Country
Bangladesh
Bangladesh grows tea in the same hills as Assam and for the same reasons, because until 1947 they were administered as one province. Partition drew a line through a single tea district: Sylhet went to East Bengal and its gardens, its companies and its workforce went with it. What has happened since is that an export industry turned inward. Bangladesh was once a notable exporter and now drinks essentially everything it makes, and then imports on top of that.
What grows here
Black tea, mostly CTC, for the home market, from three zones that work in three different ways. Sylhet division is the old estate belt, with Moulvibazar holding the most gardens and Srimangal as its centre. Greater Chittagong holds the oldest plantings in the country and a newer smallholder push into the Chittagong Hill Tracts. The third zone is the far north, around Panchagarh and the districts beside it, where tea is grown on flat land by small farmers rather than on estate hillsides, and it is the part of the industry that has actually grown.
The ground
Two quite different pieces of ground. The Sylhet gardens sit on tila, low rounded hillocks standing out of the flood plain of the Surma valley, planted on the slopes because the flat land floods and grows rice. Rainfall is heavy and monsoonal and the summers are hot, which is the Assam recipe rather than a hill station's, and the tea follows from that. The northern zone is open plain near the Himalayan foothills, cooler in winter and with no relief to speak of, farmed in small plots that sell green leaf on to factories.
The bushes
Assamica, from the same botanical stock as Assam next door. A tea research station has stood at Srimangal since 1957, raised to the Bangladesh Tea Research Institute in 1973, and its selected clones are what most new planting uses, while older estate sections are still seed-grown populations laid out in the colonial period. Nothing is sold by cultivar name, because the crop is bought on grade at auction rather than by description.
What to look for
Almost none of this leaves the country, so a Bangladeshi tea in a specialty catalogue is unusual enough to be worth asking which garden it came from. Do not read Sylhet as a hill origin either: these are low, hot gardens making a full-bodied Assam-style black, not anything Darjeeling-like. And know what you are buying into. The estate workforce descends from labourers recruited out of central India in the nineteenth century, the same recruitment that filled Assam, and their wages were the subject of a national strike as recently as 2022, so a garden name here is also a labour question.
How it got here
Tea in Bengal begins at Chittagong in 1840, when European planters set out Chinese plants from the Calcutta Botanical Garden beside the Chittagong Club, and the first locally made tea followed near the Karnaphuli river in 1843. Commercial cultivation starts at Malnicherra in Sylhet in 1854. For most of the British period Sylhet was administered as part of Assam and grew as part of the Assam industry, until a referendum in 1947 moved it into East Bengal and made one tea region into two countries. The Chittagong auction has priced the crop since 1949. Smallholder tea in the north is much newer, dating from around 2000.
Places in Bangladesh
Named places inside Bangladesh. The ones with a page of their own are links.