Tagged: tea exports

China's Tea Industry

China grows more tea than any other country by a wide margin and drinks nearly all of it itself, the reverse of the plantation-export model that built India's, Kenya's, and Sri Lanka's crops. How a single state trading monopoly gave way to more than 1.6 million tea-related companies with no majority brand, why the country runs on wholesale markets instead of public auctions, and why more and more of its tea business sells the leaf as a drink rather than a commodity.

Sri Lanka's Tea Economy

The canonical reference on Ceylon tea as an industry. How coffee's collapse created it, how nationalisation and then privatisation reshaped who owns it, the elevation bands that set what it tastes like, the brand mark that protects its name, and the shocks, agrochemical and otherwise, that keep testing it.