Beginning

Prior to the 1860s, Sri Lanka’s main crop was coffee . In 1852 A young Scottish man by the name of James Taylor who arrived in Ceylon . He later became the Pioneer for the transformation of Ceylon’s plantation map from coffee to tea.

He got involved with the Royal Botanical Gardens of Peradeniya of Sri Lanka where he got his first tea seeds for experimental planting. Loolecondera Estate with 19 acres of where Taylor did the first commercial planting of tea became the model for the future development of the tea industry in Sri Lanka. Later he experimented with different methods of processing tea leaves.

Coffee to Tea

Later in 1869 a leaf disease destroyed the island’s coffee plantation and estate owners looked for alternative crops. Following Taylor’s lead, they turned towards tea. The transformation from coffee to tea was fairly easy since the island had experienced planters and a well-working agricultural system. Ceylon’s tea industry witnessed a rapid expansion in the 1870s and 1880s, which brought a good deal of interest from large British companies, which took over many estates.

From 400 hectares in 1875, the island’s tea area grew to 120,000 hectares by 1900. Today it is covering more than 220,000 hectares in the highland and southern lowland areas of the country.

Legacy Continues

Former High Commissioner of Great Britain John Field stated that Sri Lanka James Taylor’s legacy is best summoned up in the words of “It can be said of very few individuals that their labor has helped to shape the landscape of a country. 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”