A dose of cinchona history in homemade Indian tonic water

It’s a fairly commonly known fact that the classic Gin and Tonic is an Indian drink–in the sense that the idea for this drink, all the ingredients for it and the rationale for it all converged in colonial India.

It’s also commonly known that quinine was widely used in the treatment of malaria from the 1600s on, but perhaps less obvious that the “tonic water” of malaria ministrations was at first the ground powder of the bark of the cinchona [sin-ko-na] tree, whose 4 primary alkaloids are quinine, quinidine, cinchonine and cinchonidine, with quinine being the largest in quantum.

Cinchona, Cinchona officinalis, Cinchona calisaya [also called Cinchona ledgeriana], Cinchona pubescens [or red cinchona], Cinchona calisaya, Cinchona micrantha–these are species of trees native to the wetter montane forests of Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador. Variations number up to 143 though the dominant species are Cinchona succirubra, commercially known as ‘red bark’); Cinchona calisaya (including calisaya ledgeriana), commercially ‘yellow bark’; and Cinchona officinalis, commercially known as pale or crown bark (Veale 2010: 3). So large has been their presence in European pharmacopoeia, mercantile trade, the consolidation of colonial power and the careers of [petty] colonial scientists and [maybe not-so-petty] explorers that tales about cinchona abound, many as tall as the trees themselves.

From off-hand tales to a hand-off story

One tells of an Indian [or a lion, depending on the source you consult] with a fever lost in the Andean jungle and drinking from a pool of water surrounded by quina-quina trees, as they were known. The water was bitter; the Indian thought he would die. Instead, he recovered and so the use of quina-quina bark become a native treatment.

So, via this off-hand tale, the entire and formidable knowledge systems cultivated by Andean cascarilleros [quina bark collectors] and curanderos [healers], get reduced to a naïve and rustic discovery, “as if Andean healers stopped using the bark and innovating in its therapeutic application once they shared their knowledge with Europeans” [Crawford 2016: 24-25].

The next story is the wife of the Peruvian Viceroy, at that time the Count of Chinchon, who fell ill with tertian fever, as malaria was known in the 1600s. She was treated (unconventionally) with a local febrifuge derived from bark of a tree known by then to the Inca and then the Spanish as arbol de calenturas or the fever tree, sent to her husband by the Governor of Loxa. So dramatic was her recovery, the grateful Countess ordered the powder to be distributed to the feverish in Lima and took the “miracle powder” back with her to Spain. The bark came to bear the Countess’ name: Quinquina.

Turns out, this is the story that sealed quinine’s fate and it was all apocryphal—a good miracle story to sell a good miracle drug, the efficacy of the treatment notwithstanding. But tall tales travel, often further than short ones, and create other truths along their ways.

The first mention of cinchona and its efficacy appears to be by the Augustinian monk Antonio de la Calancha in 1633, in the Cronica Moralizada del Orden de Sacn Augiustin en el Peru [Urdang, 1945]. But it was the Genoan physician by the name of Sebastiano Bado (ca. 1660s) who first circulated the Countess story in a pamphlet published in 1663. He called it the “Peruvian bark of Anastasis,” or resurrection—linking it, conveniently, to the Jesuits who controlled both mercantile trade in cinchona and pronouncements on men’s souls generally [Pain, 2001]. Thanks to them, cinchona was also known also as “Jesuits’ powder” or “sacred bark.” When Swedish botanist Carl Linneaus in 1742 formally named it Cinchona officinalis, he joined the two stories—the fact of Jesuit trade and the myth of the Countess’ recovery—conferring on both the imprimatur of science.

The bark itself most likely traveled to Europe (Spain and Italy) in the hands of Jesuit priests, most likely “Fathers Venegas and Messia. It is difficult to be certain about the persons (and dates) as the Jesuits had all the attributes of a secret society” [Lee 2002: 189]. Whoever transported it, it was distributed and effectively used to treat tertian and quartan auges most at the Ospedale di Santo Spirito by the Cardinal de Lugo who had acquired large quantities at his own expense. From here word of the bark’s efficacy spread, and it came to be known as pulvis cardinalis/ pulvis de Lugo (Cardinal’s powder/bark) [Lee 2002: 190].

Although cinchona bark appears to have been used to treat a range of different fevers, malaria was a particular scourge. It was a disease that “decimated military might in battle after battle during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from Britain’s attempts to take Spain’s New World colonies to critical confrontations with Napoleon in Belgium, where forces were halved through mortality and morbidity” [Knapp, 2002]. Controlling it was therefore a matter of some desperation, and prior to the arrival of cinchona in mid-17th c. Europe, an array of fairly primitive methods were deployed: ‘[more conventionally] limb amputation, purging, blood-letting, herbs, rest, massage, hydrotherapy, diet control; [less conventionally]: wearing amulets, applying split pickled herrings to feet, placing the fourth book of the Iliad under a patient’s head, throwing a patient head first into a bush in the hope he would get out quickly enough to leave his fever behind and “the embrace of a bald-headed Brahmin widow at dawn” [Poser and Bruyn 1999]. Some of these more eccentric methods, such as the use of spiders and their webs, were even endorsed by respectable gentlemen. As late as 1886 Dr. J. Donaldson wrote in the November issue of the Indian Medical Gazette that he found “orally administered cobwebs of greater value than quinine”’ [Source]. 

It wouldn’t be too far fetched to assume, then, that cinchona’s arrival into a still-rather-Medieval Europe ushered in a more scientific method for the treatment and cure of malaria. [Lee 2002 provides a short account of how that happened].

Unofficial quests

Several expeditions were tasked with searching out these barely-known trees. In 1735, Charles Marie de la Condamine led the French Geodesic Mission to measure the arc of the meridian at Quito, (present day Ecuador), from which the diameter of the earth could be inferred–but also unofficially to search for the fever tree [Chakrabarti, 2010] which was, even then, being confused with Peruvian balsam, also known as quina-quina [Lee 2002]. La Condamine identified the trees in Loxa/Loja, a healing center of the Andean world, thanks to help received from one Fernando de la Vega, a curandero or bark collector who was both undermined as a healer and predictably written out of the Frenchman’s reports on his findings [Crawford, 2016: Chapter 2].

But it wasn’t until 1820, when Pierre Pelletier and Joseph Caventou isolated and described quinine alkaloids, which replaced powdered bark in malarial treatments, that these took on a major role in the safe administration of the colonies, making cinchona all the more coveted and ramping up the need for control of its supply [and fostering endeavors to identify substitutes].

In 1859, one Clements Robert Markham, who had spent his younger years in Peru, became thus an “Andeanist,” and was (by the mid-1800s) a clerk in the British government’s India Office, led an expedition to spirit cinchona seeds back to India. By then, the Spanish empire was collapsing and stories of mismanagement, the indiscriminate pillaging of smugglers and scavengers and the fear of cinchona extinction, accurate or hyperbole, only hastened and rationalized British plans for transplantation [Crawford 2016: 177]. Peru and Bolivia still held control of bark collection and sale, “holding hostage European imperial expansion” [Veale 2010: 138]. In this way, science and the compulsions of environmentalist protection and the promise of humanitarianism [Markham considered it his “duty to humanity” to produce cheap febrifuge for the masses [Veale 2010: 140]] were each leveraged in service imperialist expansion.

[Markham, too, as it turns out, embellished the Countess story even further and even named her: she was the beautiful Lady Ana de Osorio. But Lady Ana was the Count’s first wife—who had died before he ever went to Peru! [Pain, 2001]]

At any rate, so began a grand botanical experiment to grow cinchona in environments that approximated the Andes, but in colonial possessions in India that would provide cheap, local quinine and break Spanish monopoly on cinchona trade. Control of chinchona became instrumental in the expansion of European colonial power in Asia and Africa.

Aside: The colonial experience with cinchona set a benchmark for other natural products from the Andes, notably coca leaves [and cocaine, which was a pharmaceutical drug before it was anything else] and wild rubber. The Peruvian sociologist Carlos Lissón argued passionately for a commitment to coca as a key to Andean development, and warned of the “risk [of] repeating the infamous national saga of cinchona bark,” which had been “once a uniquely natural Andean ‘monopoly’ (a concept that ‘science does not respect’)—that is, until wily British and Dutch imperial agents transplanted and developed it themselves in the 1870s as an industrial-scale commercial drug” [in Gootenberg 2009: 48-49]. Thankfully for India, it was Markham, as president of the Royal Geographical Society, who “spoke out against mounting another colonial venture against Peru: ‘There is …no probability that coca-growing will ever become an industry in other countries'” because the value of coca leaf was so much less than cocaine [Gootenberg 2009: 75]. Sure enough, the enterprise to “[extract] on the spot the active principle of coca, as it is being at present done by industrious Yankees in Ecuador, with the cinchona” to “make cocaine on a larger scale” was found by one Arnaldo Kitz, who “sold his cocaine exclusively to Emanuel Merck” of today’s Merck Pharmaceuticals–who cornered the market in crude cocaine [Gootenberg 2009: 77-78, second emphasis mine]. All told, “Markham’s intervention was likely enough to [have halted] the expansion of the motley coca projects in British India” [Gootenberg 2009: 75].

Indian cinchona

In India, the location identified for the establishment of cinchona plantations, based on soil and weather conditions approximating those of the Andes: the “Neilgherry” hills with Ootacamund (Ooty of modern India) botanical gardens as fulcrum for the supply of cinchona seeds to the rest of the world. From there to the Calcutta Botanical gardens, cinchona seeds would eventually reach Yunnan, playing into local Chinese state developmentalism and other internal power struggles [Shen, 2019]. In the process, cinchona went from being a wild tree to “cultivated crop.”

By 1862, there were 9000 plants in Ooty—all grown under the supervision and stewardship of one William Graham McIvor—superintendent of the Ootacamund Horticultural Gardens (which eventually became the famous Ooty Botanical Gardens). By 1870, there were 1200 acres of chinchona plantations, both government and private.

In the meantime, one Charles Ledger—an alpaca farmer belonging to a Huguenot family that emigrated to England in the 18th century—had also collected chinchona seeds from Bolivia in 1865 and sent those with much difficulty to his brother in England… where they were traded to the Dutch. As luck would have it, this variety was much more quinine rich compared to the British Cinchona succirnbra, and the Dutch project would prove far more successful than the British [falling under Japanese control in World War 2, and fostering “kina gaku”: cinchona science, Ku 2016]. The species was named Cinchona ledgeriana, after Ledger. By the 1880s, chinchona overproduction, Dutch dominance, and falling crops forced the British to turn to other crops. It is one of the reasons why Camellia sinensis–tea–now covers just about every slope in the Nilgiris.

Whoever won the market speculation game, quinine from cinchona undoubtedly “became a tool of quantification, control, and governance serving the needs of both science and empire” [Ku, 2016]. It was not so much product as network, linking “Andean forests, Atlantic markets, European pharmacies, and botanical gardens” [Crawford, 2016: 7].

The Indian Gin and Tonic

You’d guess none of this history wandering around the Nilgiris today, where McIver is a “heritage property” and pricey restaurant, the gardens like Sims Park in Coonoor and the Ooty Botanical Gardens are now benign tourist attractions where you can rent paddle boats and get in your morning constitutional, and Gins and Tonics are served (when there’s Gin to be had, that is) in the all the local clubs without any sense of history or irony.

There remains the question, however, of how Jesuit’s powder found its way into the Gin and Tonic. Quinine is famously and unbearably bitter, so it was consumed with alcohol—spirits being the proverbial “spoonful of sugar” to make medicine go down. The French had tonic wine (of course), and British troops added it to rum or ‘grog’. Gin had, by the 19th century, risen well beyond its associations with social debauchery [also see this] and had become an officer’s drink, though it’s unclear when it became the natural and permanent partner to tonic.

What we do know is that Erasmus Bond patented his tonic water in 1858—that was the start of the dressing up of plain quinine with a range of aromatics. And of aeration. Tonic waters were being marketed in the colonies soon after, and with chinchona becoming available from local Indian plantations—we have the development of Schweppes’ “Indian quinine tonic” in 1870, specifically aimed at the British expats in the subcontinent who had to take their daily preventive doses of quinine. [In France, says David Leibovitz, “they often refer to it [tonic water] just as le Schweppes, by the brand name”]. With gin-and-bitters already a natural and popular combination, it was a matter of time before tonic replaced dashes of Angostura and a soda splash made for an effective answer to the enervations of tropical climes.

Tree to table, make your own tonic water

“Cinchona trees are around,” I was told, asking about these in Coonoor. Unlike other non-native and commercially grown eucalyptus/blue gum, acacia, and silver oak, however, which are far more easily identifiable and visible targets for the environmental conservationism of the forest departments, cinchona appears just to have become blended into the natural landscape–a bit like pomelos have from long-long ago, and pitanga/Surinam cherries. Nobody really could tell me where I might find them.

Caught in rain on one afternoon while trekking to Dolphin’s Nose, we sheltered under an outcropping–next to which, best as I could tell, was a lone cinchona tree growing awkwardly on a slopy hillside. I recognized it partly by its leaves, partly by the dried-up inflorescence at the top of one branch. The bark itself was covered with lichens [kalpasi, Parmotrema perlatum] for which also I was hunting, but too high on a wet, slippery, almost vertical slope to reach. I found another tree later, of course when I had no tools on me to harvest any bark.

So what bark I’ve used here comes from an old stash bought while we still lived in Houston. You’d have to order this online or look around locally for sources such as the ones David Lebovitz mentions at the end of this post.

The process is beguilingly simple, once you have all ingredients in hand. A large proportion of what goes into making tonic water are citrus zests (and citric acid) and maybe some juices, too. Rough proportions are in my recipe below, but really the mix is yours to craft. Here, I’ve used lemon, lime, orange, grapefruit–and the zest of one half of a human-head-sized pomelo, citrus maxima, the bamblimaas as Tamils call it, this one a wild variety brought with us from the hills where nobody would have it because it was regarded too-cooling and “monkey food” besides.

Next, the other aromatics — cinchona, of course, but also cardamom, lavender (which turns out to provide much of tonic water’s distinctive flavor), lemongrass, allspice, even black pepper.

You can play with the quantities and quantum of various aromatics used. Add curry leaves or curry leaves, for example. Use different peppercorns, maybe even pacchai kurumilagu or fresh green peppercorns from the vines which are in season after the south west monsoons in November. Once you have all that straight, mix all the aromatics and zests and juices; allow these to steep and infuse for 3 days, strain, mix with a simple syrup–and store, refrigerated, until it’s ready to use.

The tonic water market in India has expanded suddenly: Bengal Bay, Jade Forest, Sepoy & Co., Svami, tapping into the apparent interest in small-batch crafted mixers. What better time than this to play with your own blends?

Cautions

I prefer to use bark chips rather than powdered bark, just because there’s probably less quinine in my tonic water that way. And quinine is a drug which can cause side-effects if taken in large quantities. In fact there are regulations and “federal standards for the use of quinine in carbonated beverages, specifically that it cannot exceed 83 parts per million in the final tonic water“–but we’re not computing, even if we know that quinine bark is about 5% quinine. Take note of the cautions outlined in this post though; I found it helpful. And don’t think that any tonic water prepped even at home is ok to down in large quantities. It’s not.

Sources Consulted

Chakrabarti, Pratik. 2010 “Empire and Alternatives: Swietenia febrifuga and the Cinchona Substitutes,” Med Hist. 2010 Jan; 54(1): 75–94.

Crawford, Matthew James. 2016. The Andean Wonder-Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630–1800. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Gootenberg, Paul. 2008. Andean Cocaine: The making of a global drug. Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Knapp, Sandra. 2002. “The quest for the Jesuit’s bark.” Nature 418 [22 AUGUST]. pp. 820-821. https://www.nature.com/articles/418820a.pdf

Ku, Ya-wen. (2016) The Development of Cinchona Cultivation and ‘Kina Gaku’ in the Japanese Empire, 1912–45. In: Liu T., Beattie J. (eds) Environment, Modernization and Development in East Asia. Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-57231-8_7

Lee, M.R. 2002. “CINCHONA OR THE PERUVIAN BARK.” J R Coll Physicians Edinb 32: 189–196. https://www.rcpe.ac.uk/journal/issue/journal_32_3/paper_7.pdf

Pain, Stephanie. 2001. “The countess and the cure.” New Scientist Vol. 171, Issue 2308.

Poser, Charles M. and George W. Bruyn. 1999. An illustrated history of malaria. New York and London: Parthenon Publishing.

Shen, Y. 2019. Cultivating China’s Cinchona: the local developmental state, global botanic networks and Cinchona cultivation in Yunnan, 1930s–1940s. Social History of Medicine, 1-15. doi:10.1093/shm/hkz099

Urdang, George. 1945. “The Legend of Cinchona.” The Scientific Monthly Vol. 61, No. 1, pp. 17-20.

Veale, Lucy. 2010. An historical geography of the Nilgiri cinchona plantations, 1860-1900. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/13041/