Ceylon Tea History - Chapter 01

Sri Lanka was formerly a British colony known as Ceylon, a name it kept for nearly a quarter-century after independence. It was during the British era that tea first began to be cultivated and manufactured here.The story of Ceylon Tea begins with coffee. The coffee plant had already been found growing naturally among the approaches to the central hill country. Then British Governor Barnes threw the weight of official support behind large-scale cultivation. Land in the central hills was sold for a few pence an acre, official funds were dedicated to research and experiments in coffee-growing, planters and merchants were provided with incentives and support. Most important of all, Barnes provided the infrastructure – a network of roads, including the all-important trunk route from Kandy to Colombo – that enabled coffee-planters to get their produce to town, and then to market in England. In the 1870s, coffee plantations were devastated by a fungal disease called Hemileia vastatrix or coffee rust, better known as "coffee leaf disease" or "coffee blight”. The death of the coffee industry marked the end of an era when most of the plantations on the island were dedicated to producing coffee beans. Planters experimented with cocoa and cinchona as alternative crops but failed due to an infestation of Heloplice antonie, so that in the 1870s virtually all the remaining coffee planters in Ceylon switched to the production and cultivation of tea.