Is it Loolkandura or Rothschild, first tea estate?

On the occasion of the forthcoming celebrations connected with 150 years of the tea industry in Sri Lanka and the 125th death anniversary of James Taylor, I would like to focus attention to a very important aspect.
This country’s great industry before tea was coffee and it was because of one such virulent leaf disease that Sri Lanka is today one of the greatest tea producers of the world.
It was during the late 1820s that some of the first coffee estates were opened in the hills around the ancient capital, Kandy. Over the following 40 years, every mountainside rang to the sound of axes, the giants of the primeval forest fell. Somewhere in 1869, there were 176,000 acres were under coffee. However, within a comparatively short period of 20 years, this great industry had fallen due to a leaf disease (Hemileia Vastatrix) known as coffee rust. That was the coffee industry’s peak time. 
In fact, today there are thousands of acres of tea bushes that grow on old coffee land on the graveyard of the old coffee estates.
The British period, during which Jewish Benjamin’ Disraeli was Prime Minister, saw many British Jews seeking their fortunes in the new colony, in Ceylon. Among those were the De Worms Brothers, related to the aristocratic European bankers, the Rothschild family.
Somewhere in 1835 or 1837, a nephew of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, who was a high-ranking government official as well as an influential personality among the mercantile sector, Maurice B. Worms, came to Ceylon. Seeing there a new and potentially profitable life for himself, he bought a substantial piece of land in Pussellawa and named it Rothschild. He then invited his brother Gabriel to join him. 
The two brothers cleared a huge stretch of jungle in the Nuwara Eliya District to plant coffee and named it Rothschild Estate. The estate they founded yet flourishes, proudly flaunting its aristocratic Jewish name though no longer owned by the pioneering de worms.
In 1841, the nephew of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, Maurice (born Moritz) De Worms, went on a voyage to China and brought back a number of cuttings. They were China jat and duly planted out on Rothschild.
In the same year, the government obtained two consignments of plants from China and Assam. Those from China were planted on Rothschild and the Assam variety on Penyland Estate, Dolosbage. 
The brothers pioneered planting coffee on their estate. Later, when coffee failed, they became the first in Ceylon to replant their estate with the new crop – tea. 
Almost 20 years after Maurice’s death, a statement was made by his nephew George De Worms in a letter to The Times: ‘My late uncle Mr Maurice B. Worms brought the first tea plants from China to Ceylon in September 1841, and formed a nursery of them on his estate in Pussellawa’ (vide Sir J. Emerson Tennent’s Ceylon, Vol. 2 chapter 7). Samples of the tea grown there were often sent by M.B. Worms to friends in England and found to be excellent.
Anyway it was clear that the brothers were involved very early on with experiments in tea growing and indeed that they succeeded in moving beyond the simple experiment of trying to persuade tea bushes to flourish in Ceylon soil and has reached the point of turning the shoots into drinkable tea, according to the letter sent to Times by their nephew in England, and the Times quoted that certainly they have come to be regarded as pioneers, if not, the founding fathers of Ceylon tea trade.
But the question was no one knows how far they moved to make a commercial success. The fact remained that for the rest of their working life, it was coffee which mainstay of their estate.       
The brothers were well regarded in the colonial establishment and even contemplated a career in politics. Gabriel de Worms contested the elections, under a limited franchise to the Legislative Council in 1847 and won a seat. He then went on to make history.
Being a non-Christian Jew, he declined to take oaths of Allegiance on the Holy Bible. The Jews should swear the standard oaths of allegiance ‘On the true faith of a Christian’. Gabriel thus forfeited his seat failing to be the only Jew to be elected to the Legislature.
De Worms left Ceylon and their estate in 1865. The China jats they planted out on Rothschild. Today these hybrids complement the growing conditions in the mountains of central Sri Lanka, which bring about Rothschild’s unique Ceylon characteristics flavour.
Rothschild Estate yet flourishes under the same name –though no longer under its Jewish founders.
(Lalin I. de Silva, an ex-senior planter, can be contacted at [email protected])