During the Qajar period, tea was a widely consumed product, whose import imposed a lot of costs on the country. This provided an incentive for tea cultivation inside Iran. With the beginning of tea cultivation in Gilan and after a quarter of a century, the area of tea plantations did not reach 100 hectares. The purpose of this research is to identify the factors affecting the insufficient development of tea cultivation between 1900 and 1925. For this purpose, historical methodology was used to examine government documents and letters left from that period. According to historical documents, Mohammad Mirza Kashif al-Saltaneh, one of the Qajar princes working in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was obliged to try in this regard while performing his consul general duty in India by the order of Muzaffaruddin Shah. After his return, despite cultivating tea in Gilan in 1900, he did not succeed in developing tea cultivation. The results of the research indicate that the monopolization of tea cultivation by granting concessions and preventing the formation of a competition institution, the way of promoting tea cultivation, not paying attention to the relationship between the owner and the farmer, requires capital and the late return of tea, along with the structural complexity of the tea industry and the holding of political positions by Kashif Al-Saltaneh should be considered as one of the most important reasons for the failure of tea cultivation in this period.