Nuwara Eliya History

History

Originally an uninhabited system of forests and meadows lying in the shadow of Pidurutalagala (aka Mt Pedro, 2524m), Nuwara Eliya became a singularly British creation, having been ‘discovered’ by colonial officer John Davy in 1819 and chosen as the site for a sanatorium a decade later. The sanatorium’s reputation became such that Sir J E Tennent wrote in Ceylon in 1859 that ‘In the eyes of the European and the invalid, Nuwara Eliya is the Elysium of Ceylon.’

Later the district became known as a spot where ‘English’ vegetables and fruits such as lettuce and strawberries could be successfully grown for consumption by the colonists. Coffee was one of the first crops grown here, but after the island’s coffee plantations failed due to disease, the colonists switched to tea. The first tea leaves harvested in Sri Lanka were planted at Loolecondera Estate, in the mountains between Nuwara Eliya and Kandy. As tea experiments proved successful, the town quickly found itself becoming the Hill Country’s ‘tea capital’, a title still proudly borne.

As elsewhere in the Hill Country, most of the labourers on the tea plantations were Tamils, brought from southern India by the British. Although the descendants of these ‘plantation Tamils’ (as they are sometimes called to distinguish them from Tamils in northern Sri Lanka) have usually stayed out of the ethnic strife endemic to Jaffna and the north, there have been occasional outbreaks of tension between the local Sinhalese and Tamils. The town was partially ransacked during 1983 riots, but the damage has long since been invisible to anyone unaware of what the place looked like previously.