Region · in India
Himachal Pradesh
Himachal Pradesh grows tea in one valley, Kangra, on the southern slopes of the Dhauladhar in the western Himalaya, about as far from Assam as Indian tea gets. It is the country's smallest serious tea region and the one with the strangest history: a nineteenth-century success that an earthquake ended, rebuilt afterwards by local smallholders on land the British planters walked away from.
What grows here
Black tea and green tea from the Kangra valley, around Palampur and the hills below Dharamsala. The green is the more distinctive of the two and is made in a Chinese-derived way rather than a Japanese one, which is unusual in India. Kangra black is light and comparatively delicate, nothing like the heavy plains tea that dominates Indian production. Volumes are tiny by Indian standards and most of what is made is drunk in northern India.
The ground
The gardens run between 900 and 1,400 m, the band written into the tea's geographical indication, under a wall of peaks rising past 4,000 m, and it is one of the wettest places in the western Himalaya, because the Dhauladhar forces the monsoon straight up. Winters are properly cold and the bushes go dormant, so unlike southern India this is a single-season industry with a hard stop at each end of the year.
The bushes
The original nineteenth-century planting was China-type sinensis seed, and a great deal of the valley still stands on that old seed stock. That is part of why Kangra black is light and why the valley can make a credible green at all. Newer clonal material comes from the CSIR Institute of Himalayan Bioresource Technology at Palampur, which has worked on the valley's tea for decades.
Harvest seasons
One long season rather than a flush calendar. Picking starts in late April once the bushes wake and runs into the autumn, and the spring picking is the one that matters. Because the whole valley starts and stops together, the only timing question worth asking is whether a tea is from the first picking.
What to look for
Kangra tea holds an Indian geographical indication granted in 2005 and a European one since 2023, which matters more than usual because the valley's output is small enough that the name is easy to borrow. The practical problem is different though. Most Kangra leaf is pooled from small growers into a shared factory, so what you buy is a factory's blend of a valley rather than a garden. Ask whether it is the green or the black and whether it is a first picking. And do not expect Darjeeling: the two are both Himalayan and are not otherwise alike.
How it got here
Kangra was planted from the late 1840s, after a survey in 1848 found the valley suitable, and did well enough to take gold and silver medals at international exhibitions in London and Amsterdam in 1886 and 1895, with much of the output travelling overland as green tea to Afghanistan and Central Asia. The 1905 Kangra earthquake destroyed the factories and much of the valley, the British planters sold up and left, and the land passed to local families in small parcels. The industry that exists now is that inheritance: many owners with a few hectares each, a handful of shared factories and a market that no longer includes Kabul.
Places in Himachal Pradesh
Named places inside Himachal Pradesh. The ones with a page of their own are links.