Read "Every Day Life on a Ceylon Cocoa Estate" by Mary E. Steuart online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
JULY 6th. - I have just returned from a visit of a few days to a very fine tea estate in the Matale district. You will have some idea of the magnitude of the operations carried on there, when I tell you that lately fifty thousand pounds of made tea was turned out in three weeks. It has the finest factory I have yet seen; and here I was introduced for the first time to a machine called a packer, which by dint of a judicious shaking motion packs the tea into its box more evenly and firmly than can be done by human agency; with the additional advantage of greater cleanliness, for the old method was for the coolies to pack the tea, pressing it down with their hands, and even sometimes, in the larger boxes, with their feet.
The neighbourhood of Matale is very beautiful. The town lies at the foot of a precipitous mountain which appears to be the end spur of a range of hills trending away to the south west. On its heights are several tea Estates, and I caught sight of bungalows perched like eagles' nests on what appeared from below to be mere platforms crowning pinnacles of rock. Near the foot of this rugged mountain mass is the famous rock temple of Aliwooharie, much more interesting to my mind than the temple of Buddha's tooth at Kandy. Aliwooharie is only about a hundred yards from the north road to Jaffna, one of the main arteries of traffic in Ceylon. It is said that here the Buddhist doctrines were first reduced to writing about a century before Christ. The temple is approached by a flight of steep stone steps, which are nearly worn away by the feet of the many pilgrims who, for over two thousand years, have worshipped in this curious place - a huge mass of rock cleft by fissures of various dimensions.