as a food and medicine but it was the Bruce brothers that worked out it was a variety of the same species of plant that was being made into tea in China. By 1839, the first batch of tea made from Assam plants was sent for sale to the London tea auction, where it was received positively.
As tea cultivation in India gained interest, the Superintendent of the hill station of Darjeeling, Archibald Campbell, a native of the Scottish island of Islay, began to experiment with growing the plant on the steep slopes of the area. Soon, following his lead, other tea gardens were planted, and by 1870, some 8,000 workers were employed in the Darjeeling tea industry.
In 1866, a young Scotsman called James Taylor visited Darjeeling from the island of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and began to plant tea in Ceylon the following year at the Loolecondera estate. By 1872 he had built a fully functioning tea factory and the tea industry spread quickly across Ceylon in the decades that followed, as farmers looked for alternatives to the island’s previous main crop, coffee, which had been hit by disease. By the 1890s, another Scot, leading entrepreneur and grocery magnate Thomas Lipton, invested heavily in Ceylon tea plantations and secured a cost-effective supply of tea for his customers, ‘direct from the tea garden to the teapot’.
By Unknown author - Tropical agriculturist and magazine of the Ceylon Agricultural Society. XIV, Public Domain,
Most of the tea drunk in Britain today comes from the vast tea estates of East Africa, now centred on Kenya, but with growers in neighbouring countries too. Its beginnings came in Malawi, now the number two producer in East Africa, but also a country with long connections with Scotland. It was a Scottish coffee planter, Henry Brown, who moved to the country in 1891 from Ceylon after the demise of coffee cultivation there, and saw two tea plants growing in the grounds of the Church of Scotland mission in Blantyre. He asked to take some seed and gradually converted his farm from coffee to tea. From there, the Malawi tea industry grew, and by 1940 there were more than 18,000 acres of tea growing there.
So, across the centuries there has been a rich connection between Scotland and the production of tea, with the creation of new tea-growing regions by intrepid pioneers, often against the odds and after multiple setbacks. In recent years, the arrival of tea growing in Scotland itself is just the latest chapter in that story.