The Hill Country of Sri Lanka and Ceylon Tea

… not often it is that men have the heart, when their one great industry is withered, to rear up in a few years, another, as rich to take it’s place and the tea fields of Ceylon, as true, a monument to courage as is the lion at Waterloo.

Sir Arthur Conan  Doyle

Tea was an essential part of my journey through Sri Lanka. I drink litres of it; I love to smell it and cook with it, and the photographs of the plantations I had seen in magazines for years had always drawn me in. So the longest, central loop of my trip was given over to the hill country, whose undisputed king is Ceylon tea.

What I found there was more complicated, and more moving, than the postcard. This is a guide to the tea country, Kandy, Nuwara Eliya, Haputale, and to what growing that tea actually costs the people who pick it. If you are planning the wider journey, it’s in my full guide to independent travel in Sri Lanka.

Kandy and the story of the leaf

If you share the passion, begin in Kandy, at the Ceylon Tea Museum in Hantana, about three kilometres from the centre. It is a restored old tea factory set in the hills among the plantations, not far from Loolecondera, the estate where James Taylor first planted tea and started the whole story of this green gold.

A shop and a tasting room sit alongside the museum, which fills the factory’s lower floors. Among the old machinery, the original tools, the books and photographs that belonged to Taylor, you can follow the history of tea and see what it meant to an island once fought over for it. Between a glance through the stained-glass windows and a hand run along the wooden walls, I learned that tea reached Ceylon around 1867, after a fungal blight wiped out the coffee that had been the island’s main crop. Taylor brought tea plants from India and, by 1873, was shipping the first Ceylon tea to London. Today Sri Lanka is one of the world’s largest tea exporters, and its teas are still sold through the historic Colombo auction, among the busiest in the world.

To carry the Ceylon Lion logo, a tea must be 100% grown in Sri Lanka and packed on the island, guaranteeing single origin and purity. The finest of it is still made the “orthodox” way, in five steps: withering, rolling, oxidation (often called fermentation), drying and grading.

The people behind the leaf

There is another condition behind Ceylon tea, and it is the one I cannot leave out.

The best of this tea is still picked by hand, which makes it beautiful, traditional and endlessly photogenic, and which also rests on a deep and lasting injustice. The pickers are Malaiyaha Tamils, descendants of labourers brought from southern India by the British colonial authorities around two hundred years ago, together with the first tea seedlings. Most of them are women. Generations later, many still live where their ancestors were placed: around 470,000 of them still on the estates, in the cramped colonial-era “line houses” that the plantation companies own to this day.

Watching them move barefoot along the stony paths between the bushes, picking the youngest shoots and leaves of the precious Orange Pekoe and dropping them into sacks slung from a strap across the forehead, gave me a lump in the throat that returns whenever I think of it. Their wages have crept up only under decades of pressure and broken promises: a landmark 2026 agreement raised the basic daily wage to 1,750 rupees, only around six US dollars and change, for gathering a heavy daily quota of leaves, while the tea itself sells at a premium the world over. When a Guardian investigation found estate workers unable to afford food, even Lipton and Tetley were forced to open inquiries into conditions on the plantations they buy from.

I have never been able to sip Lipton’s tea again since. Travelling is also this: seeing the hands behind the thing you love, and not being able to unsee them.

Ceylon tea and walks in Nuwara Eliya

Nuwara Eliya is one of the capitals of Ceylon tea, along with Uva and Dimbula, and it is a strange little England. As I wrote in my practical guide to travelling Sri Lanka independently, that resemblance is not only a matter of the cool climate: the town could pass for a British village, all mock-Tudor cottages, a racecourse, a polo ground, a golf course, a country club and flower gardens, ringed by tea.

The best known estate, because it runs right down to the town, is the Pedro Estate (long associated with the Oliphant name), whose factory is open to visitors. A little further out is the Mackwoods Tea Estate, reached along a narrow road that winds through bushes that seem to multiply to the horizon. Its tea room is well stocked and the packaging makes for genuinely elegant gifts.

Lovely Haputale

Around Haputale it would be truer to say the tea surrounds the town, because it does, on every side. It also means the railway between Nuwara Eliya and Haputale is the most beautiful and thrilling stretch in the country. If tea really is not your thing, you can skip this leg, because there is little else to do but visit the spectacular, and still unmistakably colonial, Dambatenne estate that Thomas Lipton built, then taste and buy.

While you are there, walk up to Lipton’s Seat, the viewpoint where he is said to have surveyed his empire of tea. On a clear morning, before the mist rises, the view over the plunging green terraces is one of the finest in Sri Lanka.

How to drink Ceylon Orange Pekoe

First, a small disappointment for the purist: in Sri Lanka the tea is mostly drunk from bags, or at best fabric triangles. Finding it loose, as leaf, was harder than I had hoped.

Locally, the water is heated but not boiled; one bag is steeped per cup for about five minutes, and it comes sweetened and clouded with a little cold milk, or, in smarter places, with milk foam. I drink mine hot and bitter, and unrepentant.

A recipe: apples baked in Ceylon tea

In Kandy, at the Tea Fortress, I tasted apples flavoured with tea, and I have made them ever since. Here is how.

For the tea sorbet, bring 500 ml of water to the boil with 125 g of sugar and 30 g of glucose; take it off the heat, steep 8 g of tea for two minutes and strain. Add the juice of one lemon and churn in an ice-cream maker, or, as I do, freeze in a metal container for a couple of hours, stirring now and then.

For the apples, heat the oven to 160°C. Grease a baking dish and pour in a cup of water. Halve and core the apples (Golden Delicious or a good russet), set them in the dish, put a teaspoon of butter on each half and cover with honey. Bake for 20 minutes.

For the tea jelly, bring 250 ml of apple juice to the boil with 20 g of sugar and 10 g of jam-setting agent, take it off the heat, steep 5 g of tea for two minutes and strain.

To serve, coat the warm apples in the tea-and-apple jelly and set them on a bed of tea sorbet.

There is a great deal more to Sri Lanka than its tea, of course. If this has made you want the whole island, my complete guide to independent travel in Sri Lanka is the place to start, and if the human cost of the plantations stayed with you, as it stays with me, it is part of a bigger question I keep returning to: what it really means to travel responsibly.

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