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It was Maniram who informed the British about the Assam tea grown by the Singpho people, which was hitherto unknown to the rest of the world. In the early 1820s, he directed the cultivators Major Robert Bruce and his brother Charles Alexander Bruce to the local Singpho chief Bessa Gaum. Charles Bruce collected the tea plants from the Singphos and took them to the Company administration. However, Dr. Nathaniel Wallich, the superintendent of the Calcutta Botanical Garden declared that these samples were not of the same species as the tea plants of China.