Ceylon Tea History - Chapter 03

Tea production in Ceylon increased dramatically in the 1880s and by 1888 the area under cultivation exceeded that of coffee, growing to nearly 400,000 acres in 1899. The only Ceylonese planter to venture in to tea production at the early stage was Charles Henry de Soysa. British figures such as Henry Randolph Trafford arrived in Ceylon and bought coffee estates in places such as Poyston, near Kandy, in 1880, which was the centre of the coffee culture of Ceylon at the time. Although Trafford knew little about coffee, he had considerable knowledge of tea cultivation and is considered one of the pioneer tea planters in Ceylon. By 1883, Trafford was the resident manager of numerous estates in the area that were switching over to tea production. By the late 1880s, almost all the coffee plantations in Ceylon had been converted to tea. Similarly, coffee stores rapidly converted to tea factories in order to meet increasing demand. Tea processing technology rapidly developed in the 1880s, following on from the manufacture of the first "Sirocco" tea drier by Samuel Cleland Davidson in 1877 and the manufacture of the first tea rolling machine by John Walker & Co in 1880—essential technologies that made realizing commercial tea production a reality. This realization was confirmed in 1884 with the construction of the Central Tea Factory on Fairyland Estate (Pedro) in Nuwara Eliya. As tea production in Ceylon progressed, new factories were constructed and innovative methods of mechanization introduced from England. Marshall, Sons & Co. of Gainsborough in Lincolnshire, the Tangyes Machine Company of Birmingham, and Davidson & Co. of Belfast supplied the new tea factories with machinery, a function they continue to perform to the present.