Iran's own tea gardens exist because of a man many Persians outside Iran have never heard of. He was a Qajar prince, he studied in Paris, and to bring tea home he had to smuggle it out of British India.
First, the British stole it from China
To understand his story, start fifty years earlier. In the 1840s China held the secret of tea, and foreigners were not allowed to buy tea plants or travel far from the treaty ports. So in 1848 the British East India Company sent a Scottish botanist, Robert Fortune, on a secret mission to get them. According to King's College London, he often disguised himself as a Chinese merchant to do it. He carried plants out of China to India. Most did not survive the move. In the end it was a tea plant native to Assam that took off in India and broke China's hold on the trade.
So by the late 1800s, much of the tea Persians drank every day came from British India. By one account, about 83 percent of Iran's tea was imported from India, at a cost of around a million tomans a year.
Enter Kashef al-Saltaneh
His name was Mohammad Mirza, of the Qajar family. He had studied at the Dar al-Fonun in Tehran and at the Sorbonne in Paris, and he became known by his title, Kashef al-Saltaneh, usually translated as "Royal Discoverer."
After Naser al-Din Shah was assassinated, he was sent to British India as Iran's consul general. He travelled through the tea growing districts to study how it was done, and the story told in Iran to this day is that he passed himself off as a French merchant, because the British were not sharing tea growing knowledge with people from countries like his. Whether every detail of that story is true, what he did next is on the record.
The Encyclopaedia Iranica records that around the turn of the century he smuggled about 3,000 Assam tea seedlings and several containers of seeds into Persia. In 1902 he planted an experimental garden near Lahijan, in Gilan, and soon sent the Shah about a kilogram of tea grown on Persian soil. He then tried to persuade Iran's first parliament, the Majles of 1906 to 1908, to pay for tea plantations across Gilan.
Notice the twist
A British botanist dressed as a Chinese merchant to take tea out of China. About fifty years later, the story goes, a Persian prince posed as a French merchant to take that tea out of British India. And the plant he brought home was Assam tea, the same Indian tea that had made the British trade work.
Where he rests now
Kashef al-Saltaneh died in 1929 in a car accident on the road between Bushehr and Shiraz. He was buried in Lahijan, on a hill beside the tea gardens. His mausoleum is now the heart of Iran's National Tea Museum, which opened in 1996. Inside are his documents, early photographs, samovars, teapots and trays. Outside, tea still grows.
What this means for the glass in your hand
Persian tea has always been a mix of what grows at home and what comes from far away. Iranica notes that by the early 1970s about two thirds of Iran's recorded tea imports came from Ceylon, the island now called Sri Lanka.
That is where Black Gold Persian Tea comes from too. We start with Ceylon black tea, scent it with cold pressed bergamot, and make it for the samovar, so it can be poured strong and topped up in the glass the way Persian families always have. Kashef al-Saltaneh went to a lot of trouble to put tea in Persian hands. The least we can do is pour it properly.
Sources
- Daniel Balland and Marcel Bazin, "Čāy," Encyclopaedia Iranica, Vol. V, Fasc. 1, pp. 103 to 107, 1990. iranicaonline.org/articles/cay-tea
- King's College London Archives, "Fruits of the Earth: Mass production" (Robert Fortune). kingscollections.org
- Tehran Times, "Discover National Tea Museum in northern Iran," January 19, 2024. tehrantimes.com
- "Kashef as-Saltaneh," Wikipedia (biography, and the French merchant story). en.wikipedia.org