Beware of the Rug: If this is Thursday it must be postcards, 584

Thursday, December 1, 2022

If this is Thursday it must be postcards, 584

Tea pluckers, Ceylon, ca early 1900s

This vintage postcard has a black & white photograph of a tea field with harvesters at work. The picture and the card were produced by Plate & Company Photographers of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. It has a divided back and the number 248 along the left margin on the reverse. Plate & Co. was founded in 1890 in Colombo, Ceylon by A.W. Plate and still exists today. The height of postcard popularity was during the years between 1890 and the early 1900s when Plate & Co. was printing postcards. Arnold Wright edited and published a book in 1907 titled Twentieth Century Impressions of Ceylon. In the book he mentions that in 1907 the output of picture postcards by Messrs. Plate & Co.’s had reached half a million cards a year.

Ceylon, which became an independent republic and renamed Sri Lanka in 1972, is one of the largest tea-producing countries in the world. The process of tea cultivation requires meticulous care, and is very hard manual labor. There has been a movement to protect the rights of tea plantation workers, some of whom include children. The workers often are barefoot and pick tea for hours. The daily wage is based on the number of leaves they pluck with the worker needing to pick approximately 40 pounds of leaves to earn 700 Sri Lankan rupees or about $4.15. The workers are primarily Tamils or Tamilar, a group of people who can trace their ancestry to India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka. Efforts to improve the conditions and reduce the poverty in which the tea pickers find themselves has accomplished much but there is still more that can be done.

The tea grown in Sri Lanka is known as Ceylon Tea and is considered some of the best in the world. It is made from the plant Camellia sinensis. Tea or chá is native to East Asia with plants in Sri Lanka likely originating from the area where southwestern China, Indo-Burma, and Tibet meet. It is thought that all the current plants in Sri Lanka were derived from the same parent plant. If left undisturbed, tea plants can grow to about 50 ft or 16 m tall. As can be seen on the card, the plants are pruned to about waist height to accommodate the picking or plucking process. Herbal tea refers to drinks not made from Camellia sinensis. Instead, herbal teas are the infusions of fruits, leaves, or other plant parts like rosehip, chamomile or rooibos. They are called tisanes or herbal infusions to differentiate from teas from the tea plant.