Land of Tea Herbs || Darjeeling || Himalayas Mountain || Heritage Railway || Kangchenjunga Peak.

Darjeeling is a city and a municipality in the Indian state of West Bengal. It is located in the Lesser Himalayas at an elevation of 2,000 metres (6,700 ft). It is noted for its tea industry, its views of Kangchenjunga, the world's third-highest mountain, and the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Darjeeling is the headquarters of the Darjeeling district which has a partially autonomous status called Gorkhaland Territorial Administration within the state of West Bengal. It is also a popular tourist destination in India.

The recorded history of the town starts from the early 19th century when the colonial administration under the British Raj set up a sanatorium and a military depot in the region. Subsequently, extensive tea plantations were established in the region and tea growers developed hybrids of black tea and created new fermentation techniques. The resultant distinctive Darjeeling tea is internationally recognized and ranks among the most popular black teas in the world. The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway connects the town with the plains and has some of the few steam locomotives still in service in India.

Darjeeling has several British-style private schools, which attract pupils from all over India and a few neighbouring countries. The varied culture of the town reflects its diverse demographic milieu comprising Lepcha, Khampa, Gorkha, Newar, Sherpa, Bhutia, Bengali and other mainland Indian ethno-linguistic groups. Darjeeling, alongside its neighbouring town of Kalimpong, was the centre of the Gorkhaland social movement in the 1980s and summer 2017.

DARJEELING.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

Camellia sinensis was first planted in the Darjeeling area in 1841 by Archibald Campbell who was working for the East India Company in this jungle-covered, sparsely-populated area to develop a hill station for use by the British stationed in Kolkata. At the time, the British were seeking a source of tea outside of China and had both recently discovered a second variety of the plant growing in the wilderness of Assam and smuggled seeds and plantings out of China. The Chinese variety (sinensis) was planted in Saharanpur Botanical Gardens and propagated in other Himalayan gardens where Campbell had acquired seeds from Kumaun via Nathaniel Wallich. While the original plantings succeeded, Campbell moved to Lebong where he and several other residents planted a new batch, in 1846, of both varieties (sinensis and assamica).A year after planting the first three Company experimental tea gardens in 1852, at Tukvar, Steinthal and Alubari, they reported having 2,000 tea plants and Robert Fortunewas sent to provide an expert opinion on the "suitableness of the climate and soil of the Hills for the cultivation and manufacture of Tea". While both varieties grew, the sinensis variety was flourishing, as it was found assamica preferred warmer and wetter growing conditions while sinensis had been selectively cultivated for higher elevations. The first commercial tea gardens were established in 1856 and by 1866 there were 39 tea gardens in Darjeeling, including the Makaibari Tea Estate which had established the region's first processing factory for withering and oxidation, necessary for the product to survive the months long journey down to Kolkata and over to Britain. Success of assamica at the nearby Dooars-Terai tea gardens led to infrastructure investments that would be extend up the Darjeeling Himalayan hill region, allowing more machinery and supplies to reach the tea gardens.Darjeeling's population had grown from less than a 100 in the 1830s to 95,000 people with 100 tea gardens in 1885, predominately Indian Gorkha and Lepcha migrants from Nepal, Bhutanese and Sikkim, as the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, the use of steamships and the Suez Canal reduced shipping times.

Darjeeling tea workers, 1890

After the British nationalized the East India Company it only ever leased the lands to tea garden owners on 30 year basis and maintained the practice of only permitting 40% to be used for tea crops with 40% being left natural and 20% for housing and facilities. Following Indian independence in 1947, practices shifted as British began to sell their stakes in the gardens to Indians and the 1953 Tea Act put the tea industry under the regulatory jurisdiction of the Tea Board of India. With more area being opened for tea crops at the expense of natural area and the introduction of pesticides and fertilizers, yields increased from 7.8 to 10 million kilograms between 1950 and 1960, though this came at the cost of increased soil instability. Despite a limited exemption for the tea industry the 1973 Foreign Exchange Regulations Act the new foreign ownership limitations resulted in Indian nationals becoming majority owners of the Darjeeling tea industry. As the Soviet Union replaced the United Kingdom as India's largest tea customers, Darjeeling gardens were supplemented with assamica plantings to accommodate their preference for that variety.

Production methods again shifted in the 1990s as Western Europe and Japan replaced the collapsed Soviet Union as Darjeeling's principal customers and new garden managers were bringing the principles of biodynamic agriculture to their practices. In 1988, Makaibari became the first tea estate in India to attain organic certification, followed by Tumsong, and the first to gain biodynamic certification, in 1993, followed by Ambootia. Darjeeling could not compete with other tea regions in terms of quantity or price (due to its geographic limitations, remoteness, slower plant growth, inability to mechanize, among other factors) or so it focused on quality. While the certifications provided an indication of a superior product, its practices also helped the gardens cope with erosion, slope instability and soil depletion that had become prevalent with pesticide and artificial fertilizer applications on the rainy hillsides. Yields had reached 14 million kilograms in 1994 but, with organic practices over much of the tea gardens, yields fell to an average of 9 million kilograms in the late-2010s. In pursuit of differentiating Darjeeling tea, the Darjeeling Planter's Association had been established, in 1983, to promote the product in other countries and a logo was copyrighted, consisting of the side profile of a woman holding two leaves and a bud and registered it in various countries and then, once it was eligible, internationally in the Madrid system. In 2000, the Tea Board created new licensing requirements for Darjeeling tea exporters, including product authentication and a prohibition on blending, which allowed them to issue certificates of origin. In 2004, Darjeeling tea became India's first product to receive legal geographical indication protection under the World Trade Organization's TRIPS Agreement and in 2011 it was given Protected Geographical Indication status in the European Union.