P. Baruah

Chief Advisory Officer, Tocklai Tea Research Institute, Tea Research Association, Jorhat-785008, Assam, India
Author    Correspondence author
Journal of Tea Science Research, 2017, Vol. 7, No. 7   doi: 10.5376/jtsr.2017.07.0007
Received: 23 May, 2017    Accepted: 13 Jun., 2017    Published: 22 Jun., 2017

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Baruah P., 2017, Wild teas of Assam and North East India, Journal of Tea Science Research, 7(7): 34-39 (doi: 10.5376/jtsr.2017.07.0007)

India is one of the largest tea producers in the world. In India the state of Assam is a large tea growing belt in the world where the renowned Assam teas grow. The tea was discovered growing wild in Assam by the British. Before the discovery of wild teas the local population of Assam, some of the tribal people, were in the habit of drinking tea in their indigenous method of preparation since time immemorial. Since the early part of the nineteenth century, discovery of ‘wild’ plants of Assam and Cambodia races of tea were recorded. In Assam and the North-East area at present in all the explorations carried out to the original tea areas, hybrids of the three main varieties of tea are found. The true to type original Assam variety is yet to be discovered. Existence of wild tea plants in the forests of Assam has been a subject of much curiosity and collection of such germplasm would greatly assist research on plant improvement by the scientists.

Wild teas; Indigenous; Germplasm; Singphos; Tribal; Infusion