Every garden in the Brahmaputra valley traces back, one way or another, to a plant nobody planted first. This office has certified how the East India Company argued over that plant, doubted it, and eventually grew rich on it. What it has not yet certified is that the plant is still out there, standing unplanted in forest tracts along the Assam-Arunachal-Nagaland border, found by explorers as recently as 2019. That is a real fact, and it comes with a real complication: the closer botanists look at those "wild" trees, the harder it gets to say cleanly which ones actually are.

Where the wild trees still stand today

The clearest inventory comes from Dr. Pradip Baruah, chief advisory officer at the Tocklai Tea Research Institute in Jorhat, who catalogued unplanted tea populations across Upper Assam and the neighbouring hills in a 2017 paper for the Journal of Tea Science Research. His list runs to specific places: Uloop, Inthem, Dooarmara, Ketetong, and Panbari in Upper Assam; Bordumsa, just over the Arunachal Pradesh border; forest pockets in Karbi Anglong; and the hill country around Margherita in Tinsukia district, the same stretch where the Singpho showed Robert Bruce a wild bush in 1823. Further tracts, Baruah's paper notes, are probable but less confirmed around Khonsa and Miao in Arunachal Pradesh, and Mon district in Nagaland, along the India-Myanmar border. None of these are gardens. None appear in a planting register. They are forest.

The plant itself grows differently there than it does in a pruned garden row. Left alone, Camellia sinensis var. assamica is a tree, not a bush, capable of reaching 10 to 15 metres on a single main stem before a planter's shears ever touch it. Baruah's own fieldwork recorded specimens standing roughly 20 feet, about 6 metres, well within that range and taller than almost anyone drinking the cup has ever pictured the plant.

Two expeditions, seven years apart

Nobody stumbles onto these trees by accident anymore; the forest is too remote and too little travelled by anyone with a reason to notice a tea plant among a hundred other species. In December 2012, a team from Tocklai's own experimental station walked the country from Margherita in Tinsukia district to Bordumsa in Arunachal Pradesh, guided by local Singpho villagers who already knew where the untended tea stood, hunting specifically for wild germplasm to collect and study. The team came back having located, by its own account, many patches of jungle-covered "wild" tea across that stretch.

Baruah went further in January 2019, documenting a forest at Old Doidam, a site in the far southeastern corner of Arunachal Pradesh near the Myanmar border, that no prior survey had recorded. "This is the first ever report of wild trees in this area," he said of the find. Locals there, the Noktey, were not surprised to see him. They already process the leaf for their own use, a smoked preparation called khelap, dried and ground for storage rather than fired to the grade standards this office certifies. Village elders told Baruah the trees had stood as long as anyone could remember, with no record of anyone having planted them, a claim that echoes almost word for word what the Singpho told Robert Bruce two centuries earlier, in a different hill range entirely.

The catch: how much of "wild" is actually feral

Here is where the record gets honest rather than tidy. Charles Alexander Bruce, hunting for tea tracts through the 1820s and 1830s after his brother's death, found dozens of stands of tea scattered through the same hill country, and the trade's own historical record treats a good number of them with real skepticism: they were almost certainly not untouched wilderness at all, but clumps of tea the Singpho and the Muttock, the neighbouring tribe, had planted and then abandoned generations earlier, left to grow feral once nobody was tending the clearing anymore. A tree standing alone in secondary forest, with no visible planting pattern and no living memory of who put it there, can look exactly like a genuinely wild population and be neither. Nobody, including Baruah's own 2017 survey, claims to have solved that distinction for every stand on the list. The paper is candid that even after a century and a half of looking, botanists have not conclusively pinned down a single, indisputably pure original Assam wild type; what modern expeditions keep finding instead are hybrids and near-hybrids, plants that carry the wild lineage tangled with older cultivation nobody wrote down.

What the genetics can, and cannot, certify

A molecular study cited in Baruah's paper, run across nearly 400 tea samples split between China and India, sorted the plants into distinct genetic groups and still found that roughly 30 percent of the samples studied carried genetic admixture, DNA evidence of crossing between populations that should, on a clean family tree, have stayed separate. That is not proof any particular forest tree in Karbi Anglong or Old Doidam is secretly a garden escapee. It is proof that the line between "wild population that has always been here" and "descendant of tea a Singpho or Muttock household planted six generations ago and let go" is not one the leaf itself always answers. The plant's deeper genetic story, the case that India's Assam-type tea was domesticated on its own, independent of China's, rests on a separate and more rigorous DNA study of its own. It answers a different question, when the population split, not whether any single forest tree today is unplanted in the strict sense.

Why the search still matters

The uncertainty has not stopped the searching, and there is a plain practical reason for that. A tree that has survived unmanaged in a forest for generations, through pests, drought, and disease, without a planter's spray or a breeder's cross, is carrying traits a garden clone has often lost. Baruah's own case for continuing the expeditions is exactly that: a forest population might hold resistance to a pest or a disease no cultivated stock currently has, or a flavour profile worth breeding toward, the kind of raw material that only a wild or feral-but-old stand can supply. That value is shrinking on a clock. The same forests are under pressure from clearing for farmland and from jhum, the region's traditional shifting cultivation, both of which take down exactly the old-growth, low-disturbance patches where an unmanaged tea tree has had the decades it needs to reach 15 metres in the first place.

What the Authority certifies from this

The wild plant behind Assam's entire trade did not vanish once the gardens went in. Parts of it are still standing, found again in 2012 and again in 2019, in forest this office's own auction ledgers never touch. What it cannot certify, and what no survey to date has certified either, is that any single one of those trees is untouched by centuries of quiet human hands, planting, tending, and then walking away. The honest record here is not "proven wild" or "proven feral." It is a forest that keeps producing both answers at once, and a plant whose indigenous range is real precisely because nobody, not the Company's committee in 1836 and not a geneticist running microsatellite markers today, has ever fully closed the file on it.