Chapter 30\ Introducing Ceylon Tea to the Arabs

Raymond Hanna had a close group of friends who met weekly for a couple of hours over a game of poker. One day, a member of this group brought along a wooden chest of tea, which he described as the best tea in the world. Later, when all around the table had sampled this tea and agreed that it was amongst the best they had ever drunk, Raymond asked his friend about its source and was informed by the friend – who was in the provisions business – that he had started importing tea from Ceylon. After his usual barrage of questions, Raymond secured the contact for the Ceylon Tea Board, to whom he wrote stressing the potential of the Arab markets and introducing HIMA as the ideal partner for help in making inroads.

Surprisingly, this initial contact turned into a case of a straight new business appointment. No briefs, no reviews, not even a pitch; but a client accepting the recommendation of an expert salesman, and blindly handing his advertising account to an agency that he had never met before. These were the good old days of doing business in Lebanon, where relationships were built on trust and first impressions, as people were known to be honest.

The Ceylon Tea Board soon appointed a permanent representative for the markets and stationed him in Beirut. T.G. Peiris, as this gentleman liked to be called, had the title of “Chief Commissioner”. His business card carried three different addresses: a Beirut, Eldorado building address; a Cairo office address; and the head office of the Ceylon Tea Board in Colombo. Before being introduced to him, I had never met any person from Sri Lanka. T.G was short, with an olive-colored complexion and wavy charcoal black hair, with which he used Brylcreem to comb every morning. Always dressed in dark colored suits with what the Lebanese called “coupe cigarette” pants, he wore shoes with metal-edged soles that made a sound that reminded of military parades and always pre-announced his arrival.

For many of us at HIMA, it took time to become accustomed to T. G’s English pronunciation, as he seemed to be making a permanent effort to use a Shakespearean dialect. It also took us time and effort to get him used to our language delivered with Arabic and French tonalities. In 1972, after the country became a republic, the government of the island decided to change its name from Ceylon to Sri Lanka and rushed to eliminate all that reminded them of the British colonial period.

As we became more involved with the account, we came to understand why the Sri Lanka Tea Board decided to open its own offices in the Middle East. Out of the top 10 importers of Sri Lankan tea, six Middle Eastern countries, including Turkey, Iran, Iraq, the UAE, Syria, and Egypt, were amongst them.