Sunny people in the island of the sun begin producing Black tea

The history of Ceylon tea, the finest Black tea in the world runs far back to Sri Lanka’s colonial period (1815-1948). Until the year 1869, Coffee industry of Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon was a lucrative business to the colonial era planters of the beautiful Indian Ocean Island. Second to none among the planters, mainly British, was legendary Sinhalese Coffee planter, “Rothschild of Ceylon”, Sir Charles Henry De Soysa (1836-1890) of Moratuwa (western coastal belt of Sri Lanka) who prided on management of his estates with no European whoever on the payroll. The business of European & Ceylonese planters was business. They made money.

Black tea: black tea fields down in Ceylon
As all good things must come to end, in 1869, the death blow to the coffee industry was dealt in by the outbreak of a coffee rust, Hemileia vastatrix, a fungal disease. Such was the devastation by the ‘coffee blight’, planters lost all hope on coffee. All of a sudden coffee was the bitter berry. If you get tired of digging the historical records, the next best option is fiction based on facts. Standing head & shoulders high among all the famous fictional narrations of the grand enterprise is “The Bitter Berry” to hold you in thrall. The novel was written by Christine Spittle Wilson, daughter of much adored Ceylonese Dutch burgher writer, Dr. R. L. Spittle (1880-1969). It was translated from English into Sinhala by the title “Thitta Kopei” meaning bitter coffee in Sinhalese. But then the bitterness was not given an opportunity to take root. The lion-hearted planters wouldn’t be denied: new cash crop stronger than coffee plant was found. Undaunted & obstinate with courage, the planters carried on to establish the legendary industry of Ceylon Tea, the finest Black tea in the world.

Black tea: brave hearts

“Not often is it that men have the heart, when their one great industry is ruined, to rear up in a few years another as rich to take its place: and the tea fields of Ceylon are as true a monument to courage as is the lion of Waterloo.”
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 –1930)

Black tea: our man in Ceylon

“It can be said of very few individuals that their labors have helped to shape the landscape of a country. But the beauty of the hill country as it now appears owes much to the inspiration of James Taylor, the man who introduced tea cultivation to Sri Lanka”.
John Field, the High Commissioner for Great Britain in Sri Lanka, 1992, the 100th death anniversary of Taylor

When the hour comes, the man would appear. Our man was only a boy when he arrived in Ceylon from from Kincardineshire in 1852. He was sixteen. His name was James Taylor. James Taylor (1835 -1892) during his time at a coffee plantation in Ceylon visited India (1866) to learn on growing Black tea. On his return in 1867, Taylor pioneered the Black Tea plantations of Ceylon in mere 19 acres of land.
In 1872, with a new variety of Black tea from Assam discovered by another Scotsman, Robert Bruce, Taylor went on a much larger scale in plantations at Loolecondera estate in the Central Highlands of Ceylon. Taylor had already been narrating his enterprise. “I have a machine of my own invention being made in Kandy for rolling tea which I think will be successful”, wrote Taylor. The year 1873 saw the export of Sri Lanka’s first Black tea consignment of 23 lbs from Loolecondra Estate to London.

Black tea: Lipton was here
Although Black tea had become a popular beverage in Great Britain by 1880, it was still not within the purchasing capacity of the working class. In the year 1890, a British millionaire, who at the age of eighteen had picked up American techniques of salesmanship and advertising in New York, secretly booked sea passage to Australia yet disembarked at Colombo, Ceylon to close ranks with James Taylor to launch an enterprise of gigantic scale: “Straight from the tea gardens to the tea pot‘. He had already taken a leaf out of the book his mother: his mother dealt directly with the farmers over the middlemen at the market to buy bacon, eggs & butter for their small grocery shop at Glasgow.

BLack tea: Lipton came, Lipton saw, Lipton conquered.
Thomas Lipton (1848-1931) resolved to leapfrog the industry of Black tea: kill “wherever possible, the middleman or intermediary profiteer between the producer and consumer”, “with profit alike to myself and my customer’ (Lipton’s autobiography by Sir Thomas Lipton, 1932)
In 1891 Ceylon Tea established a record price of £36.15 per pound at the London Tea Auctions. In 1893, an incredible one million packets of Ceylon tea were sold at Chicago’s world’s fair. Lipton’s became a household name across Europe and the US. Lipton took Black tea to the world. And the world brought him fame & fortune. 1898 the Irishman was knighted by Queen Victoria.

Black tea: If you build it, they will come
And they came with great power. They came climbing, winding over the rings of hills, hill after hill, through the tunnels cut through the hills, over the bridges built over the rivers & ravines: the steam powered locomotive trains. They came to transport Ceylon tea from the Central Highlands of Sri Lanka to the seaport of Colombo for export. In year 1884 the highland track of spectacular scenery built by Ceylon Railway lines was extended to Nanu Oya close to Nuwara Eliya, & in 1894 to Bandarawela & then again in 1924 to Badulla of Central Highlands of Sri Lanka, the home of Black tea branded Ceylon tea, the finest Black tea in the world.