Download Darjeeling: The Colorful History and Precarious Fate of the World's Greatest Tea AudioBook Free
Darjeeling's tea bushes find a mythical landscape steeped with the spiritual, the sacred, and the picturesque. Planted at high elevation in the heart and soul of the Eastern Himalayas, in an area of Northern India destined by Nepal to the west, Bhutan to the east, and Sikkim to the north, the linear rows of excellent renewable, waist-high shrubs that layer the steep slopes and valleys around this Victorian "hill town" produce only a portion of the world's tea and less than 1 percent of India's total. Yet the tea from that limited crop, using its characteristic glowing, amber-colored brew and muscatel flavours - sensitive and flowery, hinting of apricots and peaches - is normally considered the best in the world. This is actually the report of how Darjeeling tea started, was key to the greatest tea industry on the world under imperial United kingdom rule, and arrived to produce the highest-quality tea leaves all over the world. It is a story rich in record, intrigue, and empire, filled with adventurers and improbable successes in culture, mythology and religions, ecology and terroir, all set with a backdrop of the looming Himalayas and drenching monsoons. The story is ripe with the imprint of the raj as well as the modern day clout of "voodoo farmers" getting world-record prices for their fine teas - and all of it you start with one of the very most audacious serves of corporate and business smuggling ever sold. Nonetheless it is also the storyline of the way the industry spiraled into decline by the finish of the 20th century and how this edenic area in the high Himalayas seethes with union unrest and a violent independence struggle. Additionally it is a front-line fight against the devastating ramifications of environment change and generations of harming farming practices, a attack that has been fought in some tea landscapes - and, astonishingly, gained - using radical methods. Jeff Koehler has written a fascinating chronicle of India and its most sought-after tea.
