| Five years after he took up his post, his employers, Harrison
and Leake, impressed by the quality of his work, put Taylor in charge of the Loolecondera
estate and instructed him to experiment with tea plants. The Peradeniya nursery
supplied him with his first seeds around 1860. Taylor then
set up the first tea “factory” in the island. In 1872, he invented a machine for
rolling leaves, and one year later sent twenty-three pounds of tea to Mincing Lane.
Taylor trained a number of assistants, and from that point on “Ceylon
Tea” arrived regularly in London and Melbourne. Its success led to the opening of
an auction market in Colombo in 1883, and to the founding of a Colombo Tea Dealers’
Association in 1894. |
