When the West arrived in Ceylon, off the south coast of India, it was an island with a shifting collection of separate kingdoms. And it was not the British who initially conquered it, it was the Portuguese, who arrived in 1505, and had control of a large part of the island. The Dutch conquered the island around 1658, taking it from the Portuguese, following the eighty years war. The British arrived in 1796 and soon later expelled the remaining Portuguese and Dutch authorities. Following the Kandyan Wars on the island, by 1815 the island was united under British rule. Soon trade flourished.
In the year 1839, the first tea plant arrived in Ceylon. It was brought from Assam, India, where the variety had been discovered by Robert Bruce, a Scottish explorer and merchant whilst seeking to produce tea in India using smuggled Chinese plants. His brother Charles Alexander Bruce was instrumental in the beginnings of tea cultivation in India, and sent botanical samples to Danish Botanist Dr Nathaniel Wallich, who sent Assam tea plant samples to the Royal Botanical Gardens in Peradeniya, Ceylon for non-commercial purposes. The seeds of this plant produced excellent results, however little more was done at the time.
At this time the Ceylon coffee plantations were very profitable, and by 1860 Ceylon was the world’s largest coffee producer. However, this would soon change.
James Taylor is widely regarded as the ‘father’ of Ceylon Tea. He hailed from Mosspark, Monboddo, Kincardineshire in Scotland and arrived on the island in the year 1852. He was just seventeen when he was sent to the Loolecondera Estate, a coffee plantation in the Kandy District. With the onset of the coffee rust disease, Taylor visited India to learn about growing tea.
In 1866, on the orders of G.D.B. Harrison, one of the proprietors of Loolecondera Estate, Taylor collected tea seeds from the Royal Botanical Gardens in Peradeniya and planted them along the roadsides of Loolecondera. This was in an attempt to make up for the losses borne from the dying coffee plantations. Successfully, within the next 12 months, the first tea estate was born – Field No. 7 – expanding to 19 acres on the Loolecondera Estate, marking the birth of the tea industry in Ceylon.
The first sale of Loolecondera tea was made in Kandy, Ceylon in 1872. Several other tea plantations were already underway, and trade became international very quickly. This led Taylor, in 1873, to build the first Tea House or factory. It was of wattle and daub and had hessian lofts in which to wither the leaf. He was said to have invented a tea leaf roller, which was powered by a twenty foot diameter water wheel. That same year the first successful mass production tea-rolling machine was brought forward by the Walker brothers and manufactured by their firm, John Walker & Co.
Botanist Henry Trimen succeeded George Thwaites as Director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Peradeniya in 1880. Trimen presided over the critical transformation period for the plantations from coffee to tea and his contribution is therefore considered of paramount importance.
By 1886, Coffee production had dwindled to almost nothing, whilst tea production and sales boomed. By 1890, exports of tea had reached 20,000 tons per year.
One of these plantations is called Tillicoultry Estate, located near Lindula, Dimbulla. The land was purchased by Phillip Morrison Anstruther around 1870. He planted tea bushes and started tea production there over the next few years. The estate covers 930 acres and most of this area is planted with tea bushes.
His father, Philip Anstruther, grandson to Sir John Anstruther, Baronet of Nova Scotia, was originally from Elie, Fife, Scotland. He had been the fourth Colonial Secretary of Ceylon from 1833 to 1845 when he retired from the civil service. Whilst in post - from around 1840 - he had purchased 3,793 acres of crown land in the high lands of Kandy, where he had set up coffee plantations. He (or at least certainly his wife) returned to Scotland before he took up the chairmanship of the Ceylon Railway Company.
On 23rd September 1846, Philip Morrison Anstruther was born in Tillicoultry, Clackmannanshire. He spent at least his early childhood there prior to moving to Ceylon and purchasing the estate. He owned the Tillicoultry estate until 1892, when he sold up and returned to Britain, settling in Great Yarmouth before his death in 1899.
The Tillicoultry estate continued through various owners, and the island of Ceylon became independent of Britain in 1948, and became the Republic of Sri-Lanka in 1972. The tea plantations were nationalised in 1975. In 1992 the industry was re-privatised, and the Tillicoultry Estate continues to produce world famous Ceylon tea to this day.
References:
Wikipedia (Philip Anstruther and Philip Morrison Anstruther)