Nuwara Eliya

Before the British arrived the high plateau was largely empty grassland and forest, used for hunting and as a route between the Kandyan kingdom and Uva rather than settled. British officers crossed the plain early in the 19th century, a road was pushed up into the hills, and a sanatorium and official residence were established for people who needed relief from the heat of the lowlands. The founding of the town itself is credited to Samuel Baker, later the explorer of Lake Albert and the upper Nile, who settled there in 1846.

The town that grew there was deliberately English in temper. Officers and planters laid out a racecourse, a golf course and a park, planted hedges, eucalyptus and pines, built brick and half-timbered houses with fireplaces, and founded the Hill Club in 1876. Coffee estates spread over the surrounding slopes until leaf disease destroyed the crop after 1869; tea replaced it, and the high ground around Nuwara Eliya turned out to produce some of the lightest and most valuable leaf on the island. Tamil labourers brought from South India cleared and planted the estates and settled in the lines of workers' housing that still ring the town.

The railway reached Nanu Oya in 1885, bringing visitors as well as tea chests, and from then until independence in 1948 the town was the summer capital of the colonial establishment. After independence Sri Lankan holidaymakers took over the season, the estates were nationalised in the 1970s and later leased to private companies, and tourism grew alongside market gardening into the town's second industry.

Nuwara Eliya's identity rests on the oddity of a piece of transplanted Britain sitting at the centre of Sri Lanka. The nickname 'Little England' is used by the town itself, and the hedges, gabled roofs, log fires, race meetings and rose gardens are maintained as much for Sri Lankan visitors as for foreign ones. The old clubs kept their rules and dress codes long after the planters left, and part of the pleasure of the place for domestic tourists is dressing for the cold in a country where cold is rare.

Underneath that the town is a meeting point of three communities. Sinhalese traders and officials run much of the town centre; up-country Tamils, descendants of the estate labourers brought from South India in the 19th century, form the majority of the surrounding population and keep Hindu kovils, Tamil schools and festivals such as Thai Pongal and Deepavali; and a Muslim merchant community holds many of the shops and the mosque near the bazaar. Their history includes long decades of statelessness after independence, only fully resolved by citizenship laws in the 1980s and 2000s.

April is the town's cultural high point, when the Sinhala and Tamil New Year, the racing season, the flower show and school holidays coincide and the population briefly multiplies. Outside that month the rhythm is quieter and more local: early buses to the estates, evening walks by the lake, and the mist coming down by mid-afternoon.

Only a few tens of thousands of people live in the town itself, with a much larger population in the estate settlements and villages spread across the surrounding hills. Most working households depend on one of two things: tea and the market gardens. Pluckers, almost all of them women, work the estate slopes and are paid by weight, and the level of the daily wage has been a recurring political dispute; other families grow carrots, leeks, cabbages, potatoes and strawberries on the terraces, selling through the town market and the wholesale trade to Colombo and Dambulla.

The town's third employer is tourism, which is seasonal and concentrated. Hotels, guesthouses, drivers, tuk-tuk operators and boat owners at Lake Gregory work hard in the first months of the year and through April, then face quieter, wetter months. Government offices, schools and the hospital account for much of the rest.

Days start early and cold, with mist on the valley floor and buses grinding up the estate roads before dawn. Housing is the town's clearest problem: many estate families still live in the old 'line rooms', terraces of single rooms built in the 19th century, and successive schemes to replace them have moved slowly. The local pressures are familiar ones for the hill country — landslides after heavy rain, young people leaving for Colombo or for work abroad, and the effect of high visitor numbers on a small town's water and waste systems.

The food of Nuwara Eliya is built on what grows around it. A rice and curry here comes with the temperate vegetables the district is known for: leeks and carrots cooked in coconut milk, beetroot curry, potato, green beans, and mallung of shredded leaves with grated coconut, alongside dhal, pol sambol and a fried fish or egg. Small kitchens in the bazaar serve this at midday, and parippu and roti are the everyday food of the estate settlements.

Tamil cooking gives the town its snack culture. Vadai, deep-fried lentil rings, thosai and string hoppers are sold with sambar and coconut chutney in tea shops around the centre, and short eats — fish cutlets, patties, rolls — sit in glass cases in the bakeries along the main street. Sweet buns and Ceylon-style bakery cakes suit the cold, and the plain milk tea served everywhere, strong and heavily sugared, is the local drink at any hour.

The district's produce also appears in forms visitors notice quickly: strawberries grown in the plots around Ambewela and sold with cream at roadside stalls, fresh dairy from the highland farms, and temperate fruit rarely seen elsewhere in Sri Lanka. Above all there is the tea itself. Nuwara Eliya's high-grown leaf makes a pale, brisk liquor that is usually drunk without milk by those who take it seriously, and estate factories around the town sell it by the packet after a tasting.