Manohari Gold Tea
An ultra-premium, small-batch orthodox tea from one Assam garden, hand-plucked 25 to 50 grams a day and sold at record prices. What it is, how it is made, and the full auction record, set out plainly.
On this page
Manohari Gold Tea is an ultra-premium, small-batch orthodox black tea made from the golden-tipped buds of one Assam garden, Manohari Tea Estate in Dibrugarh district, in quantities of 25 to 50 grams a day. It is the most expensive tea India has sold at auction, and it has broken its own record four times. The Authority's own certifying standard, strength by weight and measure, does not reach this tea; what does is set out below.
The estate behind the name
Manohari Tea Estate sits in Dibrugarh district, upper Assam, in the heart of the valley this office was founded to weigh. The garden runs to roughly 1,800 acres, of which over 1,000 acres are under tea, producing close to 3 million pounds of black and green tea a year2. That is a large working Assam garden doing ordinary large-garden work, most of it destined for the same chests and the same blenders as everybody else's.
Manohari Gold is not that output. It is a separate line drawn off the same ground, and the whole of it would disappear inside a rounding error on the estate's annual tonnage.
How it is made
Every step in the process subtracts. The tea is plucked only from the tender, golden-tipped buds of the estate's P-126 clone bushes, by hand, in the early morning between roughly 4am and 6am, before the sun can work on the aroma and flavor. The buds are then hand-rolled and sun-dried by traditional methods2.
The output of all that is 25 to 50 grams a day. Weigh that against something familiar: a good day's production would fill a fifth of a standard 250-gram retail packet. No machine touches it, no volume is possible, and the two-hour plucking window puts a hard ceiling on the quantity before a single bud is rolled.
The record book
Most people know this tea for one reason: what it has sold for. Here is the record, in order, each figure a per-kilogram auction result with an approximate US dollar equivalent.
| Year | Price per kilogram | Approximately |
|---|---|---|
| 2018 | Rs 39,001 | $470 |
| 2019 | Rs 50,000 | $600 |
| 2020 | Rs 75,000 | $900 |
| 2021 | Rs 99,999 | $1,200 |
| December 2022 | Rs 1,15,000 | $1,380 |
The 2018 result was the first record1, and the most expensive tea sold at any Indian auction centre at that time; the buyer, Sourabh Tea Traders, took the two kilograms on offer for clients in Delhi, Ahmedabad, and Kolkata. The 2019 sale went through the Guwahati Tea Auction Centre7, as did the Rs 99,999 result in 20213, also reported at the time by Business Today4.
The ceiling, and the sale that went around it
Look hard at that 2021 figure: Rs 99,9993 is one rupee under Rs 1,00,000, and that is not a coincidence of bidding. The Tea Board of India caps prices at the government-run auction centres at Rs 1,00,000 per kilogram5, so the 2021 record was set flush against the ceiling of the room it was sold in. There was nowhere further to go inside the Guwahati hall.
So the next record stepped outside the Guwahati hall entirely. In December 2022 the tea sold for Rs 1,15,000 a kilogram through the Tea Intech private auction portal, bought by a Hyderabad-based tea trader, reportedly for restaurant clients6. Two different rooms, two different rules. Anyone comparing the 2022 figure with the earlier ones should know they were not weighed on the same scale.
What the price measures, and what it does not
An auction result is a number, and this office respects numbers. It is worth being exact about which quantity that number describes. It records what one buyer would pay for one lot on one day, in a market where the total available supply is a few dozen grams. It is a measure of scarcity, and of the labor that produces the scarcity. It is not a measure of anything in the cup.
Nothing in the record book above is a grading. No strength was certified to reach those figures.
The 2026 profile
The tea has since become a diplomatic object. In July 2026 the Prime Minister gave Manohari Gold to the President of Indonesia, months after visiting the estate in Assam and plucking leaf there himself; this office filed a separate report on that. Note the order of events. All five price records above were set years earlier, on auction results alone. The fame followed the price. It did not produce it.
What this office certifies, and what it declines to
The facts above are certified: the estate, the acreage, the clone, the plucking window, the daily yield, the dates and the figures. They are on record, they are checkable, and they are correct as set out here.
The grade is a different matter, and this office states it plainly. The Authority certifies tea on strength, by weight and measure, in a proper cup, hot, with milk, before the day makes demands. Manohari Gold answers to none of that. It is sold by the gram to people who will never brew it at four grams to the pot, and this office has not graded it against the morning standard because it was never entered for it.
That is not a complaint. A curiosity is allowed to be a curiosity. Filed under provenance and price, then, and not under strength. The morning cup remains subject to the usual test, and costs a great deal less.