Office was smashed into bits.

Meanwhile, Chinese tea plants and Chinese experts and laborers
had been imported into India and tea gardens were well under way
before the native tea plant had been recognized. But in the
ultra-tropical climate of India, Chinese tea plants languished,
and success was finally obtained only by abandoning the stunted
Chinese varieties, and getting back nearer to the indigenous Thea
Assimica; and by the introduction of modern agricultural methods
under British management, and even by the use of machinery for
rolling tea and for firing tea by currents of hot air. Indian
laborers now supersede the Chinese workmen, who were not found
sufficiently pliable in adapting themselves to European ideas.

To preserve the historical record of tea so far as possible, we
will state that while the indigenous Indian tea plant had been
recognized somewhere about the year 1820, the first serious and
sustained attempts to grow tea in India were made by Englishmen,
about 1834, using Chinese tea plants and Chinese workmen for the
purpose. English authorities differ upon the exact dates. The
first shipment of English grown tea from India to London was made
in 1838; it amounted to but 60 chests, which brought at auction
in London $2.25 a pound. The second shipment in 1839 of ninety
five chests brought $2.00 a pound. In 1899 the Indian tea crop
amounted to about 175,000,000 lbs., and the size of Indian tea
gardens varied from 100 acres or less up to 4,000 acres. In 1897
the total acreage of tea plantations in India was stated by Mr.
Crole at 509,500 acres, equal to nearly 800 square miles.

Ceylon began to grow tea on a commercial scale as late as 1875,