Ceylon Tea

Tea is picked by hand. This worker is collecting the leaves from the top of a hearty tea plant, stashing then in the bag on her back. When her bag is full, she will take it up to the road where a man is waiting with a scale. He weighs the bag and writes something down in a book. All the pickers I saw were women, and I believe that they were all Tamil. This ethnic minority was imported by the British (from nearby India) to work on the tea plantations.

Tea is a cornerstone of the Sri Lankan economy. But this was not always so: tea came as an emergency substitute for coffee after the near-total destruction of the island's coffee plantations due to disease (source: Lonely Planet). But since this was in the 19th century, nobody really remembers this fact. People think of Ceylon and they think of the eponymous tea.