红茶与红酒培训 红茶产地.docxVIP

KANDY?You may think I write too much about the scenery,’ suggested James Taylor in a letter home to Scotland, ‘but if you could see it for yourself, you would understand why I write so.’ The pioneer of Ceylon Tea was describing the views from his estate, Loolecondera, and the surrounding Hewaheta countryside. Since arriving there in 1851, he had left only once, on a visit to Darjeeling to study tea cultivation there. Such was his love for the region that he would spend the rest of his life in the Kandyan hills, and be buried among them when he died.?Kandy, then, is the tea-growing district where it all began. Formerly the last redoubt of the Sinhalese kings, it is accessible only via steep mountain passes, which created a formidable obstacle to invasion in the days when there were no roads and the hillsides were covered in thick forest. Such inaccessibility helped the kings of Kandy resist foreign invaders for more than three hundred years. In its temples and monastic libraries, its arts and crafts and folkways, Kandy preserved for centuries the cultural traditions of the Sinhalese people. It was also an important centre of Buddhism: the Buddha’s teachings were first put into writing at Aluvihare near Matale, and the holiest relic of the faith, a tooth reputed to be that of the Master himself, was preserved in a golden casket at a temple in the capital. Its possession is said to grant legitimacy to the rulers of Lanka, so when the kingdom of Kandy passed into the hands of the British in 1815, the latter were careful to protect the sacred tooth and continue the rituals, such as the famous perahera, associated with it. They continue to this day.The fall of Kandy opened up the whole of Sri Lanka’s hill country to the British. The capital of the kingdom, which they also named Kandy, soon became the metropolis of the region. When the coffee enterprise began soon after, it was natural that the first estates should be established in close proximity to this ‘hill capital’ –