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58 Tea & Coffee Trade Journal | www.teaandcoffee.net P reviously, the Kingdom of Ahom under Burmese rule, Assam became part of British India after the Anglo-Burmese War (1824-26). It's unique and extreme geo-climatic con- figuration, located just below the eastern Himalayan foothills and crossed from east to west by the Brahmaputra with its many tributaries, have made the cultivation and accessibility of the lands a huge task that has taken a century. Remote from the main Indian sub- continent, Assam is surrounded by seven other states: Arunachal Pradesh, Nagalad, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, Meghalaya and Sikkim. All together they are known collectively as the Eight Sister States. They are connected with India through the Siliguri Corridor, a land strip of 14 miles, also called "the chicken's neck." With an area of 30,285 square miles, Assam, the central state, is equivalent to the size of Ireland and shares borders with Bhutan and Bangladesh, with China and Myanmar only about 50 mi away. With a population of 32 million peo- ple, Assam is home to more than one hundred ethnic groups and 45 languages spoken among them. This multi-ethnic situation, together with a tumultuous past, may be amongst the reasons for the recurrent social and political unrest. Furthermore, Assam suffers from ille- gal immigration from Bangladesh, high unemployment and much lower average income than the rest of the Indian states. Although there are the resources of oil and gas and the thriving tea industry, Assam seems to continuously lag behind the pace of the overall Indian economic growth. This context should be kept in mind when setting out for a tea journey to discover its more than 760 tea estates and the more than 100,000 small-holder tea gardens. Indigenous tea trees were identi- fied by the British explorer Robert Bruce in Upper Assam in 1823, and the first commercial plantations were started there in 1835, with the first consignment of Assam tea exported to England in 1838. From the 1830s onwards, the forests and wild-life lands have been progressively cleared for agriculture, rail and air trans- port have replaced the river steamers to and from the tea estates, and several big cities have sprung up, with Guwahati, the state's capital city home to the Assam Tea Auction and Jorhat, Assam Universities, and the Tea Research Institute, which was founded in 1911. Favorable Production According to the statistics published by the Tea Board of India, the Assam state tea production in 2013-14 amounted to 629,050 metric tons (mt), harvested from an acreage of 304,000 hectares (ha), which represents 52 percent of the total Indian tea volume, grown on 54 percent of the country's tea garden surface. This huge concentration of tea production in the Upper and Lower Brahmaputra Valley and the Cachar district of the Barak River Valley seems to demonstrate that the soil and climate conditions are very favorable. In the 1830s, it took several years for the scientific community in Britain to assess the botanical identification of the Assam tea tree as a tea plant, because it showed differences from the Chinese tea plant. Closing a long debate, the final deci- sion was to establish two distinct varieties: the camellia sinensis var. sinensis, with small, rigid leaves, a multi-stem growth pattern, apt to thrive in high altitude and to bear with frost; and the camellia sinensis var. assamica, with big soft leaves, prosper- ing in hot, humid low lying plains with a main stem growth pattern. It is interesting to note that this origin highlight: assam Assam: Heartland of the Indian Tea Industry Indigenous tea trees were discovered by the British in 1823 in the upper Assam Valley, starting off the world's biggest tea production area. After clearing the thick jun- gles and wild forests of Northeast India, the slopes above the mighty Brahmaputra River are covered with tea estates yielding around 12 percent of the global tea volume. By Barbara Dufrêne Photos courtesy of Barbara Dufrêne Upper Brahmaputra Valley, Assam