Tea Total in Darjeeling
“Life is chaos, the world is chaos. The only constant is change. I like chaos and the way you position yourself in it. Where do we come from? What are we doing here and where are we going? We need to answer these questions to be free, to find our way. That’s what I’m doing in my tea garden.”
Not the sort of introduction one would expect from a tea plantation owner in the Darjeeling hills. But then, Rajah Banerjee is not an ordinary man. He is the owner of the most highly prized tea plantation in the world. Makaibari Tea Estates in Darjeeling have developed sustainable, biodynamic agriculture at high returns. Rajah Banerjee, the enigmatic fourth heir to the estate, sells the world’s most expensive tealeaves. His main clients in the US, Japan, France and Germany buy up his entire harvest – before it is harvested.
View Aroon Thaewchatturat’s feature story on The World’s Most Expensive Tea, republished in Traversing the Orient Magazine in April 2009. Text by Tom Vater.