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High in the lush hills south of Kandy, a patient factory manager explained to me the venerable business of ‘Orthodox’ and ‘CTC’, of Broken Orange Pekoe, fannings and dust. We discussed plucking and withering, fermentation and drying, while his workers tended machines almost as old and archaic as the Industrial Revolution.

Despite a name change from Ceylon to Sri Lanka in 1972, one of its most vital sources of wealth and pride remains firmly rooted in the past. ‘Ceylon tea’ – no one says ‘Sri Lankan’ – remains virtually a byword for fine quality and full flavour that no whiff of colonial stuffiness can spoil. The Hantane Tea Estate, a government-owned concern of over five hundred hectares whose manicured bushes cloak these hills like corduroy, welcomes casual visitors for impromptu tours. I had come to see the process, still unchanged after more than a century, by which tender green leaves yield a golden-brown and near universal brew, a passion for some and almost a drug for others.

It is a matter of detail rather than alchemy. Amidst a kind of quaint Dickensian gloom and the clatter of cogs and belts, shuddering trays and giant fans, we examined and smelled a pile of leaves fermenting on mats. For most managers it is still experience and skill that properly gauge their evolving aroma and colour, and which ultimately fix flavour and quality.

At the nearby Tea Museum (established by the government in 2001 and said to be the world’s first) one gets a keener sense of the industry’s heritage and scope. Occupying a beautifully restored tea factory, its ground floor comprises displays of immaculately reconditioned equipment salvaged from other estates. There are Little Giant Tea Rollers (manufactured in 1880) and the famed Sirocco driers from Belfast. Some of it is as rudimentary as it is ingenious – the Single Chest Packer, for example, simply vibrated until the tea settled, while the Ariel Wire Shoot Tensioner of 1880 allowed cumbersome sacks of leaves to be slung from taught cables and dropped from the loftiest fields.

There’s a small chart, too, which illustrates numerous grades of tea whose subtle differences are best left to tasters and buyers. James Taylor, widely considered the father of the country’s tea industry, gets a room to himself. He was, it seems, "single but married to tea", and his only holiday ex-Ceylon was to Darjeeling, India to study the plant. While coffee plantations were being decimated by disease, in the 1860s he was experimenting with tea and its paraphenalia on his verandah. Taylor went on to plant the first commercial fields at Loolecondera Estate in Hewaheta, about 40km of lovely winding roads southeast of Kandy. Afficiondos can still see those very bushes at field seven along with – at 324ft – Sri Lanka’s longest tea factory.

Perhaps the best way through the heart of Sri Lanka’s tea country is the spectacular railway from Kandy up to Nuwara Eliya and the highlands. Though part of the so-called Main Line originating in Colombo, by the time it leaves Kandy it feels more like a Raj-era toy train. Craning out of the observation car’s windows you feel the tracks were laid in the 1880s as much for pleasure as for practicality, a notion echoed by Nuwara’s creation as a retreat, if not a playground, for those fusty old colonials.

By then tea was replacing coffee in vast plantations that had once been rain forest. Planters soon became part of the Nuwara scene of garden parties, balls and high living whose participants pretended they were back home somewhere between the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands.

Today, as the little train chugs up through verdant valleys and round countless hills, the scenery is distinctly Sri Lankan. Strands of forest give way to the lines and swirls of myriad bright green tea bushes that contour the open landscape like an immense mosaic. Clusters of pickers, usually Tamil women, add splashes of colour with their yellow, scarlet or amber sarees. The tea factories look starkly functional, like outsized shoeboxes with numerous windows and gleaming corrugated iron roofs.

Nuwara Eliya remains a popular hill station with a ‘season’ of racing, flower shows and racous socialising. Hotel names like The Grand, Windsor and St Andrew’s suggest the old sentiments still have currency. Perhaps it was the chill air or pure gluttony but I readily succumbed to lashings of marmalade at breakfast, cake at tea time and custard with pudding, hearty fuel for walking which (along with absolutely nothing) is one of the best things to do up here.

The colonial pantomime climaxes at the exquisite Hill Club, a marvellous baronial-looking place with sentry boxes, velvet lawns and a bar that forbids women. I had strolled in with my partner, quite prepared to be mistaken for a gardener, only to be allowed temporary membership ("on a daily basis only, sir") with a choice of cast-off jackets and risky ties from a cloakroom. Suitably, if not stylishly, attired, we could visit its other bar and browse the lobby and corridors adorned with old pictures, momentos and memoranda. There’s a splendid snooker room, too, and they’re not shy of indicating the women’s former side entrance.

Sri Lanka’s tea trail need not be purely nostalgic. At nearby Kandapola (another glorious drive), the award-winning Tea Factory stands perched on a hillock beseiged by the noble crop. Built in the early 1900s but lying sadly idle since the 1970s, the former tea factory was recently converted into a stylish hotel. Its fabric is unchanged and they have kept the large engine and line shaft that powered its machinery, along with a pair of huge wooden fans hanging in the atrium. Those fans once drew warm air from dryers and blew it over hessian nets to wither freshly plucked leaves. Now, the only warm air here is for heating bedrooms, the hotel’s own small crop being processed nearby.

I headed on down towards Bandarawela where the climate is less fickle but the scenery no less rewarding. At Haputale, where the ridge simply plunges to the lowlands, a small road wriggles east to the imposing Dambetenne Factory built by Thomas Lipton in 1890. Lipton gets considerable coverage in Kandy’s Tea Museum for he more than anyone popularised Ceylon tea through canny marketing and pricing. About seven kilometres further one can hike up a short trail to Lipton’s Seat for bracing views across much of the hill country.

The industry had other, largely unsung, pioneers. At Kirchhayn Bungalow near Bandarawela they’ll tell you about the Bostocks, generations of whom thrived in Ceylon. If you hark after a small yet traditional estate, Kirchhayn offers crisp low-key nostalgia, rather like staying in a home rather than a hotel.

Beautifully marooned in a sea of tea, it was here I got to join Tamil pickers inching up the hillside, their nimble fingers devouring the required ‘two leaves and a bud’. Their labour is as picturesque as it is hard. The best can pluck around 30-35kg in a day but 18kg is their base target. A kangani or foreman ensures they pick well and – with long sticks laid across bushes – evenly so as to maintain a smooth ‘table’.

In an unlikely – for tea – setting close to the Indian Ocean at Ahangama near Galle, the Handungoda Estate has more specialist concerns. In reviving the so-called silver tips once beloved of ancient Chinese emperors, they launched some of the world’s most expensive tea in August 2004. As manager Herman Gunaratne explained, it’s a curious story involving an English tea expert, a perfumier from Grasse in France, Chinese tradition and human sweat.

"We could hardly believe it ourselves" he continued "but the results were unanimous ; untouched by hand, it tasted better." They’ve skipped its picking by silk-clad virgins with gold scissors, but Kilburn Imperial is garnered by gloved girls using aerated bowls. "It’s a niche market, and quantity’s limited by cost and climate". The needle-like leaves acquire a tantalising silvery sheen as they dry. As for taste ? "Just don’t add sugar or milk" winced Herman.

When it comes to Sri Lanka’s tea, you might say not all is sweetness and light.

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