Tea and Taylor

The name James Taylor is synonymous with Ceylon tea. He has been acknowledged as the ‘Father of Ceylon tea’ for his pioneering efforts to introduce a new crop when coffee cultivations were vanishing due to a leaf disease. 

After 127 years since his death, the village folk in his birthplace in Scotland are planning to erect a statue to remember him. A bronze bust on a plinth is to be set up at the corner of two streets in Auchenblae in Aberdeen. The initiative has been taken by the Auchenblae Heritage Society, a news report said. 

Taylor came here as a teenager in the 1850s. It was the era when owners of coffee plantations were looking for “sons of the soil” in Scotland to work in the plantations in Ceylon – then a British colony. For the youngsters it was an adventurous trip.

Following the invasion of the Kandyan kingdom in 1815, the British administration gradually began to open bare lands for plantation crops. While India, which was also a colony under the British at the time, started growing tea achieving great success in Assam in Northeast India, coffee was introduced to Ceylon. The first coffee plantation was started at Gampola in 1835. 

“It initiated a series of changes that transformed an ancient culture based on a subsistence economy to an outward looking capitalist economy,” says Maxwell Fernando in ‘The Geography of Tea’ (2001). The British government provided the facilities to encourage their investors to start the cultivations. It didn’t take long for them to form partnerships and companies and start work.

Though coffee preceded tea, there are references to the Dutch attempting to plant tea in the early 1800s. Maxwell F’s research refers to these. In a news report the London Observer of 25 July 1802 said: “A late attempt has been made by a naturalist of eminence to cultivate the tea plant in the island of Ceylon but the experiment had been a total failure.”

Englishman James Cordiner had pointed out in 1805 that the tea plant was seen to have been growing wild near Trincomalee, and that the soldiers had dried the leaves, boiled them and preferred the decoction to coffee. 

Captain Robert Percival of the 18th Royal Irish Regiment had written in 1805 that the native tea plant had been discovered in the forests of the island. “It grows spontaneously in the neighbourhood of Trincomalee and other northern parts of Ceylon. General Champagne informed me that the soldiers of the garrison frequently used it,” he wrote. 

“They cut branches and twigs and hang them in the sun to dry.  They then took off the leaves and put them into a vessel or kettle to boil to extract the juice, which have all the properties of that of the China tea leaf. Several friends have assured me that the tea was looked upon as far from being bad, considering the little preparation it underwent. The soldiers of the 80th regiment made use of it in this manner on being informed of its virtues and quality by the 72nd regiment, whom they relieved. Many preferred this form of tea to coffee.”

However, there had been disagreements and contradictions of these reports. Despite these it has been reported that a tea tree had been found in the Botanical Gardens at Kalutara before 1824. 

Prior to coffee, tea and cinchona had been tried out as subsidiary crops cultivating them along with the country’s traditional spices which attracted the Moors to come over and start a profitable trade. 

December 1839 has been accepted as the month when tea was brought to the country for the first time. Fifteen years earlier, pioneer planter George Bird had opened the first coffee plantation at Sinhapitiya near Gampola. In 1842, tea plants had been brought from Assam and planted at the Oliphant Estate at Nuwara Eliya. While various trials had been conducted at several estates it was not until 1875 that tea was established as a commercially viable crop. That was when James Taylor came on the scene.

Having signed a contract with the London agents for Loolecondera estate at Hewaheta 1851as assistant manager for three years for a salary of 100 pounds a year, young Taylor had come to Ceylon in October by ship. The estate was then planting coffee. 

As coffee declined the estate proprietors, G.D.B. Harrison and W.M. Leake wanted Taylor to work on planting tea. Taylor collected tea seeds from the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens and planted them by the roadside. 

Meanwhile, on a request made by Leake who was the secretary of the Planters’ Association, the government sent an experienced coffee planter, Arthur Moore to India to report on the tea districts at Assam. Encouraged by what was reported, a consignment of Assam hybrid tea seeds was got down in 1866. Taylor cleared a block of 20 acres in 1867 and planted tea. This became the first commercial plot of tea planted with the first imported seeds.

The first lot of manufactured tea from Loolecondera was marked in Kandy in 1871. It fetched 3 shillings 6 pence. Taylor was sent to India to study tea manufacture and soon he was able to produce tea equal to those produced in Assam. 

“Loolecondera by 1888 had become a showpiece with its visual impact and Taylor was able to unfold all future tea planters the potential available on tea. Many are the complements paid to him. The most interesting factor regarding the ‘original tea plot’ planted in 1867 was that the first dose of fertiliser in the form of caster cake was only administered in 1885, but production figures indicated that the bushes were growing vigorously and the yields had been maintained at around 475 pounds of made tea per acre,” Maxell F writes. 

Taylor never went back home and spent even his first holiday in Darjeeling. There too he was quite happy to study tea manufacture.

He spent his time in the estate where he first came to work and breathed his last there when he was 57 years old. His tombstone at Mahaiyawa cemetery in Kandy carries the inscription:

“In pious memory of James Taylor, Loolecondera estate Ceylon, the pioneer of the tea and cinchona enterprises, who died on May 2nd 1892, at the age of 57 years.”