East India Company's China monopoly ends; Tea Committee founded
Parliament ended the Company's monopoly of the China trade, and in the same year the Governor-General Lord William Bentinck established a Tea Committee charged with determining whether tea could be grown commercially in British India. The two moves are connected: with its privileged position in China gone, and with the payment problem unresolved, growing tea inside British territory became a strategic objective rather than a botanical curiosity. The Committee's early work relied on Charles Bruce's Assam material.
Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.
Subjects
- English (later British) East India Company · chartered company · not located
- Assam · region · India
- Tea · trade good · not located
- Canton (historical) — modern Guangzhou · city · China
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent. This is the standing of the weakest source, not an average.
A History of the Assam Company 1839–1953
Documents the 1823 Singpho tea encounter, Charles Bruce's samples, the 1834 Tea Committee, the January 1839 London auction of Assam tea and the founding of the Assam Company.
T. and A. Constable, Edinburgh · 1957 · Partly verified
H. A. Antrobus, 'A History of the Assam Company 1839–1953' (Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, 1957) — company history written from the Assam Company's own records
East India Company factory records for China, India Office Records
The Company's Canton trade, its tea purchases and cargo accounting, and its administrative decision-making are documented in a single surviving institutional archive.
British Library, Asian and African Studies (India Office Records) · 1600–1858 · Partly verified
British Library, India Office Records, IOR/G/12 — Factory Records: China and Japan (Canton consultations, diaries, tea invoices and cargo accounts); related Court Minutes at IOR/B
Recorded on English (later British) East India Company
- Tea buried in the Han Yangling mausoleum
- Tea-for-horse exchange between China and Tibet
- Tea first shipped to Europe by sea
- Parliament bans the use of printed calicoes
- Qing trade confined to Canton
- Boston Tea Party
- Commutation Act cuts British tea duty
- Robert Bruce shown tea growing in Assam
- East India Company's China monopoly ends; Tea Committee founded
- The Opium Wars
- First Assam tea auctioned in London
- Lin Zexu destroys confiscated opium at Humen
- Treaty of Nanking
- Robert Fortune removes tea plants and tea makers from China
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.
- Robert Fortune removes tea plants and tea makers from China · 1848–1851
- Treaty of Nanking · 1842-08-29
- Lin Zexu destroys confiscated opium at Humen · 1839-06-03/1839-06-25
- First Assam tea auctioned in London · 1839-01-10
- The Opium Wars · 1839–1860
- Robert Bruce shown tea growing in Assam · 1823
- Commutation Act cuts British tea duty · 1784
- Boston Tea Party · 1773-12-16