Ranjith Karunaratne, on a country read from a corner office in Hatton.

My beat

I am a tea-trade journalist. For twenty-eight years I have written for the Ceylon plantation press — the weekly bulletins of the Planters' Association, the monthly trade magazines published from Colombo, the occasional commissioned report for the Tea Research Institute at Talawakelle. My beat is the leaf as it is grown, picked, processed, and sold — not the leaf as it is drunk. I write about plucking rounds and withering troughs and the small mechanical details of the orthodox factory.

Where I live

I live in a flat above the public library in Hatton, on the Colombo–Nuwara Eliya road, at an elevation of one thousand two hundred and seventy metres. From my window, on a clear morning, I can see the Pedro estate on the slope opposite, the railway line that the planters built in 1885, and the long curve of the road that the plucking lorries use at the change of shift. The journal that follows is, in part, a journal written from that window.

Why this journal

The Ceylon tea country is the second-largest tea exporter in the world by value, and the third by volume. The trade-press coverage of the country has been steady for a hundred and fifty years, but it has been almost entirely commercial in character — prices, crops, freight rates, dividends. Nobody, as far as I have been able to find, has yet written a slow, non-commercial reading of the country aimed at the general literate reader. The journal is my attempt at that reading.

Sources

The journal is written from four principal sources: the trade press of the period (a near-complete run of the Planters' Association Bulletin from 1898 to the present, which my father bequeathed me); the estate diaries I have been allowed to read, in the archives at Talawakelle and at the Tea Research Institute; the field notebooks of the head kanganis of three estates who have, over the years, become friends; and the morning conversations on the plucking path itself. None of the conversations are attributed by name.

What this is not

It is not a buyer's guide. The journal is not interested in helping the reader choose a tea, find a tea, or buy a tea. It is interested in the country, in the trade, in the leaf as a thing made by particular people in particular places.

On the long timescale

A hundred and fifty-seven years is a long time for a single industry to occupy a single country. The Ceylon tea industry was, in 1869, a footnote on the back pages of the coffee press; by 1900 it was the second-largest tea industry in the world; by 1972 it was the largest in volume. The journal reads the country at the scale at which the country has actually lived — in seasons, in generations, in the long replanting cycles of a bush that, properly maintained, will produce leaf for eighty years.

From my window, on a clear morning, I can see the Pedro estate on the slope opposite, the railway line that the planters built in 1885, and the long curve of the road that the plucking lorries use at the change of shift.

— R. K., Hatton