A Taste of Tea’s History in Sri Lanka

Tea was a relative latecomer to this verdant tropical land of clove trees, coconut palms and bamboo groves. And its advent resulted from disease.

In the first half of the 1800s, the British introduced commercial coffee growing to their Indian Ocean colony of Ceylon to augment the traditional exports of spices. But in 1869, a devastating rust began wiping out the coffee bushes.

Fortunately for the planters, a Scottish plantation manager, James Taylor, had started the experimental growth of tea two years earlier. Determined to make a fresh start, the planters restocked their holdings, called estates, with tea bushes. Taylor’s Loolecondera Estate, where the innovative Scot planted the island’s first commercial tea acreage, became their model.

The late 19th-Century pedigree makes Sri Lanka a piker in the cultivation of a crop already known in China during the 3rd Century BC. But the same mysterious factors that combine to produce a great wine soon made “Pure Ceylon Tea” a label coveted by the tea drinkers of the British Empire--and far beyond.

The Uva teas from the eastern slopes of the central highlands, raked by dry, cool winds from July through September, acquire a rich, distinctive taste that connoisseurs liken to wintergreen. To the west, leaves from bushes grown on estates over 4,000 feet, ruffled by the northeast monsoon during the first three months of each year, acquire a jasmine-like aroma. Their teas, known as Dimbulas, produce a smooth and mellow beverage.

The British transformed the geography of Ceylon’s hilly and mountainous heart, uprooting scrub and jungle and carpeting the slopes with the soft green down of tea bushes. They depended on brute human force--and herds of elephants trained to help with clearing and construction.

In many places, the bushes the colonists planted survive today, and still produce excellent tea. But 47 years after independence, only a solitary British planter is left--a manager in his 50s, who works on the Telbedde estate.

The cash crop also altered Sri Lanka’s demography, since to pluck the leaves the British imported hordes of Tamil laborers from southern India. Unwittingly, the colonists were contributing to the ethnic tensions that have plagued this country’s political life since independence in 1948.

Today, about 600,000 acres are planted with tea, a crop that is the country’s top moneymaker overall based on export earnings and the revenues it generates for government coffers. Year in and year out, according to the Sri Lanka Tea Board, the country meets 25% of the world’s imported tea demands.