Category: History

After learning that Japanese beef was graded with a two dimensional system (A, B, C and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), I had thought I could work on the reason behind the different grades in tea (the most known being in the former English colonies and only for black teas).

To do so I began looking in my books on tea for evidences on why this system was in use and how it the other tea producing countries that did not follow it dealt with this topic. Let us just say for now that the other system combines geographical references and ways of preparing tea to produce a certain quality. However, I stopped when I found out a small reference about the tea produced in Tanzania, which had its origin in German colonisation.

I know the context nowadays is complicated to speak about such part of history and without ignoring the consequences of such occupation, I would like to focus on a small part of it: the introduction of tea.

As with most European countries (see there), Germany developed an approach based on an Agricultural Research Station in Anami that was grounded in 1902 and taken over by the British in 1920 when they were awarded that part of the former German East Africa. Although this research centre had a good reputation (for coffee or for its botany garden) as stated by William Nowell, new Director of the East African Agricultural Research Station “As you are all doubtless aware, we occupy the site and buildings of the Biological and Agricultural Institute, founded in 1902, which under the direction of the late Dr. Zimmermann rendered most valuable services to the colony of German East Africa. […] but we inherited a valuable library, a considerable herbarium, and plantations stocked with introduced economic plants.” (Proceedings of the Royal Society of Arts, Dominion and Colonies Sections from 24^th October, 1933), the British fired all its personal, probably out of fear that they would not be loyal to the Crown (the kind of things that was important in those years).

It seems that the first tea was planted in 1904 but didn’t leave the realm of experimentations before the second half of the 1920s (a recurring problem in these research stations be they in India or in Indochina is how long it took from experiments to real “commercial” use, perhaps a topic for another time). To increase the spread, a tea officer was appointed (I still need to find out what this is) and free seeds were given between 1930 to 1934 with a tea factory opening in 1930.

In 1934, 1,000 ha had been planted, producing 20 tons of processed tea, of which 9.3 were exported (Carr et al. 1988, Tea in Tanzania, Outlook on Agriculture, 17:18-22). I do wonder what happened to the remaining 10.7 tons. Were they drank in Tanzania? This seems quite unlikely.

The outbreak of World War II brings us another information as because of the presence of many German settlers (which must have returned after World War I or decided to remain), the British government decided to dispose them of their estates, which were acquired by a subsidiary of Brooke Bond, an English tea brand famous for PG Tips). The land must have been good for tea as the company began to plant more tea (the final results being that in 2010 29,000 tons produced of which 28,000 were exported).

However and surprisingly enough, some Germans were still there as I found out that a Mr Voigt, last (probably because of its age but I couldn’t find any other information on that part) German tea grower in the area retired in 1986 after 60 years living in Tanzania. He even wrote a book about his life, 60 Years in East Africa: Life of a Settler 1926 to 1986. I guess it contains some information on these plantations and how they fared through the years and could be compared to similar experience from British settlers in Kenya or Assam around the same time.

The question I didn’t answer was how did I learn about the grading of Japanese beef. Did you see my title? It is from a classical 1968 war movie with Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood about a “secret traitor” stuff and I thought it fitted the topic of this post to a T, so I selected it.

What? I didn’t answer the beef question… Let’s save it for another time.

I think that Goethe’s last words are more than suited to this rather obscure topic that I teased last time, tea in French Indochina. But perhaps I should start with some explanations for those unfamiliar with the history/geography of the world at the beginning of the 20^th century.

French Indochina was the result of a process beginning in the middle of the 19^th century with a series of military expeditions earmarked as punitive expeditions by France and Spain, leading to the occupation of the South of Vietnam and in 1887 to the creation of the Union of French Indochina.

Administrative map of French Indochina in 1937. Showing protectorates and provinces/districts by XrysD

Because of the distances involved and France not being overpopulated, this colony was seen as an economic one and not as a settlement one, meaning that “few” French went there and that the exploitation of natural resources was the priority (with most of the funding coming from taxes on the local people through monopoly on important products). For example, rice was the biggest exported product of French Indochina (both in volume and value), something that was unheard before (mostly because the former government and local people had no use for this kind of sales of goods but this is another topic, one that would lead us too far away from tea).

During the Roaring Twenties, France intended to diversify the French Indochina economy with the introduction of several new commodities to be produced but the Great Depression hurt it like in most colonies as the decline in prices and in exports meant less resources while the cost remained the same.

Rive Field by Halong Bay by Dinkum

But let’s not get too quickly to the end of the story.

As I said earlier, while looking for information on this topic, I found several old books and among them the Bulletin of the Economic Agency of Indochina, the representatives in France of the Governors-Generals of French Indochina acting also as a centre of information on said region, of promotion or of research on different topics. I accessed the Bulletins from 1928 to 1937 (I don’t know if it was published before (I have some doubts as it displays a 1^st year mark followed by “new series”) or after) looking for information on tea as it was quite often filled with articles on politics, on agriculture in the different provinces as well as analysis of the economical situation in the area or in the potential markets around it (like the Dutch East Indies known today as Indonesia) or a little further away (Poland). Obviously, the different Bulletins are written in a style and with ideas that are so 20s-30s but they are quite interesting.

From 1928 to 1933, it was edited every month and from 1934 on, it became quarterly, making it 76 issues of it In 43 of them, I found at least one article on tea, ranging from production statistics to full analysis of the tea sector in French Indochina or to news about foreign markets (including India and Ceylon).

Banknote from the Bank of Indochina

Before I get into more details about the bigger picture, here are some interesting/puzzling facts:

– tea at that time was still painted/flavoured by chemical products, be it in China or in French Indochina. Perhaps it was also done in other places?

– there seems to be some forgery of what is tea with the addition of other plants and herbs (with those guilty being obviously according to the Bulletin the foreign intermediaries) . The solution was to work on a kind of label (“Appellation d’Origine” in French), an idea that is still valid today.

– there were two kinds of producers: the natives (small gardens) and the French ones with bigger gardens with different processing methods.

First thing, if you read For all the tea in China: Espionage, Empire And The Secret Formula For The World’s Favourite Drink by Sarah Rose (I look at a specific aspect of it, here), you might remember that there were experimental stations in most colonies to experiment and help with the spread of new plants and techniques.

French Indochina had some and they experimented with tea plans but for an unknown reason stopped doing so in 1910 before getting back to it from 1922 on. Their work focused on the best species to be used (although this statement written in 1933 is in contradiction with something else written two years ago in the Bulletin, see a little further below) and they had 14 varieties under supervision in 1919, 24 in 1923 and 70 in 1933 but also on the best way to “design” a garden (with shadow, without, with other trees, the use of fertilizers…) or the way to process tea leaves.

For example, the plots shadowed by chine wood oil trees gave 932 kg of fresh leaves per hectare when shadowed and 1,306 when not; with copperpods, the results were respectively of 807 and 1,087. Without any further indication about the differences between the plots, one can’t drawn any further conclusions.

The main areas of production seemed to have been in almost all French Indochina but mostly (and without surprise) in the areas with hills like those of Quang Nam (a name that came back as a good producing area over the whole time period).

However, in spite of what had been written about the experimental stations, two “species” of tea trees were used and seemed according to the authors native to French Indochina (but see above): Thea sinensis Sims and Thea assamica Mast.

The production was split in two with the gardens of the native, with few access to factories to process in an industrial way their leaves (they did it by hand) and a few French gardens, owned either by some settlers or some companies selling teas in France (perhaps a research for another post?), which had full access to one of the three factories I found references to (but there might have been more of them).

What about the productivity? In Annam from a tea tree, you could extract 600 to 800 grams of green leaves, of which 4 kilos were needed to produce 1 kg of saleable tea (made of 60% of the thin quality and 40% of big leaves or waste). At the same time, the production in Java or India was of 600 to 1,000 kg of saleable tea per ha. Since I have no clue about the density of the tea trees in the gardens in Annam, I can’t do the maths. If you have any information, I will edit this part.

In the end, what was the overall production of French Indochina? I am not sure we can say anything but here are some numbers I could find (which might be a bit biased and would need to be checked with other sources).

The crest of Saigon from 1870 to 1975

The tea produced by the natives seems sometimes to have been only for their own consumption but at other times, they are said to be selling it… The truth is probably that they drank some of it but that they also sold it to either the trading firms, the factories or the above mentioned intermediaries. However every year around 2,000 tonnes of tea were imported from China for the use of the native upper class, of the Chinese and of the European. This seems a bit much and my feeling is that part of it might have been just in transit to Europe under the label of Indochina tea (but this is just a gut feeling with no proof to back it).

However, since my sources here were in a way official, I got the numbers of tons exported (at 80% to France) each year over most of the period. I hope you are well seated because the figures are a bit like a roller-coaster with no real explanations for now.

Tons of tea exported from French Indochina (in tons per year)

I also got the value in French Francs for the second half of this table but since it wasn’t complete, I didn’t use it here.

After this “short” introduction, I will try to go through other documents I found online to see if I find more information to share with you or to see if I can find more about the names and whereabouts of the tea companies involved in this business and this area. But this will be for a later article.

We all know about Robert Fortune and the British East India Company (for a really small summary, you can look there) in the spreading of tea from China to India (I will not go on the topic about the different Camellia sinensis varieties and their origins).

We all know that he went through a lot of efforts to find the tea bushes, to bring them to the coast, to ship them to India and then to Darjeeling.

I say through a lot of efforts as even at that time, sailors, warehousemen, customs officials… (but not botanists or should I say not all of them) knew few things or cared not about the way to take care of plants, seeds, resulting in heavy losses like the ones suffered by the first delivery Robert Fortune made as of the 10,000 seeds sent 100% had rotten and of the 13,000 young plants and only 80 were healthy enough to try to thrive in their new home.

And this result was achieved in spite of the use of up-to-date technology from Victorian times, the real unsung hero of the tea adventure: the Wardian case.

What is a Wardian case? It is a sealed container protecting the plants or the seeds that needed to be protected from salt, moisture… yet at the same time needed light, water… because it is a living being that can’t live without food, water, solar light. Through its glass top, it allowed the light to get in and the closed container allowed humidity to develop, humidity that gave the plants the water they need.

The name comes from its inventor Dr Ward, a physician interested in botanic. He made in 1829 an experiment with a glass bottle and some moths and seeds; the final result being that plants could live/grow (okay not like in wild nature but enough for other uses). Since at that time, the different European powers were all looking for ways to develop their colonies with new agricultural products (a trend that began the first time that someone somewhere saw a fruit and managed to bring it back alive to its own country), the Wardian case seemed perfectly suited to give an answer to this difficult problem: how to bring alive the seeds or plants.

Sometimes as with tea, this exportation of new agricultural products to a country was done through smuggling, because one country (China, France, the United Kingdom…) didn’t want to lose its competitive advantage by allowing someone else to produce the same products they had. This too is a really long story that can be seen in the history of the spice trade once the European managed to get into the Indian Ocean (for an example of this, you can look at the history of Mr Poivre (Pepper in French and yes, it was his true name))..

This case was not using any breaking technology but Dr Ward was the first one to reduce the scale of a greenhouse, freeing it from the need to add extra heating and water, as his case was self-regulated.

To be perfectly honest, Dr Ward might not have been the first to have the idea or to experiment with it (according to some a Scottish botanist might have created one around a decade earlier but I couldn’t find more than a tenuous reference) but he was the first to publish (if you want to protect your inventions, get a patent or publish) and he found an associate in Mr Loddiges, owner of a well-known plant nursery in London that traded with the whole world (it pays to have friends), which helped him spread the use of his invention with for example the shipping of plants from Australia to England in 1833 with almost all of them surviving.

This was what Robert Fortune used like so many others for sending his findings be them plants or seeds and an invention that was instrumental in bringing tea from China to India.

And after this explanation, you might wonder why the Wardian cases failed the first time. The explanation is simple: human curiosity. Custom officials eager to know what was so special about these cases did the only thing that shouldn’t have been done: break the seal and open the cases, breaking the process.