
The year is 1824. The British Colonial Government has only recently gained full dominion over the Island of Ceylon, subsequent to fall of the Kandyan Kingdom in the aftermath of the 2nd Kandyan War. This same year, an individual or a group of individuals attached to the British East India Company, the record is not clear, brings with them the first ever tea plant to Sri Lanka from China.
This specimen is planted at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Peradeniya, and no one pays much attention to it beyond that, and for good reason. At the time, Ceylon is famous for its exquisite coffee. In fact, much of the British colonial economy in Ceylon has been built entirely on coffee and it is a flourishing trade with no end in sight.
Until it Was Time for Tea…
As 1870 approached, and coffee production in Sri Lanka was at its peak, the Island’s coffee plantations were ravaged by a terrible blight, leaving the industry devastated. During the early years of the blight, planters began looking for alternate crops, understanding the extent of the impending catastrophe for coffee.
In this atmosphere, a young Scotsman with some experience with tea, James Taylor, was charged with attempting commercial cultivation of tea in 1867. He was given 19 acres of land on the Loolcondera Estate and told to “get on with it”. And so, he did. An enterprising chap, Taylor soon planted a tea garden on his 19 acres and experimented with various methods of manufacture on his veranda, which ended up being Ceylon’s first “tea factory”. Within a year he dispatched the first shipment of Ceylon tea, a whopping 23 pounds in total quantity, to the London Tea Auction. By 1872, he had established a fully equipped tea factory at Loolcondera and the age of tea in Ceylon had begun.
The Rest is History
It was soon discovered that, not only was Ceylon very suitable for tea production, its variety of soils and climates made for unique cups of tea. Thus, as the sun set on coffee it rose on tea and, within a few years, tea production flourished on the Island; growing from just 19 acres in 1867 to nearly 400,000 acres by 1899. The success and lucrative nature of the industry drew the attention of expert planters and mechanisers of the day such as Henry Randolph Trafford, Samuel C Davidson and John Walker & Co. Together, these pioneers and visionaries, along with other titans of the day, designed and put into place the techniques and practices for the manufacture of Ceylon Tea, many of which are still used today, in some form.
By the late 1800s, the industry was coming of age. The Ceylon Tea Traders’ Association and the Colombo Brokers’ Association were formed, as was the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce and, in July 1883, the first tea auction in Colombo was held at Somerville & Co. These bodies still form the core structure of the tea industry in Sri Lanka today.
The Colombo Tea Auction would later grow to become the largest single origin tea auction centre in the world and, up until the Global Pandemic, functioned in much the same way as it had done from the beginning, by open outcry. In 2019, Sri Lanka exported nearly 300,000 metric tons of tea and it is now amongst the Island’s top 03 exports, making the Sri Lanka the world’s 4th largest exporter of tea.