The morning the London market chose somewhere else
In 1905, a single earthquake did what decades of competition could not. The Kangra valley had been producing tea since the 1850s, its gardens running along the lower Dhauladhar slopes from Palampur westward, and by the 1880s its orthodox leaf was fetching prices on the London market that made Darjeeling growers nervous. The liquor was different, lighter, with a faint floral note that tasters described as distinctly Himalayan, not the muscatel that Darjeeling was building its reputation on, but something quieter and more difficult to place. That difficulty turned out to matter. When the 1905 Kangra earthquake destroyed the irrigation infrastructure and killed thousands, the colonial tea companies did not rebuild. They moved their capital east. Darjeeling got the marketing, the railway access, the GI tag a century later. Kangra got the silence.
