Phalap: The Singpho Tea the British Did Not Discover

The usual account says Assam tea was discovered in 1823, when the Scottish trader Robert Bruce saw wild tea growing in hills near Rangpur. The Singpho, a tribe of the Patkai hills, already had a tea¹. They called it phalap, and it was registered as a Geographical Indication of Arunachal Pradesh on 22 January 2024.

A chief named Bessa Gam, and the man who introduced Bruce to him

Bruce did not stumble onto the plant alone. By the KKHSOU account, it was an Assamese official, Maniram Dewan, who introduced him to a Singpho chief, Bessa Gam, in 1823. Bessa Gam agreed to supply Bruce with tea plants and seeds on his next visit.

The Singpho and the neighbouring Khamti, who had settled the upper valley generations earlier, "were well acquainted with tea plants and drank brew from the tea leaves," according to the TeaWorld archive of Krishna Kanta Handiqui State Open University.

What the Singpho actually drank: phalap

As Manje La Singpho of Margherita tells it, two brothers, worn out from hunting, chewed leaves off an unfamiliar tree to keep themselves going and found the leaves revived them. One brother asked the other, in Singpho, "pha lap", what leaf. The name stuck to the tea itself: phalap.

Singpho families pick the leaf, then roast it. From there the leaf is sun-dried and then packed tightly into a hollow green bamboo tube, the ndum. The packed tube goes back over the fire, smoked, roasted, and compacted in repeated rounds, and aged. Write-ups also call it coin tea or bamboo tea.

The Geographical Indication

Phalap became a registered Geographical Indication, India's mark of protected regional origin, on 22 January 2024. The application, Arunachal Pradesh Singpho Phalap, Application Number 935, was filed in August 2022 and advertised for public objection in GI Journal 180 thirteen months later, in September 2023. The registry gives its geographical area as Arunachal Pradesh. A Singpho maker in Margherita still sells phalap in bamboo tubes.