Sri Lanka, tourism with a capital "tea".

Sri Lanka, tourism with a capital "tea".

Perched along a twisting, mountainous road four kilometers south of Kandy is the quaint old Ceylon Tea Museum--its machinery lovingly restored for visitors eager to learn about the country's most important industry. With Sri Lanka engaged in a punishing civil war for the last quarter-century, tourists haven't exactly been lining up to enter this crumbling tea factory in the middle of nowhere.

"We get only 2,500 visitors a year," said the museum's director, Dharmasiri Madugalle, known by his friends simply as Madu. "This is not what we expected, and it's because of the war."

In May, however, Asia's longest-running conflict finally ended with the Sri Lankan Army's crushing defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which had been fighting for an independent Tamil homeland in the north since 1983. And the conclusion of that brutal conflict could now spark a long-awaited revival of tourism to Sri Lanka, whose friendly people and rich cultural, religious and archaeological heritage should have made long ago made the island one of South Asia's top tourist attractions.

Bernard Goonetilleke, chairman of the Sri Lanka Tourism Board, said that last year, the country received barely 500,000 foreign visitors (of which only 10,000 were Americans)--a pittance next to the millions who flock to India, Nepal, Vietnam and Thailand each year.

"Since 1983, our numbers have not increased because of the political situation," said Goonetilleke, Sri Lanka's former ambassador to the United States. He noted that in 2008, tourism generated about $425 million in foreign exchange, about half the amount earned through tea exports.

But what if the two industries could be combined, promoting tea as a tourist attraction in itself? "I wouldn't say tourists come to Sri Lanka to sample tea, because a connoisseur will have access to specialty teas from shops," said Goonetilleke. "But tourists who are here anyway--especially those with an interest in Ceylon tea--would certainly be exactly in the right spot to learn more."

The Ceylon Tea Museum, formerly the Hanthana Tea Factory; sat abandoned for years before being converted to its current use in 2001. Its five floors are filled with machinery and memorabilia, and Madu--a former agricultural adviser for the Sri Lanka Tea Board--seems to know the location and meaning of every single artifact.

"The oldest piece of machinery on display here is James Taytor's original tea-making equipment, dating from 1872," said Madu, showing off the museum's special room housing the personal effects and papers of Ceylon's undisputed pioneer of tea.

Madu, an energetic man who looks nothing like his 74 years might suggest, says most of the machinery on display was found in the old tea factories surrounding Kandy and were quite rusted, with many parts corroded or missing. "All this was given to us by the government," he said, gesturing across a vast, open floor full of vintage 19th-century equipment from England and Ireland. "My retired driver and I dismantled the machinery, transported it here and refurbished everything. It took us three years to put it all together."

Foreigners pay 400 rupees ($3.50) for admission, while residents pay 30 rupees (26 cents) and students only 20 rupees (17 cents). On the second floor is a rather bizarre collection of donated artifacts in a glass case--ranging from old English typewriters and a "Bush Valve Radio" from the 1930s to a statue of Queen Victoria and a medal from Pakistan's Ministry of Defense. There's also a plaque presented by the Taiwan Tea Manufacturers Association on the occasion of a November 2008 visit to Sri Lanka.

The museum's third floor consists of tea shops waiting for customers, and the fourth floor has a lovely restaurant with panoramic views of the surrounding mountains and the town of Kandy, home of one of Sri Lanka's most famous tourist attractions: the Temple of Lord Buddha's Sacred Tooth Relic.

One man in the forefront of the "tea as tourism" movement is Anselm B. Perera, managing director of Mlesna (Ceylon) Ltd. Perera, who named his company Mlesna because it spells his last name backwards, just opened his 17th tea shop in Sri Lanka. He says the St. Clair Tea Castle, inaugurated Nov. 15, is the largest tea shop in the world.

"The whole building is dedicated to tea," he said, noting that the area dedicated to retail sales of tea covers 6,000 square feet. The aisles are filled with tea sets, tea strainers, mugs, containers, jars, figurines and of course tea. Perera says the shop has roughly 3,500 items in its inventory.

"Tourism is almost zero at the moment," he concedes. Even so, the company has invested $5 million in the shops, in Sri Lanka and abroad. Domestically, his busiest outlet is the one at Colombo's Majestic City shopping mall, which attracted 12,750 paying customers last year. That was followed by the oldest Mlesna tea shop, at Liberty Plaza (8,000 customers) and the duty-free outlet at Colombo's Bandaranayake International Airport (7,700 customers).

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Altogether, Mlesna operates 78 tea shops worldwide, of which 47 are in Russia (mainly St. Petersburg and Moscow); five in Japan, three in Ukraine, three in Australia, two in Greece and one each in India and Taiwan. "No Sri Lankan tea company has shops in Russia except us," he boasted. "We mainly go with the top end of the market, so all these tea shops offer top-quality blends and packaging for the high end. The tea market has two or three different levels: top, middle and absolute bottom."

Perera, who started his company in 1983 after a career with Brookebond, says his company does $6 million in annual tea exports. In 1986, he opened his first tea shop for tourists, and "thereafter, we have been multiplying." At the Mlesna Tea Fortress, located just outside Kandy, 50 varieties of tea are offered, the most expensive being silver tips at $13 per 50-gram box. There's also a display of porcelain figurines and souvenirs, the most expensive being a 22k, gold-plated teapot for 120,000 rupees (about $1,150). "The Russians tend to buy these things," says shop director Chrysanthi Jayasuriya. "We also have a tea garden with 1,000 plants, if tourists don't have time to visit a real tea plantation."

Those who do might want to consider Taprospa, a chain of luxury spas and resorts run by Sri Lankan tea exporter Mackwoods Ltd. "Bespoke luxurious boutique hotels in harmony with nature," is how a brochure describes this chain of restored colonial mansions nestled within the company's vast tea, rubber, coconut and palm oil plantations.

The flagship of this series of plantation guest houses is Taprospa Culloden Villa, a sumptuous property set in the middle of the 4,300-acre Culloden rubber and palm-oil plantation, and reachable mainly by helicopter. Likewise, the Taprospa Labookellie Villa consists of three classical colonial planters' bungalows, each surrounded by thousands of tea bushes on the 1,300-acre Mackwoods estate, on the western slopes of the Pidurutalagala mountain range.

Each Taprospa Resorts tea villa is distinctive in style, lovingly restored with original antique furniture, luxurious marbled bathrooms, some with private massage beds, tea spas, an extensive collection of novels in the library, billiard room and bar, reminiscent of the planters' era. Along the same lines is Ceylon Tea Trails, a venture of Dilmah subsidiary Forbes & Walker. Located in the hills of the Bogawantalawa Valley at an elevation of 4,000 feet, Tea Trails consists of four classic colonial bungalows built for British tea estate managers in the 19th century.

Resorted by the owners of Dilmah Tea to offer guests the experience of life on a working tea estate, the bungalows--Summerville, Castlereagh, Tientsin and Norwood--have four to six rooms apiece. "Wake up to the sound of bird calls and watch the mist rise over the lake, while shafts of sunlight streak through," urges a slick promotional pamphlet, adding that "since the bungalows are on working tea estates, guests will see first-hand how the world's finest tea is harvested by hand in the fields and processed in the nearby factories, in a traditional manufacturing process unchanged for a century."

Prices range from $193 for a luxury room to $289 for a master suite (per person, double-occupancy) and include all meals and amenities including a Sri Lankan breakfast, a four-course dinner with wine and a personal butler at your beck and call.

The unique resort's owners must be doing something right; despite all the violence and unrest plaguing this island nation until very recently, Ceylon Tea Trails managed to make Conde Nast Traveler magazine's "Hot List."

This article concludes the seven-part series on Sri Lanka's tea industry by Larry Luxner, news editor of The Washington Diplomat and longtime contributor to The Tea & Coffee Trade Journal. Luxner's stories and photos can be viewed at www.luxner.com.

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