When most people hear chai tea, the immediate association that probably comes to mind is India. The country is chai-crazy, estimated to make up roughly 30% of global tea consumption. South Asia as a whole is home to a vibrant cultivation industry, with common strains such as Ceylon and Darjeeling originating in the region. And yet the crazy thing is that before the 20th century the drink was far from the staple it is in India today. More remarkable is the story of how that all changed in such a short period of time.
Tea was likely not entirely foreign to India before the British showed up, as there are some strains indigenous to the country, but besides a few scattered accounts from European traders, there isn't any indication that a substantial tea-drinking culture existed prior to the arrival of the British East India Trading Company.
During this time Britain was increasingly embroiled in Asia, and a series of disputes with China over a growing trade deficit (due in part to tea) saw Britain devise all manner of creative schemes in order to rectify this. Tea cultivation was a closely guarded state secret at every level, from the technique employed to turn it into a powder, to the actual plant itself, and China naturally had no desire to alter this incredibly lucrative trading relationship. Worse still, Chinese authorities began to balk at the opium Britain was exporting to their country, threatening a further worsening of trade relations. While in the short term this resulted in the First Opium War, long-term the East India Trading Company realized a more permanent solution was needed.
To that end, a botanist named Robert Fortune was recruited and a mission devised that would see seeds and expertise smuggled out of the country and into British controlled India, in the hopes that a domestic source of tea could be established there. Plantations had already been established in the region of Assam some years earlier, a climate hospitable to growing tea. Now tea production exploded, as the Assam Tea Company (est. 1840) oversaw commercial cultivation at a scale that would surpass China's industry by the turn of the century.
It was not smooth sailing from the get-go, however. The early iterations of Indian tea were not of the highest quality, and it would be a few decades before it caught on back in Britain and Indian tea producers began to turn a profit. But even during all this time, tea remained a relative niche amongst Indians. It wasn't until the Indian Tea Association began a concerted effort to promote consumption of the beverage during The First World War that this began to change. Tea vendors were dispatched to factories, coal mines and train stations; anywhere large numbers of Indians congregated.
It was also during this time that tea turned into "chai". Vendors were provided with instructions on how to prepare the drink as consumed in Europe, but soon a variation consisting of milk, sugar and spices emerged, what we know today as chai tea.
While some Indian nationalists denounced tea as a product of colonial exploitation, today chai is indelibly a part of Indian culture. Cultivation has spread beyond Assam, employing a million Indians, and spawned numerous regional variations on the drink. Until very recently, India was its largest producer until China finally reclaimed the title, but it still remains on the forefront of cultivation technology. Tetley, a popular brand in the west, was even purchased by an Indian conglomerate in 2000. Now chai is increasingly a staple in coffee shops in North America and Europe, in a sense bringing us full circle. There's a lot of surprising history in that drink!
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