James Taylor’s Loolkandura Estate

The estate lies off the Galaha Road, roughly 35 km south-east of Kandy, near Deltota. The land was bought around 1841 and first planted with coffee. James Taylor, a Scotsman, arrived in Ceylon at about sixteen or seventeen as an assistant supervisor on a coffee plantation, and became manager of this estate in 1857. He obtained tea seed from the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens sometime in the 1860s, and in 1867 cleared nineteen acres — Field No. 7 — to plant Ceylon's first commercial tea plot.

Taylor had already worked out practical methods of rolling and processing the leaf. In 1872 he built a fully equipped factory on the estate and invented a machine for rolling it. The following year he sent the first shipment of processed Ceylon tea, twenty-three pounds, to the Mincing Lane market in London. The first public tea auction in Colombo followed a decade later, in 1883.

Governor Sir William Gregory visited the estate in 1890 to commend Taylor's work. The following year Taylor was dismissed when the estate was absorbed into a larger company; he died in 1892, aged fifty-seven. His well, stone seat, and the chimney of his log cabin were gazetted as an Archaeological Protected Monument in 2008 — what is left of where Ceylon tea began.