The first Chiabari garden was established in 1916. The family owned, professionally managed Chiabari Group is now into its 6th generation and owns seventeen estates in Darjeeling. Some of our Darjeeling estates are heritage gardens, more than 100 years old. Collectively, the group is the largest producer of organic Darjeeling teas, both in terms of quantity and quality. The Tumsong Chiabari Tea Retreat Group’s state-of-the-art modernizations, its vast infrastructure and our insistence on flexibility and innovation have given us a competitive edge over others. A new fully automatic blending and packaging unit has recently been commissioned in Kolkata for hygienically blending and packing teas in keeping with the EU regulations and HACCP standards. We export to most of the major tea consuming countries in Europe as well as UK, Japan, USA and the Middle East. The history of tea goes back to 2737 BC. There is a legend that once the Chinese Emperor Shen Nong was sitting beneath a tree while his servant was boiling drinking water, when some leaves from a tree blew into the water. Shen Nong, a renowned herbalist, decided to try the infusion that his servant had accidentally created. The tree was Camellia sinensis, and the resulting drink was what we now call tea. In addition, the Tumsong Chiabari Tea estate faces the highest Himalayan ranges and this puts it directly in the path of a constant cold breeze. This makes the plants grow gradually and thus gives them time to saturate their leaves with the special muscatel flavor of its exotic teas. Also, the garden, now certified as 100% bio-organic, is planted with one of the highest percentages of rare pure china bushes.