However, the native Sinhalese used only the leaves to make their curry mixtures.
Dutch merchants started the first attempts of commercial coffee use in 1658, with plants that were illegally smuggled from today’s Yemen into the Amsterdam botanical garden in 1616.
This is probably one of the first Christian colonial coffee plantations at all.
But it was not until the 1825s that the British established a first plantation near the royal town of Kandy, also with Arabica plants from the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, where coffee was introduced by the British around 1730.
The central mountainous region with its rainy slopes and high plateaus proved to be ideal for coffee cultivation.
Unfortunately, for the commercial cultivation, large forest areas were cleared in favor of shadowless coffee monocultures.
The coffee rat, which eats the buds and flowers of the coffee plants, also destroyed whole crops in Sri Lanka at the end of the 17th century.
The Scot James Taylor then came up with the idea of cultivating tea, for which the country is now world-famous and ranked 4th among the tea producers.
In 1953 coffee grew only to a total of 20 ha – in 1964 it was already 800 ha.
In the 90s, the Dutch began to cultivate coffee on Sri Lanka again – this time sustained, so that the tragedy does not repeat itself.
Coffee – කෝපි
Coffee –