Tea in Sri Lanka: From a Blight in 1869 to Four Million Cups a Day

Walking through a tea plantation above Ella on a clear morning, with the rows running up the hillside in every direction and a handful of Tamil pickers working a section below me, it occurred to me that I knew almost nothing about how this all came to exist. I had stopped at the Kingswood Tea Company on the way from Kandy, watched the process from leaf to finished product, tasted three varieties, and still felt I was only seeing the surface of something much larger. So I looked into it. What follows is what I found.

How it all started: coffee, a fungus, and a Scotsman

Sri Lanka was not always a tea island. For most of the 19th century, the highlands were given over to coffee. British planters had been growing it since the 1820s, and by the 1860s the industry was substantial: around 170,000 acres under cultivation, exporting to Britain and Europe, profitable enough to attract serious investment. The colonial economy of Ceylon, as it was then known, was built on coffee.

Then, in 1869, a fungus arrived.

Hemileia vastatrix, coffee leaf rust, spread through the plantations with the kind of efficiency that only a disease attacking a monoculture can manage. Within fifteen years it had destroyed the industry almost completely. Planters who had borrowed heavily against their estates faced ruin. The highlands were full of dying coffee bushes and men looking for an alternative.

The alternative was already growing in India. James Taylor, a Scottish planter who had been in Ceylon since 1852, had been experimenting with tea on his estate at Loolecondera in the Kandy district since 1867, two years before the coffee blight arrived. He planted his first commercial crop on 19 acres, processed the leaves by hand in his bungalow, and shipped the first commercial consignment to London in 1873. The auction price was good. Other planters took notice.

By the 1880s the transition was well underway. By 1900, Ceylon was producing 150 million pounds of tea per year and had become one of the leading tea exporters in the world. The transformation took barely two decades. It was driven by necessity and enabled by the particular conditions of the central highlands: altitude, rainfall, and a temperature range that turns out to be close to ideal for Camellia sinensis, the plant from which all tea is made.

The land and the altitude

Sri Lanka’s tea regions are defined almost entirely by elevation, and the industry uses three broad categories: low-grown (below 600 meters), mid-grown (600 to 1,200 meters), and high-grown (above 1,200 meters). The differences matter.

High-grown teas, produced in the districts around Nuwara Eliya, Dimbula, and Uva, are considered the finest. The cold nights slow the growth of the tea bush, which concentrates the flavor compounds in the leaves. The harvest is smaller but the cup is more complex: lighter in color, delicate, with a brisk, almost wine-like quality. Nuwara Eliya teas in particular have a distinctive character that serious tea drinkers recognize in the same way a wine drinker recognizes a specific appellation.

Mid-grown teas from the Kandy and Ella regions, including the estates around Kingswood, tend to be fuller in body. They are the workhorse of the Ceylon tea industry: flavorful, consistent, the teas most likely to end up blended into what Europeans buy as everyday breakfast tea.

Low-grown teas from the southern and western lowlands are strong, dark, and produced in large volumes. They form the base of many commercial blends.

The Ella area sits at around 1,000 meters, in the transition zone between mid and high-grown. The plantations around the town cover the hillsides in the dense, clipped rows you see in every photograph: not the natural shape of the bush, which would grow considerably taller, but a working surface maintained at waist height to allow hand-picking.

From leaf to cup: the process

The process I saw at Kingswood is essentially the same across the industry, and has changed relatively little since Taylor’s day.

Plucking. Only the top two leaves and the bud of each shoot are taken, what the industry calls the “two and a bud.” A skilled picker can harvest 15 to 20 kilograms of leaf per day. The work is done almost entirely by hand. Mechanical harvesting exists but is used mainly on lower-grade plantations; for quality tea, hand-picking is still standard.

Withering. The fresh leaves are spread on long mesh trays, called withering troughs, and air is blown through them for 12 to 18 hours. The leaves lose around half their moisture and become soft and pliable. This is the step that prepares them for rolling without breaking.

Rolling. The withered leaves are passed through rolling machines that twist and break the leaf cells. This releases the enzymes that trigger oxidation. The degree of rolling affects the final character of the tea: more broken leaf means a stronger, faster-brewing cup; whole leaf means a slower infusion with more nuance.

Oxidation. Spread out in a cool, humid room, the rolled leaves are exposed to air. The enzymes react with oxygen and the leaves turn from green to copper to dark brown. This is the process that turns green tea into black tea. The timing is critical: too little and the tea is underdeveloped; too much and the flavor becomes dull. A skilled factory operator judges it by eye, color and smell.

Tea is always dried with wood in Sri Lanka

Firing. The oxidized leaves go into large dryers at around 90 degrees Celsius, which stops the oxidation and reduces moisture to around 3%. The heat also develops the darker color and characteristic aroma of black tea.

Sorting and grading. The dried tea is sifted through a series of meshes into grades based on particle size. The main grades you are likely to see on a packet in Europe are OP (Orange Pekoe, whole leaf), BOP (Broken Orange Pekoe, broken leaf), and BOPF (very fine broken leaf, used in teabags). The grading is about size and brewing characteristics, not quality as such: a high-grown BOP will outperform a low-grown OP in the cup.

Tasting and blending. Before packing, each batch is tasted by a professional taster who assesses color, clarity, aroma, and flavor, and decides how it will be sold: as single-origin Ceylon tea, or blended into a house mix. Most of what ends up in European supermarkets is a blend, combining teas from different origins and harvests to hit a consistent flavor profile.

The people who pick it

The Tamil workers on Sri Lanka’s tea plantations are not the same community as the Sri Lankan Tamils of the north. They are descended from laborers brought from southern India by the British in the 19th century, when the local Sinhalese population proved unwilling to work the highland estates on the terms the planters were offering. Around a million people were relocated over several decades, a migration organized and managed as a business necessity rather than examined very carefully as a human one.

Their descendants, known as Indian Tamils or Up-Country Tamils, have occupied a precarious legal and social position ever since. When Ceylon became independent in 1948, the new government stripped around 700,000 of them of citizenship, rendering them stateless. A series of agreements with India over the following decades resulted in some being granted Indian citizenship, some Sri Lankan citizenship, and a substantial number remaining in legal limbo for years. Citizenship issues were not fully resolved until 2003.

The plantation workers today are among the lowest-paid workers in Sri Lanka. The daily wage for a tea picker is set by collective agreement between the unions and the Regional Plantation Companies that manage most of the large estates, and it has been a subject of ongoing dispute. In 2022, following prolonged strike action, the daily wage was raised to 1,000 Sri Lankan rupees, around three US dollars. Workers typically live in line rooms on the estates: long, barrack-style housing provided by the plantation companies, a system dating from the colonial period that creates a degree of dependency on the employer that critics have long pointed out.

This is not a comfortable part of the story. The cup of Ceylon tea that reaches a kitchen in Stockholm or London has a supply chain that runs through one of the more historically unjust labor arrangements in South Asian history. It is worth knowing.

What Ceylon tea means for Sri Lanka today

Sri Lanka is currently the world’s fourth-largest tea producer, behind China, India, and Kenya, and the second-largest exporter by volume. Tea accounts for around 10 to 15% of the country’s total export earnings in a normal year, making it one of the single most important sources of foreign exchange in the economy.

The industry employs directly around one million people: pickers, factory workers, supervisors, blenders, packers, and the infrastructure around them. When you add indirect employment in transport, retail, and the service industries that have grown around tea tourism, the number is considerably larger.

The brand is exceptionally strong. Ceylon tea has a geographical indication protection similar to Champagne or Parmigiano-Reggiano: tea can only be labeled Ceylon tea if it is grown and processed entirely within Sri Lanka. The lion logo used by the Sri Lanka Tea Board on certified exports is one of the most recognized food brands in the world. It commands a premium in export markets and protects against blending with cheaper teas from other origins.

The country also exports considerable volumes of tea as bulk commodity for blending, which goes out under other brands without the Ceylon label. The split between premium branded exports and bulk commodity sales is a perennial tension in the industry, with ongoing debates about how to move more of the value chain onshore.

Sri Lanka’s economic crisis of 2022, which saw foreign currency reserves collapse and imports restricted, hit the tea industry hard. The government’s abrupt ban on synthetic fertilizers in 2021, reversed after the harvest fell sharply, was particularly damaging. Output dropped by around 18% in that year. The industry has since partially recovered, but the episode illustrated how dependent the national economy is on a single crop, and how quickly disruption to that crop translates into broader economic stress.

A plant, a fungus, and 150 years

The tea plantations of Sri Lanka exist because of a fungal infection that destroyed an earlier industry at exactly the right moment for an alternative to be available. James Taylor had been quietly proving that tea could grow in the Ceylon highlands for years before anyone needed the information urgently. When they did, it was there.

That is roughly 150 years ago. The industry that grew from his 19 acres now covers around 220,000 hectares, employs a million people, generates billions of dollars in export earnings, and produces a cup that serious tea drinkers around the world consider worth seeking out by name.

Walking through the plantations above Ella in the morning, with the mist still in the valley below and the pickers moving steadily along the rows, the whole weight of that history is not obviously present. It looks like what it is: people working, on land shaped for a single purpose, in country that happens to be extraordinarily beautiful. The history is underneath it, as it usually is.

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