The tea below Lockhart Gap is not Kannan Devan tea

Ask almost any question about tea within thirty kilometres of Munnar and the answer is Kannan Devan — the operation the Tatas built out of Finlay Muir’s estates and handed, in 2005, to its own workers, making KDHP the largest employee-owned tea company in the world. It is such a reliable answer that people stop asking.

Lockhart is the exception. The tea you are looking at from the gap belongs to Harrisons Malayalam Limited, part of the RPG group since 1988, and it is worked as a Harrisons property with its own factory, its own labour lines and its own bungalows. Standing at this viewpoint you can see the boundary of the largest employee-owned tea business in the world without either side being marked.

The numbers, and why we are not picking one

The estate is given as 645.25 hectares in one account. CGH Earth, which operates one of three colonial-era bungalows on the property as a three-room guest house, says in its own brochure that the retreat sits on "about 1,500 acres" of tea — which is roughly 607 hectares, close enough to be the same figure rounded differently.

Output is a different matter. One account puts the factory at 21 tonnes of tea a day; another at about 20 million kilograms a year. Those cannot both be true: 21 tonnes a day, worked every day of the year, is under eight million kilos. We have printed both and picked neither, because neither comes from Harrisons.

The factory and the museum

The building 4.6 km back towards Munnar is claimed to date from 1936, and a superlative travels with it — that it was the first tea factory the British constructed in these hills. That one does not survive contact with the record. The Kannan Devan factories were running decades earlier and 1936 is late even in Lockhart’s own history. Treat the date as plausible and the superlative as marketing.

On 22 January 2014 part of the building opened to the public as the Lockhart Tea Museum. It holds mechanical harvesters, shears, fletcher sprayers and a wall of photographs of the planters that is a century old in places. The factory itself takes visitors during working hours and is shown as closed on Mondays; the number published for it is 094460 05406.

We have not printed an entry fee for it, deliberately. Every figure in circulation comes from a travel aggregator rather than from the operator — ₹200 and ₹400 on one, ₹250 and ₹500 on another, a ₹150 tea tasting on one and a tasting included on the other — and harrisonsheritage.com, which is the estate’s own heritage site, would not serve us a page. Ring and ask.

The part nobody photographs

Within a kilometre and a half of the viewpoint, OpenStreetMap records the Veterinary Hospital, Lockhart; the Lockhart Anganavadi, which is a state creche; the Lockhart Library; a Public Distribution System ration shop addressed simply "Lockhart, Devikulam"; and a private clinic. Lockhart is not a scenic area with a name attached. It is a village, and the tea in your photograph is somebody’s workplace.