22 MAY 2018: The tropical island of Sri Lanka has attracted visitors for centuries with its green and lushly fertile natural beauty. Today its popularity is stronger than ever. Almost a decade has passed since the end of its long and bitter civil war, and now lovely boutique and luxury hotels abound, the food is delectable and the people friendly and welcoming. For me there was another compelling reason to visit – a gift from its colonial past that has continued to flourish.

The island which lies in the Bay of Bengal, just below the south-eastern tip of India was formerly a British crown colony known as Ceylon, a name it kept for nearly a quarter-century after independence. The name Ceylon is almost synonymous with fine tea. To this day this small Indian Ocean island is famed for producing the finest black tea in the world.

Tea cultivation underpinned much of Sri Lanka’s prosperity during its British Colonial period with major cultural and environmental aftereffects. It led to the clearance of much of the highland jungles and heralded the settlement of boatloads of Tamil labourers brought in to work the plantations. At first the British tried coffee as the principal plantation crop in the highlands but a leaf virus laid waste to that industry in the 1870’s.

In 1867 the island’s first commercial tea plantation was established by Scottish planter James Taylor southeast of Kandy. Then as the coffee industry collapsed tea took off. Bankrupt coffee plantations were snapped up and converted to tea production making fortunes in what would soon be known as Sri Lanka’s “green gold.” Hundreds of colonial planters and speculators descended on the island turning hill country jungle into tea gardens that extended up misty mountains farther than the eye could see.

Thousands of migrant Tamil labourers who used to return to south India for six months out of the year as coffee plantation work was seasonal, became permanent settlers as tea production is year-round. These “plantation” Tamils descendants still work the island’s highland tea gardens today.

Sri Lanka was once the world’s top tea exporter and is still among the top three with India and Kenya. Tea is serious business here and makes up around a quarter of the country’s export earnings. For the tea loving tourist, like me, there’s much to see, appreciate and taste as many plantations offer tours and tastes.

The tea “bush” is really an evergreen tree, camellia sinensis, which in the wild grows to ten metres in height. To keep it bush height, it’s constantly pruned, which produces a repeated growth of fresh young buds and leaves throughout the year. It’s only the youngest two leaves and bud from the end of every branch that the tea pickers pluck – every seven days in dry season, twice as often in wet.

Ceylon tea is divided into three types depending upon the altitude at which it is grown. The best quality, high-grown tea, flourishes above 1200m in a warm climate on a sloping terrain – exactly what Sri Lanka’s high hill country provides. Bushes at high altitude grow slower producing a more delicate flavour that’s cherished by connoisseurs. Ceylon high-grown teas are rated second only to the finest Indian Darjeeling in subtlety. Low-grown teas are more robust in flavour. Mid-grown teas are somewhere between the two.

I started my tea visits about half an hour inland from the historic seaside city of Galle on the southwest coast. My driver took me by cinnamon plantations stopping on the way to pick up a handful of cinnamon bark and leaves at the roadside which he crushed to let me inhale the distinctive aroma of the spice. Then all too soon we reached The Handunugoda Tea Estate.

The plantation has been in the family of the sole proprietor Malinga Herman Gunaratne for over 150 years. Gunaratne worked for over 45 years in plantation management for the British plantations and then for state owned ones (the country nationalized the industry with disastrous consequences in 1975 – after inept management and plummeting standards the estates were gradually returned to private ownership) including plantations of over 100,000 acres in the country’s most prestigious plantation district of Nuwara Eliya.

Today along with running his family plantation, he has authored five books about Sri Lankan life: The Plantation Raj, For a Sovereign State, The Suicide Club, Tortured Island and God’s Secret Agent. His grandfather who was president of the Suicide Club, a gambler’s club, almost lost the plantation on the roll of the dice. Among the teas sold at Handunugoda is The Suicide Club blend, recommended to be consumed with that book in hand.

My tour began with an explanation of tea production including Herman’s Virgin White Tea, which the estate claims is the only white tea in the world untouched by human hands. At dawn women wearing fine white gloves pluck the harvest with golden scissors. The estate also has rubber, cinnamon, pepper and coconut trees and I was treated to a mini demonstration of how those are harvested.

After a short walk about, I was served tea and chocolate cake at the proprietor’s bungalow. Then I went through the tea processing facilities where 150-year-old machines still chugged along doing their work noisily but proficiently. The tour ended at the Tea Museum with an opportunity to taste and buy a large selection of Ceylon teas.

Of course, my next destination had to be Nuwara Eliya in Uva province, the highest, wildest and most beautiful part of Sri Lanka. The drive from Galle took over seven hours under harrowing traffic conditions on narrow windy roads dominated by maniacal bus drivers intent on crushing anything in their way. Thank goodness for my driver Anton who calmly dodged cows, dogs, people, tuk tuks (three wheeled auto rickshaws), motorcycles with entire families aboard and oncoming buses speeding down upon us in our lane.

As we neared our destination we climbed up sheer green mountainsides of pine and eucalyptus forests, by plunging waterfalls and into the mist-shrouded tea plantations. The stylized landscape of the immaculately manicured plantations rising up steep slopes on rugged mountains was jaw dropping gorgeous. And it went on for miles and miles and miles. More about Sri Lanka in my next column. Meanwhile pour a cuppa Ceylon tea to honour the Royal wedding.