Region · in Sri Lanka
Kandy
Kandy is where Ceylon tea began and where the island's mid country sits, between the low-grown south and the high-grown plateau. That middle position is the whole identity: strong and full without the briskness of the high grown or the flat weight of the low. It makes Kandy leaf a blender's staple and a difficult thing to sell under its own name.
What grows here
Mid-grown orthodox black tea, most of it headed for a blend rather than a single-district packet. The estates sit in the hills around the city, at Hantane and Nilambe, at Gampola and Hewaheta to the south and at Pussellawa on the climb toward Nuwara Eliya, where they start behaving like high-grown ones. Loolecondera, where the island's first commercial planting was made, is in the Hewaheta hills.
The ground
Roughly 650 to 1,300 m, which is the mid country by definition. Kandy is sheltered in a way the famous districts are not. The southwest monsoon does push wind up the mountain passes into the district, but nothing here gets the drying stress that makes Uva. It does share the western quality season, and the Tea Board puts its best tea in the cool dry first quarter, but the effect here is a lift rather than a transformation. Estates down in the valleys run stronger and deeper in colour than the rest of the district, which is a real internal split and not an accident of the year.
What to look for
Kandy covers a wide elevation band with a lot of range inside it. A garden near the top at Pussellawa and one below Gampola are not making comparable tea, so the word on a packet says less than 'Uva' or 'Nuwara Eliya' does and the estate name is doing the work. It is also worth separating the region from the city: much of what is sold to visitors in Kandy is packed there rather than grown there, and the lion logo is a statement about the country, not about this district.
How it got here
James Taylor planted Field No. 7 at Loolecondera in 1867, a few acres in the hills southeast of Kandy, and spent the decade working out how to grow the bush and handle the leaf while the coffee around him was still healthy. When leaf rust destroyed the coffee from 1869, the growers had a worked example to copy and the conversion took years rather than decades. That is Kandy's claim. Not the finest tea on the island, but the place the rest of it was learned.
Places in Kandy
Named places inside Kandy. The ones with a page of their own are links.