Packetting Tea, Colombo
A nice representation of a small portion of the human labor – a dozen people here – that went into the preparation and production of a commodity like tea.
Tea
A Tea Estate, Darjeeling.
A very early postcard of Darjeeling which nicely represents, visually, the colonial project: a sprawling European building dominating lush grounds while tiny workers pluck away at tea leaves under the watchful gaze of a man in a solar topee.
Tea Garden, Gauhati, Assam
There are very few early postcards – besides a handful of missionary ones – of Assam, an area in northeastern India brought under British control in the first half of the 19th century following wars with the then Kingdom of Burma.
Madras Seven Pagodas
[Original caption] Madras, Seven pagodas. This is the largest of the Seven pagodas of Mahabalipuram (once a city and now a village), 35 miles south of Madras.
Shipping Tea, Colombo
"People like me who came to England in the 1950s have been there for centuries," writes the Jamaican cultural theorist Stuart Hall, "symbolically we have been there for centuries. I was coming home.
Bombay. Rampart Row.
[Original caption] Rampart Row, Bombay (City). Bombay is a city of contrasts. Very different is the quiet grandeur of Rampart Row, with its massive buildings and open spaces, to the rush and turmoil of the industrial centre of the great city.
Greetings from John Hagenbeck & Co.
[Original German translated] Buy tea from Hagenbeck's Ceylon Tea.
The main driver of Sri Lanka’s economic growth during the colonial period was the tea industry.
Shipping Tea, Colombo
In the 1860's the coffee rust fungus disease destroyed much of the the coffee industry of Sri Lanka. In the late 1860s, a Scotsman named James Taylor established the first multi-acre tea plantation in the country.
Tea in Transit to Wharf Ceylon
The Sri Lankan tea industry grew from 250 acres under cultivation in 1876 to almost 400,000 acres in 1900.8 Some 150 million tonnes of tea were produced in 1900 worth 50 million rupees, half of Ceylon’s total exports.
Lipton's Teas and Coffees
An early Lipton's advertising postcard; the firm used postcards very effectively to spread the new habit of tea drinking and associate it with its brand of Ceylon-grown teas.
