Sylhet's tea gardens: history, people and visits

How tea reached Sylhet in the 1850s, how the leaf is grown and made, who plucks it, and where and when to see the estates without trespassing.

Drive south from Sylhet towards Sreemangal and the land begins to fold into low hills, the tilas, each one clipped into a waist-high green carpet and dotted with thin shade trees. This is tea country. The estates of the Sylhet division, most of them in Moulvibazar and Habiganj, grow the large majority of Bangladesh's tea, and they have shaped the region's landscape, economy and people for about 170 years.

The gardens are also working estates with their own rules and a working population whose history begins in the colonial labour trade. This chapter explains how tea came here, how it is grown and made, who does the work, and how to see the estates as a guest rather than a trespasser.

How tea came to Sylhet

The story begins across the border. In the 1820s and 1830s the British found tea growing wild in the hills of Assam, and in 1839 the Assam Tea Company was formed to grow it commercially. A first garden in Chittagong in 1840, planted with Chinese stock, soon closed. In Sylhet, wild tea was reported on the Chandkhani hillock on 4 January 1856, but planting had already begun at Malnichhara, on the edge of Sylhet town. Banglapedia and the Bangladesh Tea Association date the garden to 1854, and the Tea Association gives 1857 as the start of commercial production, which is why Malnichhara is usually called the oldest commercial tea garden in Bangladesh. The Sylhet district administration and some local accounts give an earlier start, in 1849.

Lalchand and Matiranga followed in 1860, the same year the British-run Consolidated Tea and Lands Company and the Varaura (Baraoora) company began planting in the Sylhet area, with James Finlay as their managing agent for more than a century. By 1900 Sylhet had 71,490 acres under tea, and in 1910 European companies owned about 95 per cent of the tea land. Sylhet, then part of the province of Assam, became the heart of tea growing in what is now Bangladesh. After 1947 West Pakistani investors bought heavily into the industry, and by 1966 they owned 56 of its 114 gardens.

1. 1839

   The Assam Tea Company is formed in London to grow tea in Assam.

2. 1840

   A first, short-lived tea garden is planted in Chittagong.

3. 1854

   Malnichhara estate is established near Sylhet, by most accounts (some local accounts say 1849); commercial production follows in 1857.

4. 1856

   Wild tea on the Chandkhani hillock in Sylhet is reported on 4 January.

5. 1860

   Lalchand and Matiranga gardens open; Finlay-managed companies begin planting in Sylhet.

6. 1921

   Thousands of workers leave the gardens in the Mulluk Cholo exodus; on 20 May armed forces attack them at Chandpur.

7. 1949

   The Chittagong tea auction is established.

8. 1957

   A tea research station opens at Sreemangal on 28 February.

9. 1973

   The station becomes the Bangladesh Tea Research Institute.

10. 2006

    James Finlay sells its Bangladesh estates and factories to local businessmen.

11. 2022

    In August, after a strike, the daily wage rises from Tk 120 to Tk 170.

12. 2023

    Bangladesh produces a record 102.9 million kg of tea.

Tea country in numbers

Bangladesh has around 170 tea estates. The count varies with source and year: reports in 2025 gave 168 or 169, and a Dhaka Tribune report of July 2026 gave 172. Together they hold more than 280,000 acres, of which about 159,000 acres are planted with tea. About 135 estates are in greater Sylhet, by counts made between 2010 and 2017: roughly 90 in Moulvibazar, about 22 in Habiganj and about 20 in Sylhet district; a 2024 report gave 91, 25 and 19. Moulvibazar is usually credited with about 55 per cent of the national crop and Habiganj, in second place, with about 22 per cent. Since 2000 tea has also spread to Panchagarh and four other northern districts, mostly on small holdings, which together produced about 20 million kg in 2025.

Output swings with the weather. The record of 2023 was followed by a fall to 93 million kg in 2024, which the industry put down to erratic rain, a push for quality and a weeks-long shutdown of some state-owned gardens, and the Tea Board set a target of 104 million kg for 2026. Bangladesh grows about 2 per cent of the world's tea and drinks most of it at home: domestic demand is put at 85 to 90 million kg a year, and exports, once a large share of the crop, came to only about 2.5 million kg in 2024.

How tea is grown

On the estates the tea plant is pruned on a three- or four-year cycle into a flat-topped bush at about waist height, with roughly 15,500 to 18,000 bushes to a hectare. It likes temperatures between about 18 and 29°C, more than 1,400 mm of rain a year and well-drained, acidic sandy loam, which is one reason the gardens occupy the slopes and tops of the tilas rather than the low, wet ground between them.

The tall, thin trees standing over the bushes are shade trees, mostly species of Albizia (koroi) and Derris robusta. Tea does best with about half the full sunlight, and these leguminous trees also feed nitrogen into poor soils and hold moisture, so they are as much a part of the crop as the bushes themselves.

Two leaves and a bud

Quality depends on plucking only the tender tip of each shoot, two leaves and a bud. Pluckers work through each section of a garden every 7 to 9 days, about 30 to 32 rounds in a season, and the leaf goes to the estate factory the same day.

The season follows the rain. Plucking begins in March once the first showers arrive; in 2025 most gardens started in the second and third weeks of the month, and Malnichhara formally opened its season on 22 March. Output climbs through the monsoon and runs at 10 to 15 million kg a month nationally from July. By January and February the bushes are nearly dormant: in February 2026 the whole country produced just 24,000 kg.

From leaf to cup

At the factory the leaf is first withered to drive off moisture until it turns limp, then rolled. Bangladesh has long specialised in CTC tea, made in machines that crush, tear and curl the leaf into small granules; some factories use orthodox rollers or a rotorvane instead. The rolled leaf is left to ferment, more accurately to oxidise, on the floor or on racks, then dried in hot air at around 90°C at the inlet, sorted through sieves into grades and packed.

The result is mostly strong CTC black tea, the kind brewed with milk and sugar in roadside stalls across the country. Made tea is sold at weekly auctions in Chattogram, which handles about 98 per cent of the trade, at a second auction centre in Sreemangal, opened in 2017, and at an online centre in Panchagarh, opened in 2023; at the opening sales of the 2026 to 2027 season Sreemangal's average price was Tk 267 a kg.

In Sreemangal itself you will also meet the layered seven-colour tea for which the town is known, sold widely in town; the Food and tea chapter has more on what to drink and where.

The research institute and the tea museum

Sreemangal is the centre of tea research in Bangladesh. A tea research station opened here on 28 February 1957 and became the Bangladesh Tea Research Institute (BTRI) in 1973, an autonomous body under the Bangladesh Tea Board. Its campus lies about 3 km from town, with substations at Kaliti in Moulvibazar, in Sylhet and at Fatikchhari in Chattogram. Its scientists work on soils, plant breeding, pests and processing, and it has released a series of high-yielding clones named BT1 onwards, at least 13 of them by Banglapedia's count.

BTRI is a working research station, not a visitor attraction. Ask at the gate before you walk in, and accept a no; the estate next door has put up no-entry and no-photography signs in the past.

A small tea museum lies outside the town, about half an hour from the centre by one 2024 account; ask locally for directions and opening hours. Its rooms hold a miscellany of old objects which, a guard told a bdnews24 writer in 2024, came from various estates; that writer thought it not worth the time on a short trip, so treat it as a brief stop on a day that also takes in Lawachara National Park rather than a destination in itself.

The people of the gardens

The tea was planted by British companies, but the gardens were built by labour brought from far away. From the middle of the 19th century planters recruited workers from Bihar, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, the Chota Nagpur plateau of present-day Jharkhand, Madras and Andhra Pradesh. Many were promised a better life. Under colonial labour law, including the Workman's Breach of Contract Act, leaving a garden without permission was a criminal offence.

Their descendants belong to dozens of distinct communities, among them Munda, Santal, Oraon, Bhumij, Kurmi and Mahato. Languages such as Sadri, Kurukh (Oraon), Mundari and Kharia are still spoken in the labour lines, and several are among the country's endangered languages. Read more in People, languages and culture.

Mulluk Cholo, 1921

In May 1921 striking workers left the gardens of the Chargola valley, part of the Sylhet tea belt that now lies in Assam, and the exodus spread. Under the call Mulluk cholo, go home to our land, thousands made for the river port of Chandpur, hoping to board steamers home; figures vary, and the one usually quoted in Bangladesh is about 30,000 people. On 20 May, at the Chandpur steamer ghat, armed police and Gurkha soldiers attacked the crowd; accounts in the Bangladeshi press describe shooting as well as beatings. Some workers drowned in the Meghna, and the death toll was never officially recorded. Railway and steamer workers struck in sympathy, and many survivors were eventually returned to the gardens.

Tea workers mark 20 May each year as Cha Shramik Dibosh, Tea Workers' Day, although the state has not officially recognised it.

Life in the gardens today

The estates employ 116,762 registered workers plus thousands of casual hands, according to a 2026 Daily Star report, and union leaders estimate that nearly a million people live in tea garden communities. Most live in rows of estate housing called labour lines, receive grain rations and basic healthcare from the estate, and have no legal title to the land their families have lived on for generations. Wages rose from Tk 120 to Tk 170 a day after a strike in August 2022, a 2023 government notice built in a 5 per cent annual rise, and by 2025 the daily wage had reached Tk 187, the figure still cited in May 2026, with payments at some estates delayed for weeks.

Tilas, shade and water: the tea landscape

What makes the Sylhet gardens beautiful is the way they follow the land: bushes cover the rounded tilas, shade trees break the skyline, and streams and paddy fill the low ground between. Some estates have lakes of their own. Madhabpur Lake in Kamalganj is reached by a winding road lined with tea gardens, another garden lake in Kamalganj draws migratory birds each year, and the lake in the Rehana garden at Kulaura fills with red lotus in winter; but these are estate lakes, and visitors are not always let in.

Forest survives in patches between the estates. The best known is Lawachara National Park near Sreemangal, with a railway line running through its hill forest and a Khasi village inside it, though the village was closed to visitors at last report. The Haors, forests and wildlife chapter covers it in depth.

Where to see the gardens

You do not need to enter an estate to enjoy tea country. Many of the best views are from public roads, and tea gardens can be photographed from the roadside without going in.

Around Sylhet City

Malnichhara, a short distance from Osmani International Airport, covers about 1,500 acres according to the district administration and draws a steady stream of visitors. Lakkatura is a few minutes' drive from the centre. Both are easy to reach by CNG auto-rickshaw and can be combined with the Shahjalal Dargah in a morning; see Sylhet City.

Around Sreemangal

The densest tea country is around Sreemangal, where gardens line the roads out of town and the road east towards Kamalganj runs on through Lawachara. The large Finlays estates of the Consolidated Tea and Lands Company, among them Rajghat, Deanston and Balisera, lie in Sreemangal upazila; in 2022, The Daily Star reported, these three and Rashidpur in Habiganj were among the country's most productive gardens, and Rajghat, at about 5,817 acres, led them. Kamalganj adds Madhabpur Lake. See Sreemangal Tea Gardens and the Sreemangal weekend guide.

Habiganj

Habiganj, the second-largest producing district, has big estates of its own, including Rashidpur in Bahubal upazila. The Habiganj chapter covers the district.

Malnichhara Tea EstateUsually called Bangladesh’s oldest commercial tea garden, dated to 1854 by Banglapedia (some accounts say 1849), minutes from the airport road.Sreemangal Tea GardensRolling estates, the Tea Research Institute and the famous seven-colour tea of Sreemangal.Lawachara National ParkA tropical forest where western hoolock gibbons call from the canopy and a railway line cuts through.Madhabpur LakeA winding reservoir inside the working Madhabpur tea estate, with water lilies of several colours, blue lotus among them.

Visiting etiquette

Tea estates are working farms, not public parks. In 2020 the Sylhet chairman of the Bangladesh Tea Association, which represents the estates, said that letting visitors in would hamper production and that government policy did not allow gardens to be used for other purposes, tourism included, and some Moulvibazar estates put up signs barring entry and photography. At others, visitors who report to the office have been allowed to walk the estate roads. Treat each garden as its own case.

• Ask first: report to the garden office or the guard at the gate, say who you are, and follow what they tell you.
• Never pick leaves or break stems; the planters' association has singled this out as real harm that visitors can do.
• Stay on estate roads and paths; do not walk between the rows or climb onto bushes for photographs.
• If you hope to see a factory, ask the manager in advance, and never walk into one uninvited.
• Workers are at work. Ask before you photograph anyone, accept a refusal, and do not interrupt plucking.
• Labour lines are people's homes. Do not wander into them unless you are invited.
• Take your litter back with you and keep noise down.

If you want to walk inside an estate, ask your accommodation in Sreemangal or Sylhet City whether it can arrange permission or a walk with someone from a nearby garden.

When to go

• March and April: plucking starts after the first rains, and the bushes put out fresh growth.
• May to September: the monsoon makes the gardens their greenest and national output peaks from July, but expect heavy rain and muddy estate roads.
• October and November: plucking continues as the rains ease, and the Manipuri Rash festival in Kamalganj usually falls in November.
• December to February: dry, cool and the busiest time for visitors, but the bushes are nearly dormant, so there is little plucking to see.

Early morning is the best time of day, when the light is soft and the air cool. For seasons across the division see when to go, and for the wider region read Sreemangal and Moulvibazar.