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It is believed that the tea was originated in China as its earliest mention is in a Chinese dictionary of 350 BC. By the middle of the 17th century, tea had invaded Europe and it is accepted that Portuguese were the first to introduced tea into Europe.
It is mentioned that, during 1680s, tea was very popular in England and was drunk only by the very rich as tea was heavily taxed. The custom of afternoon tea in England was first started by Portugal’s Cetherine of Braganza who came to England in 1662.
In 1834 tea returned back to Asia, as British started cultivating tea in their Asian colonies. In Sri Lanka, The first batch of tea seeds was planted at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Peradeniya in December 1839, five years after tea introduced in India. These seeds were obtained from the Calcutta Botanic Gardens and were named as “Indigenous Assam Tea”.
The first commercial tea planting in Sri Lanka was undertaken by James Taylor in 1867, in Loolecondera Estate, Hewaheta, Kandy in order to test tea as an alternative crop for coffee which was showing a declining trend. In parallel to this experiment, in 1869, coffee industry was ravaged by a fungal disease called coffee leaf rust disease wide opening the door for tea plantations in Sri Lanka. Fortunately, tea was well matched with Sri Lankan conditions and caught rapidly. The first consignment of tea was exported in 1872 and by 1884, tea production exceeded the limit of one million lb (454,000 kg).
Till about 1950s, all the tea that was commercially planted in Sri Lanka was from seed but marked a huge turning point with the introduction of vegetative propagation (VP) tea cultivation. In 1958, a tea replanting subsidy scheme was initiated to promote the planting of vegetatively propagated tea cultivars and as a result, it is estimated that more than 50 per cent of the area under tea is now planted with VP tea cultivars. Because the smallholdings sector was wide spread parallel to the VP tea introduction, most of the tea smallholdings are planted almost entirely with high yielding VP cultivars. However, the estate sector has considerable areas still under relatively lower yielding old seedling tea which leads to the low productivity of such tea gardens.
Since the introduction of open economic strategies in early 1980s, the economic environment of the country was favourable for an increase in investments on privately owned tea factories which ultimately promoted the small-scale tea cultivation as a financially lucrative venture because the opportunity to sell green leaf produced by smallholders was secured. Also, the demand for low grown leafy grade teas, which produces a strong brew against upcountry flavour teas, from Middle East and CIS countries (earlier known as Union of Socialist Soviet Russia) has influenced the small-scale tea cultivation to increase, thus leading to an expansion of the smallholder tea sector. Still following the traditional setup large tea estates mainly exists in High and Mid elevation areas while more than 80 per cent of tea smallholdings are confined to the Low country. Due to the significant growth of smallholder sector, the estate (corporate) sector, which previously dominated the Sri Lankan tea industry, is now placed backseat.
