The Slow History of Chai | Boring History to Fall Asleep To, 80 Min, Soft Fire (Video)

Transcript

Before we begin

This is a slow history of chai, told to fall asleep to. It is meant to be a little boring. Lie down somewhere safe, never while driving. Nothing here is medical treatment; sleep trouble that goes on for months deserves a doctor.

You do not need to remember any of this. There will be no test. If you lose the thread, let it go. If you fall asleep in the middle of a sentence, that is the sentence doing its job.

Let the pillow take the weight of your head. Let your hands rest wherever they have landed. Take one slow breath in, and let it out a little more slowly.

Somewhere in the room there is the sound of a small fire settling. Let it stay in the background. We will talk quietly over it, about a leaf, and a drink, and how one became the other.

We will go slowly. Slower than a lesson. Slower than a story. More like someone turning the pages of an old book in the next room, reading a line here and there, half to themselves.

A leaf in the hills

Tea begins with a plant. One plant, with a long Latin name, Camellia sinensis. It is an evergreen shrub, if left to itself a small tree, with glossy, slightly toothed leaves and small white flowers that nobody bothers to pick.

Every cup of tea in the world, the pale kind, the black kind, the green kind, the kind boiled with milk at a railway station, comes from the leaves of this one species. Different handling, same leaf.

Left alone, the plant would grow taller than a person and flower in the cool months, small white petals around a yellow centre, a little like a wild rose that has forgotten to be pink. In a garden it is never left alone. It is pruned flat, waist high, so that it spends its strength on leaves instead.

A tea bush can live a very long time. There are bushes in the old gardens that were planted by people whose grandchildren are now old, and they are still being picked, still sending up new leaves after every rain, as if nothing had changed.

The roots go deep. The stems go grey and knotted. Every few years the whole bush is cut hard back, almost to the ground, and it sulks for a season and then comes again, green and soft, as if it were young.

The plant grows wild in a damp, hilly stretch of country where the borders of several modern nations meet. Mist in the mornings. Warm rain for months. Hills folded into hills. The kind of place where a leaf can take its time.

Nobody knows exactly where the first person picked a leaf and dropped it into hot water. It was so long ago that the knowing has worn away. What is left is the habit, passed from one pair of hands to the next, for longer than anyone wrote anything down.

There are two main kinds of the plant. One has small leaves and likes cooler slopes. The other has larger leaves and likes heat and heavy rain. The large-leaved one is named after the place where the world first noticed it: Assam.

Botanists call it the Assam variety. The people who lived among those plants did not call it anything so formal. They simply picked the leaves, dried them, and brewed them, and had done so for a very long time.

The two kinds have been crossed and mixed so often now that most garden bushes are a little of both. But the old difference is still there if you look. Small leaf for the cool hills. Big leaf for the warm, wet plain.

Imagine one of those leaves. Dark green, a little leathery, with a smell when you crush it that is grassy and faintly bitter. Hold it in your mind for a moment, and then let it go.

That is really the whole of the story, in one leaf. Everything else is just the leaf moving from place to place, and people deciding, slowly, what to do with it.

The Singpho and a traveller

In the hills of upper Assam lived, and live, a people called the Singpho. They knew the tea plant well. They cut the leaves, dried them in the sun or over smoke, packed them tightly into lengths of bamboo, and brewed them when they wanted something warm.

Their tea was not sweet. It was not milky. It was a dark, strong, smoky drink, made from leaves they had grown up beside. It did not need a name, because everyone around them already knew what it was.

Picture a length of bamboo, as thick as a wrist, packed tight with dried leaf and sealed at the end. It could be carried for days. When it was opened, the smell of smoke and leaf came out all at once, and a handful was dropped into boiling water.

Into those hills, in the eighteen twenties, came a Scottish trader called Robert Bruce. He was there to trade, not to study plants. But while he was among the Singpho he was shown the shrub they brewed, and he was told it was tea.

He would have travelled by river for part of the way, on a flat boat poled along the brown water, with the hills rising blue on either side and the heat lying on the deck like a blanket. Days of that. Then a path up into the trees.

This was interesting to him, because at that time nearly all the tea drunk in Britain came from China, and the merchants of the East India Company very much wished it did not. A tea plant growing wild inside their own territory was worth a second look.

Robert Bruce did not live long after that. His brother, Charles Alexander Bruce, carried the matter on. He collected leaves and seeds. He sent samples to botanists in Calcutta, who looked at them for a long time and argued about whether this was true tea or merely a cousin.

It took years. Samples went back and forth. Letters were written in slow ink. Eventually the botanists agreed: it was tea, the same species as the Chinese plant, but a different variety, with bigger leaves and a taste all its own.

A committee was formed, as committees are. It sent people to look at the plants where they grew. It wrote reports. The reports were read by other people, who wrote further reports. All the while the bushes in the hills went on growing, unaware that they were being discussed.

Nothing about this was quick. Think of the slowness of it. A leaf in a bamboo tube in a Singpho village. A letter on a river boat. A botanist turning a dried specimen over under a lamp. Seasons passing between each step.

Gardens in the plain

Once the leaf was agreed to be tea, the East India Company wanted gardens. The first attempts were untidy. Seeds were brought from China and planted in the heat of the plains, where they did not thrive. Cattle wandered into one of the earliest nurseries and ate it.

Slowly, the planters learned to work with the local large-leaved plant instead, the one that had been growing there all along. It liked the heat. It liked the rain. It had been waiting.

Assam is a wet place. The rains come in the middle of the year and stay for months, and the river rises and spreads across the plain and goes down again, leaving the soil dark and soft. The tea plant was made for that. It drinks the rain and makes leaf out of it.

In time a small shipment of Assam tea was packed into chests and sent down the river, and across the sea, and sold at auction in London. People tasted it and found it strong and dark and good with milk. More chests followed.

Think of those first chests. Wooden boxes lined with thin metal, nailed shut, stencilled on the side, stacked in the hold of a sailing ship for months. The leaf inside, dry and dark and patient, going a very long way to be tasted by strangers.

A company was formed to grow it. Then another. Land was cleared along the Brahmaputra, the great slow river of Assam, and planted in rows. Workers came from far away to pick the leaves, and many of them never went home. That part of the story is not a gentle one, and we will not pretend otherwise. We will simply let it rest here, acknowledged, and move on softly.

Picture a tea garden in the plain. Low bushes, trimmed flat on top so that the new leaves come up within reach. Rows that run away toward a line of trees. Shade trees standing here and there like tall, patient guards.

The bushes are planted close, so their tops grow together into one flat green table that stretches away in every direction. From a distance it looks like a lawn. Up close it is a thicket of grey stems with a thin bright layer of new growth on top.

Early morning. Mist on the bushes. The pickers move slowly along the rows, taking the top two leaves and the bud, two leaves and a bud, two leaves and a bud, and dropping them over their shoulder into a basket on their back.

The new leaves are soft and pale and a little sticky. A picker can take them without looking, by touch alone, the fingers finding the right place to pinch. The basket fills slowly. Nobody counts the leaves. There are far too many to count.

When the sun is high the picking stops. The baskets are weighed under a shade tree. Then the pickers go home to eat, and the bushes stand in the heat and quietly grow the next flush.

The leaves are carried to a long shed and spread out to wilt. Then they are rolled, so the juices come to the surface. Then they are left in the warm air to darken. Then they are dried with heat until they are crisp and black. Then they are sorted and packed. That is all black tea is.

The shed is dim and smells of hay and cut grass. The leaves lie in long shallow troughs with warm air moving under them, and over several hours they go limp and lose their shine. A worker walks the length of the trough every so often, turning the leaf with a flat hand.

Then the leaf is rolled, in the old days between the palms of the hands and now by slow machines that turn and press it, so that the cell walls break and the juice comes to the surface. The leaf darkens as the air gets at it, green to copper to brown, the way a cut apple does, only slower.

Wilt. Roll. Darken. Dry. Sort. Pack. The same five or six slow steps, repeated every day of every season, in every garden, for a very long time.

If you were to stand at the door of one of those sheds in the evening, you would smell it before you saw anything: a warm, sweet, slightly bready smell, like a kitchen where something has been baking all day and has just been taken out.

Up into the hills

Meanwhile, to the west of Assam, the hills rose steeply toward the high mountains, and in those hills the British had begun to build a small town where officers could escape the heat. The town was Darjeeling.

The road up to the town climbs through forest at first, then through bamboo, then into cloud. The air cools with every bend. By the time you reach the ridge you have left the plain so far below that it has become a haze, and you need a shawl.

A doctor there, Archibald Campbell, planted tea seeds in his garden, more or less to see what would happen. The plants grew. The cool, misty slopes suited the small-leaved Chinese variety much better than the plain had.

Think of that for a moment. A doctor in a hill town, a long way from anywhere, pressing a few seeds into the soil of his own garden and walking away, not knowing that whole hillsides would one day follow.

Other residents tried their hand. Seeds were sown at different heights, on different slopes, and the ones that did well were noted. Over a couple of decades the hobby became an industry, and the slopes around the town filled with tea.

Darjeeling tea is grown very high up, far higher than Assam, on slopes so steep that the pickers work almost at the angle of a ladder. The bushes grow slowly in the thin, cool air, and the leaf they give is lighter in colour and more delicate in taste.

The weather there is almost always damp. Clouds come up the valley in the afternoon and sit in the tea like sheep in a field, and the leaves stay wet for days together. The pickers wear plastic over their shoulders and work in the mist, and the mist moves slowly past them while they work.

Imagine standing on one of those slopes in the late afternoon. Cloud drifting through the rows below you. A bell somewhere far down the valley. The smell of wet leaves and wood smoke. Nothing to do but stand and look.

To carry the tea down from those hills, a small railway was built, with a very narrow track and little blue engines that climb in loops and zigzags up the mountainside. It still runs. It is slow, which is the whole point of it.

Before the railway, the tea came down on the backs of people and ponies, along paths cut into the hillside, chest by chest, for days. The little train did not make the hills any less steep. It only made the slowness more comfortable.

Picture that little train, rocking gently, taking two hours to climb what a car does in one. Steam, or diesel now, drifting back along the carriages. Tea gardens on both sides. Children waving. Nobody in a hurry.

At one point the track makes a full loop over itself, climbing all the way round so that the engine passes above the carriages it was pulling a minute before. At other places it runs backwards up a short zigzag and then forwards again, gaining height in slow, patient steps.

Villages come right up to the line. The train passes the open doors of houses, close enough to see a pan on a stove, a child on a step, washing on a wire. It slows, and whistles, and people step aside without looking up, and it rolls on.

Once, near the top, the track crosses the road and runs along the middle of the bazaar, between the shops, and the stallholders lift their baskets of oranges out of the way and set them down again after the last carriage has passed.

Let the rocking of that train settle into your body for a moment. Side to side. Slow. Climbing without effort.

Tea goes to the stations

By the end of that century, more of Britain's tea came from India than from China. The gardens of Assam and Darjeeling, and the hills of Ceylon further south, had done what the merchants wanted.

Ceylon, the island to the south, had its own quiet story: coffee planted first across the hills, then lost to a leaf disease, then the same hills planted again with tea. Another slow turning. Another leaf taking over from the one before.

But here is a quiet fact worth lying with for a moment. Almost none of that tea was drunk in India. It was grown in India, picked in India, packed in India, and sent away. The people who grew it mostly did not drink it.

That changed slowly, in the early years of the next century, and it changed on purpose. The growers wanted a market closer to home, and they set out to make one.

An association of tea growers encouraged factories and mills and mines to give their workers a tea break. They set up stalls. And, most lastingly, they helped small vendors sell hot tea at railway stations all along the growing network of lines.

Imagine one of those early stations. A long platform under a tin roof. The smell of coal smoke and hot iron. A man with a brass urn and a stack of clay cups, calling out one word, over and over, as the train slows.

The train slows. Windows slide down with a rattle. Hands come out, holding coins. The man with the urn moves along the platform at exactly the pace of the train, pouring as he goes, a thin brown stream from a height into each cup, never spilling.

The cup is handed up. The coin is handed down. The train is already moving again. On the platform the man turns and walks back to his stool to wait for the next one, which will not come for an hour.

A thousand platforms like that. A thousand men with urns. The same word called out at the same pace at every one, so that a traveller crossing the whole country heard it, over and over, like a slow bell marking the hours of the trip.

Chai. The word itself had travelled a long way to reach that platform. It began, long before, as the Chinese word for tea, cha. It passed through Persian as chay. It settled into the languages of the subcontinent as chai, and there it stayed.

The vendors were supposed to brew the tea the way the growers wanted: plain, strong, a little milk, a little sugar, so that plenty of leaf was used and plenty was sold.

The vendors had other ideas. Leaf was expensive and milk was cheap, so they used more milk. Sugar made it go further, so they used more sugar. And since the kitchens of the subcontinent had always warmed milk with spices, they put the spices in too.

Nobody decided this at a meeting. One vendor on one platform put a little more milk in, and the cup was nicer, and the next day he did it again. Down the line, another did the same. It spread the way habits spread, one cup at a time, without anyone noticing it was happening.

Cardamom, crushed in the hand. A knob of ginger, bruised with the back of a spoon. Sometimes cloves, or a stick of cinnamon, or a few peppercorns. Boiled together with the leaves and the milk until the whole pan went the colour of wet sand.

Every region leaned a different way. Somewhere the ginger was heavier. Somewhere the cardamom. Somewhere the milk was boiled so long it turned pink and a pinch of salt went in instead of sugar. Somewhere the tea was left strong and the milk was only a cloud. All of it was chai.

The growers disapproved. Less tea per cup meant less tea sold. But there was nothing to be done about it. The people had tasted this version, and they preferred it, and that was the end of the argument.

So the drink that was planted to be sold abroad became, by a long and slightly accidental road, the drink of the platform, the office, the shop doorway and the kitchen. Masala chai. Milk tea. Doodh patti. Just chai.

It became the thing that was offered before anything else. Before a question, before a price, before bad news or good. A visitor at the door is not asked whether they want chai. The pan is already on.

Let the sound of that word rest in the room. Chai. One syllable. Warm. The same in a hundred towns.

The pan and the cup

Think about how it is made, slowly, as if watching someone else do it in a small kitchen on a cold morning.

Water goes into a pan with a long handle. The pan has been used for this so often that the inside has a faint brown ring where the tea always stops. The water begins to warm.

The kitchen is small. One window. A shelf of steel tins, each with a different lid, each dented in its own way. The one with the tea leaves is nearest the stove, because it is opened most.

A spoon of leaf goes in. Dark, small, broken leaf, the kind that gives up its colour quickly. The water turns amber, then red, then a deep brown. A pod of cardamom is cracked between the thumb and the edge of the counter and dropped in.

Milk is poured in from a steel glass, and the colour softens all at once, from dark brown to a pale, warm tan. Sugar follows. The pan is left to come up to the boil.

Here is the part that cannot be hurried. The milk rises. It climbs the sides of the pan in a soft, creamy foam. Just before it spills, the pan is lifted off the heat, and the foam sinks back. Then it goes on again. Up it comes. Off. Down it goes. On.

Anyone who has made chai knows the small lean toward the pan at this moment. Not anxious. Just present. The eyes on the foam. The hand already near the handle. The rest of the world put down for a minute.

Up, and off. Down, and on. Three times, four times, five. Each rise a little slower than the last. The kitchen smells of cardamom and scalded milk.

Then the pan is tipped through a small wire strainer into a cup, or a glass, or a clay kulhar, and the spent leaves sit in the strainer, steaming, finished with their work.

The strainer is rinsed under the tap and hung back on its nail. The pan is filled with water and left to soak. The cup is carried out of the kitchen, held by the rim, and a little of the morning is spent doing nothing except drinking it.

The clay cup is worth a moment of its own. It is unglazed, rough on the lips, and faintly porous, so that the first sip tastes a little of wet earth. When it is empty it is dropped on the ground and breaks, and goes back to being earth, and someone makes another.

A cup made from mud, filled with a drink made from a leaf and a cow and a few seeds, drunk in two minutes on a platform, and then gone. Nothing could be simpler, and it took the better part of a century to arrive.

The roadside

The railway was not the only line across the land. There was also the road, the long old road that ran from the north-west down across the plains, through one city after another, all the way to the sea in the east.

Along that road, in time, came lorries. And wherever lorries stop for the night, the drivers need something hot, something filling, and somewhere to lie down. So the roadside eating place appeared: the dhaba.

The first dhabas were simple. A mud wall. A thatched or tin roof. A fire with a big flat pan for bread and a deep pot for lentils. And out front, a row of charpais, the rope-strung cots, with a wooden plank laid across each one to serve as a table.

Behind the fire a man sits on his heels, slapping dough from hand to hand and laying the rounds onto the hot iron, where they puff and brown and are flipped with a bare finger. The bread arrives at the cot hotter than the tea.

You sat cross-legged on the cot, or you lay on it, and the food was brought to the plank. When you had eaten, the plank was taken away and the cot was yours for the night, under the open sky or under the tin.

And always, at every dhaba, a pan of chai on the go. Not made cup by cup but by the potful, boiled and reboiled, strong enough to stand a spoon in, sweet enough to make the sweetness part of the taste rather than an addition to it.

The chai pan at a dhaba is black on the outside and never quite empty. More water, more milk, more leaf, more sugar go in as the night goes on, and the taste of the first pot is still somewhere in the last one.

Imagine arriving at one of those places late at night. The engine switched off. The sudden quiet. A bare bulb hanging over the fire. The sound of a ladle against the side of a pan. Someone says one word, and a glass of chai is put into your hands before you have asked.

The chai at a dhaba tastes of the road. Smoke in it, from the fire. A little dust. A great deal of sugar. It is not refined and it is not meant to be. It is meant to put something warm into a person who has been driving since dawn.

The glass is too hot to hold at first. You hold it by the rim, and then by the base, and then it cools enough, and you sit on the edge of a cot in the dark and drink.

Nobody talks much. There is the fire, and the pan, and the tick of cooling engines, and somewhere a radio turned down so low it is only a murmur. Someone yawns, and the yawn goes round the cots, one after another.

Lorries ticking as they cool. Crickets. The road, empty for once. The chai finished, the glass set down on the plank.

Other drivers lie on other cots, their shawls pulled over their faces, their lorries lined up along the roadside with the tarpaulins tied down. Someone snores. Someone coughs. The man at the fire banks it low for the night and sits down beside it.

Then you lie back on the ropes of the cot, which give slightly under you, and look up at whatever is there: tin, or thatch, or stars.

Everywhere and nowhere

That is roughly how a leaf from the misty hills became the drink of a whole subcontinent. Not by a plan, or not by the plan anyone had. By a slow series of small accidents, each one taking years.

A people in the hills who had always brewed it. A trader who happened to be shown it. A brother who did not let the matter drop. Botanists who argued for years. Gardens that failed, and then did not. A doctor planting seeds to see what would happen.

Workers who crossed half the country to pick the leaf. A shed with warm air moving under wet leaves. A railway that loops over itself. A platform under a tin roof. A coin handed down from a window.

A small train. A long platform. A man with an urn. A word that had crossed half the world. Milk, because it was cheap. Spices, because they were already in the kitchen. A clay cup, broken and returned to the earth.

None of it fast. None of it dramatic. Just one quiet step, and then a long pause, and then another.

If you have followed this far, you can let go of it now, the way you would let a cup cool on the table beside you without needing to finish it.

You are allowed to stop following now. You were always allowed. The history will go on without you, the way the kettle goes on without anyone watching it.

Picture, if you like, a pan of chai somewhere, rising and settling, rising and settling, in a kitchen you do not need to be in.

Resting

The fire is low. The cup is empty. The leaves are finished with their work.

Milk rising. Milk settling. Slow.

Nothing to remember. Nothing to do.

Let the warmth stay in your hands a while longer.

The sound of the fire will stay with you for a while, and then it will fade. There is nothing more to do.