Product Description <br/>Contains 120 color pictures. In this superbly illustrated book, Gillian Wright tells the story of Darjeeling, the beautiful hill station in the Eastern Himalayas. She traces the history of its world-famous tea from its origins in China to the present day. The British appetite for tea convinced the merchants of the Raj that they should bring tea growing to India. The author recounts the adventures of the nineteenth- century botanists who succeeded in bringing the closely guarded secrets of tea manufacture from China to India; of the founders of Darjeeling and of the pioneers British, German and Indian who took up tea plantation on the then remote mountainsides. Wright tracks the changes that accompanied the transition from British to Indian ownership after Independence, and describes the gardens of today through the seasons, places of astounding biodiversity, where leopards still roam and uncounted smaller creatures and unnumbered plant species thrive. Her encounters with planters and workers, especially the women, without whom the industry could not exist, illuminate their lives, hopes and aspirations.<br/> About the Author <br/>Gillian Wright is an author, translator and journalist who has lived in India for over twenty years. Her travel books include Introduction to the Hill Stations of India and an illustrated guide to Sri Lanka. She is co-author, with Mark Tully, of India in Slow Motion, a collection of essays on modern India. She has also collaborated with him on three other earlier books: Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi's Last Battle, No Full Stops in India and Heart of India. With a team of Indian ornithologists, she co-authored one of the first photo-guides to the birds of the Subcontinent. A scholar of Urdu and Hindi, she has translated several modern classics of Indian literature into English, notably the satirical novel Raag Darbari by Shrilal Shukla, the epic story of rural India around the period of Independence, A Village D