Assam tea went on sale for the first time this month, eight chests of it, 350 pounds in all, offered at the London tea sales on Jan. 10. It is the first tea grown in India ever put up for buyers, and the first anyone outside the Brahmaputra valley could carry home and drink.

The tea was made in Assam by Charles Alexander Bruce, superintendent of the tea plantations there, from the broad-leaved bush that grows wild in the Brahmaputra valley, not from the China plant the trade has always bought. Bruce sent a consignment of better than forty chests down to the Tea Committee at Calcutta in 1837. Part of it spoiled on the sea passage. Eight chests, 350 pounds of sound made tea, came through, reached London in 1838, and went under the hammer this month.

The sale drew a crowd. The bidding ran among some sixty rivals, and one lot of Assam pekoe was knocked down at 34 shillings a pound, many times what the leaf costs to make. Captain John Rhodes Pidding, a tea merchant and former servant of the East India Company, bought every lot. Pidding sells China tea about the country as Howqua's Mixture.

Three hundred and fifty pounds is not much tea by weight, and few drinkers will taste it. What it proves is what will fill their cups. Tea can be grown inside the Empire, on land the gardens are now clearing along the Brahmaputra, and it need not come from China at all. A drinker who wants tea now has somewhere new it can come from.

Sources: Tea Research Association (Tocklai), History of Tea Cultivation (the eight chests of Assam tea forwarded to London in 1838 and auctioned on 10 January 1839; C.A. Bruce appointed Superintendent of Government tea plantations); Indian Tea Association, Legends (the 1837 consignment, the portion spoilt in transit, and 350 pounds in eight chests sent to the London auctions and auctioned 10 January 1839); Sir William Wilson Hunter, The Tea Committee (Captain John Rhodes Pidding buying every lot, 34 shillings a pound for one lot of Assam pekoe after bidding among some sixty rivals, Pidding a former East India Company servant who sold China tea as Howqua's Mixture).