The botanist Robert Fortune was given a task by the British East India Company in 1848: to sneak live tea bushes out of China despite the emperor's severe edicts and plant them in the Himalayan foothills of West Bengal to develop a new tea industry under British control.
The heist took years to complete. The plants struggled to thrive in the 6,000-foot-high Indian soil. Darjeeling plantations, on the other hand, were producing some of the world's best teas by the end of the nineteenth century: vivid brews that reflected a meadow's worth of fruits and flowers, with a refined airiness that stood in stark contrast to India's brawny lowland teas. Darjeeling quickly became known as the "champagne of teas," and its reputation grew in the aftermath of the British colonial withdrawal.
Darjeeling, on the other hand, is in trouble today. Plantation agriculture has taken its toll on the soil during the last century and a half. To meet consumer demand, switching to organic producing methods is costly. The skilled profession of controlling an estate's production, long a prized vocation for Indians raised in the colonial system, is losing favor, and decades of labor union disputes have drastically reduced harvests during strikes.
However, only a few hours across the border in Nepal, a loose-leaf revolution is taking shape. Tea plants are being planted in the same steep, high-altitude regions that have given Darjeeling its legendary status. Without the baggage of Darjeeling's colonial past, entrepreneurial farmers and factory owners are creating unique tea flavors at a fraction of the cost, typically using younger, more robust plants that thrive in comparably better soil.
Nepali teas aren't sold at Starbucks, but they're becoming increasingly popular among specialty shops and online retailers in North America and Europe looking for unique teas from rising countries.
"Nepal and Darjeeling are so near together," said Jeni Dodd, 48, an American buyer and consultant for tea stores and cafés who leases an apartment in Kathmandu, Nepal, for regular trips. "There's no astringency or bite to it at all." They're big and bold, yet they're also smooth and approachable."
According to folklore, China's Daoguang Emperor handed Nepal's then-prime minister, Junga Bahadur Rana, a gift of tea plants in 1863; records suggest that production began in the country's eastern Ilam region, near the Indian border, shortly after Darjeeling's plantations were created.
White teas have been experimented with by Darjeeling farms in recent years, but the style has truly become a hallmark of Nepali creativity. The spring white buds from Nepali Tea Traders, a Massachusetts tea importer dedicated exclusively to Nepalese speciality teas, provide a drink as unique as white tea gets, evoking the flavor of sweet summer corn smeared in butter and thick enough to leave a film on your lips.
Unlike Darjeeling tea, which is cultivated on estates that own their land entirely, practically all Nepali tea is grown on small plots owned by individual farmers who sell the fresh leaves to companies. Small-batch outputs are imported by Nepali Tea Traders from an Ilam facility that purchases fresh leaf from a cooperative of 47 small-scale farmers.
The large number of stakeholders in Nepal's tea economy has made the sector difficult to organize, and critics in the Western tea industry blame this for Nepali producers' inability to maintain consistent quality year after year.