In the minds of many outsiders, Sri Lanka remains synonymous with one thing: tea. Tea cultivation underpinned much of the island’s prosperity during the British colonial period, and also had major cultural and environmental side effects, leading to the clearance of almost all the highland jungles and the arrival of large numbers of Tamil labourers, drafted in to work the plantations. The industry remains crucial to Sri Lanka’s economy, and tea estates still dominate the hill country, with endless miles of neatly trimmed bushes carpeting the rolling uplands.
The first use of the leaves of the tea plant as a beverage is generally credited to the Chinese emperor Sheng-Nung, who – in truly serendipitous manner – discovered the plant’s potable qualities around 2700 BC when a few leaves chanced to fall off a wild tea bush into a pot of boiling water. Tea developed into a staple drink of the Chinese, and later the Japanese, though it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that it began to find a market outside Asia. The British began commercial production in India in the 1830s, establishing tea plantations in Assam and, later, Darjeeling, where it continues to flourish.
The success of Ceylon tea (as it’s still usually described, rather than “Sri Lankan”) was built on the collapse of the island’s coffee trade. Throughout the early British colonial period, coffee was the principal plantation crop in the highlands, until the insidious leaf virus hemileia vastatrix – popularly know as “Devastating Emily” – laid waste to the industry during the 1870s. Tea bushes had been grown in Sri Lanka in Peradeniya Botanical Gardens as far back as 1824, but it wasn’t until 1867 that the island’s first commercial tea plantation was established by the Scottish planter James Taylor, a modest nineteen-acre affair at Loolecondera, southeast of Kandy. When the coffee industry finally collapsed, a decade later, interest in tea really took off. Bankrupt coffee estates were snapped up for a song and converted to tea production, while rapid fortunes were made from what soon became known as Sri Lanka’s “green gold”. Hundreds of colonial planters and speculators began descending on the island to clear new land and establish estates of their own, clearing vast swathes of hill-country jungle to make way for new tea gardens in the process.
The introduction of tea also had a significant social by-product. The coffee estates had already employed large numbers of migrant Tamil labourers, brought to Sri Lanka from South India due to a chronic shortage of local manpower in the hills. Work on the coffee plantations was seasonal, meaning that these labourers returned to South India for six months of the year. By contrast, tea production continued year-round, which led to the permanent settlement of thousands of expatriate labourers, Sri Lanka’s so-called “Plantation” Tamils, whose descendants still work the island’s tea gardens today, although they remain one of the island’s poorest and most marginalized communities.
Tea remains vital to the economy of modern Sri Lanka – so much so that the entire industry was nationalized, with disastrous consequences, in 1975. The government’s inept management of the estates over the following decade led to plummeting standards that came close to crippling the entire industry, after which estates were gradually restored to private ownership, where they remain to this day. Sri Lanka is currently one of the world’s top three exporters, along with India and Kenya, and tea still makes up around a quarter of the country’s export earnings. Almost half these exports now go to Middle Eastern countries, however, which has made the industry vulnerable to the effects of warfare and sanctions in that region, although significant quantities of low-grade tea particles find their way into the tea-bags of major international brands such as Tetley and Lipton’s.
The tea “bush” is actually an evergreen tree, Camellia sinensis, which grows to around ten metres in height in the wild. Cultivated tea bushes are constantly pruned, producing a repeated growth of fresh young buds and leaves throughout the year. Ceylon tea is divided into three types, depending on the altitude at which it is grown. The best-quality tea, so-called high-grown, only flourishes above 1200m in a warm climate and on sloping terrain, for which Sri Lanka’s hill country provides the perfect location. Bushes at higher altitude grow more slowly but produce a more delicate flavour – among connoisseurs, premium high-grown Ceylon teas are rated as second only to the finest Indian Darjeelings in terms of subtlety. Low-grown tea (cultivated below 600m) is stronger and less subtle in taste; mid-grown tea is somewhere between the two – in practice, blends of the various types are usually mixed to produce the required flavour and colour.
The island’s finest teas are grown in Uva province and around Nuwara Eliya, Dimbula and Dickoya; the flavours from these different regions are quite distinct, showing (at least to trained palates) how sensitive tea is to subtle variations in soil and climate. Low-grown teas are mainly produced in the Galle, Matara and Ratnapura regions. Most Ceylon tea is black (fermented), though a few estates have diversified into producing fine green (unfermented) and oolong (partially fermented) teas, the staple form of the drink in China and Japan.
Tea production remains a labour-intensive, resolutely low-tech industry, and the manufacturing process – indeed often the machinery itself – has remained pretty much unchanged since Victorian times. The entire tea production process, from plucking to packing, takes around 24 hours. The first stage – plucking the leaves – is still extremely labour-intensive, providing work for some 300,000 estate workers across the island (mainly but not exclusively female). Tea pickers select the youngest two leaves and bud from the end of every branch – bushes are plucked every seven days in the dry season, twice as often in the wet. Following plucking, leaves are dried (or “withered”) by being spread out in huge troughs while hot air is blown through them to remove moisture, after which they are crushed for around thirty minutes, an action that releases juices and enzymes and triggers fermentation – the conditions and length of time under which the leaves ferment is one of the crucial elements in determining the quality of the tea. Once sufficient fermentation has taken place, the tea is fired in an oven, preventing further fermentation and producing the black tea that is the staple form of the drink consumed worldwide.
The resultant “bulk” tea is then filtered into different-sized particles and graded. Like wine, tea comes in an endless variety of forms and flavours, and a complex and colourful vocabulary has grown up over the centuries to describe the various styles and standards available. The finest teas – also described as “leaf” teas, since they consist of relatively large pieces of unbroken leaf – are known as Orange Pekoe (OP), signifying a tea made with young, whole leaves, and the slightly lower-quality Broken Orange Pekoe (BOP), which uses broken pieces of the same leaves. Finer grades of OP and BOP come with the added designations “Flowery”, “Golden” or “Tippy”, signifying teas which also include varying quantities and types of young buds mixed in with the leaves to give the tea a distinctively delicate flavour, such as the prized FTGFOP, or (to give it its full name) Finest Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe – also known among aficionados as Far Too Good For Ordinary People.
Lower grades are designated as “fannings” (BOPF) or as an even finer residue, unappetizingly described as “dust” (D). Despite the unprepossessing names, these grades are perhaps the two most important, since their tiny particles produce a rich, strong, instant brew that is perfect for the tea bags favoured in many parts of the world – Ceylon tea, blended with leaves from other countries, is used in many major international tea brands, including Lipton’s and Tetley. The larger OP and BOP grades, which yield a much paler and more delicate liquor, are traditionally favoured in the Middle East.
Sir Thomas Lipton and the rise of Ceylon tea
For all the pioneering efforts of Sir James Taylor, the father of Sri Lanka’s tea industry, it was another Scot, Sir Thomas Lipton, who almost single-handedly put Ceylon tea on the global map. Born in 1850 in Glasgow, Lipton displayed his appetite for adventure young, stowing away at the age of 14 on a ship to the US, where he worked for five years as a farm labourer and grocery clerk. Returning to Glasgow, Lipton opened his first grocery store in 1871, using the sort of eye-catching publicity stunts he had seen employed to tremendous effect in America, including leading a parade of well-fed pigs through the streets of Glasgow, their backs hung with placards declaring “I’m going to Lipton’s, the best shop in town for Irish bacon!” By 1880 he had twenty shops; by 1890, three hundred.
In 1889, Lipton moved into tea retailing, announcing his new wares with a parade of brass bands and bagpipers; by undercutting the then going price by two-thirds, he succeeded in selling ten million pounds of tea in just two years. The real birth of the Lipton’s tea dynasty, however, began in 1890. En route to Australia, Lipton stopped off in Ceylon and – true to his “cut out the middleman” motto – bought up five bankrupt tea estates, including what would become his favourite, at Dambatenne, near Haputale. Trumpeting his new acquisitions with relentless advertising and a new slogan (“Direct from the Tea Gardens to the Teapot”), Lipton put Ceylon tea firmly on the world map and massively stimulated demand for it back in Britain. His was also the first company to sell tea in pre-packaged cartons, thus guaranteeing quantity and quality to hard-pressed housewives – while ensuring that the Lipton’s brand received the widest possible exposure.
As a commercial expression of the might of the British Empire, Lipton’s tea was unparalleled. Lipton succeeded not only in establishing his brand as the number one tea at home and throughout the colonies, but also largely killed off demand for the traditional and more delicate but unpredictable China teas that had previously formed the mainstay of the trade, fostering a taste for the black, full-bodied and reliably strong blends that remain the norm in the UK right up to the present day. The Lipton’s tea phenomenon in turn paved the way for the commercial success of other brands established in the late nineteenth century, such as Typhoo (despite the compellingly oriental-sounding name, the tea itself was, again, sourced entirely from Sri Lanka) and Brooke Bond’s PG Tips.
The fortunes of Lipton’s own brand were mixed, however. It continued to be a major player in British markets well into the twentieth century, but gradually lost out to Brooke Bond, Typhoo and others, largely due to the fact that it was sold only through Lipton’s own shops. With the rise of supermarkets such as Tesco (which itself had its roots in the tea trade – the name is an amalgam of the surname of another entrepreneurial grocer, Jack Cohen, with that of his tea dealer, T.E. Stockwell), sales slowly decreased and the Lipton’s brand largely disappeared from Britain, leading to the final irony whereby Lipton’s, which is still synonymous with tea throughout Asia and in many other parts of the world, is now largely unknown in the land of its founder’s birth.
Following production, tea is sampled by tea tasters – a highly specialist profession, as esteemed in Sri Lanka as wine tasting is in France – before being sent for auction, mostly in Colombo. The vast majority of Sri Lanka’s tea is exported, although there’s an increasingly good range of home-grown teas available in local shops and supermarkets (especially Cargills) including various blends by major Sri Lankan tea retailers Dilmah and Tea Tang, while unblended, single-origin estate teas are also increasingly available – Ceylon tea at its purest. When buying, look out for the Ceylon Tea Board lion logo, which guarantees that the stuff you’re buying comprises only pure Ceylon tea.