The Tea Trade
tips, generally in May, the first picking takes place. The second picking belongs to the fire-fly season in June, and after that great festival tea comes in from the plantations in decreasing quantities until the end of August. The choicer qualities of tea are never exported, but consumed at home. Choice basket-fired tea, such as is used in the homes of the rich and well-to-do Japanese, sells for one and two dollars a pound. There are choicer, more carefully grown and prepared teas, which cost as high as from seven to ten dollars a pound; but such teas are shaded from the hot suns by matted awnings, and the picker, going down lines of these carefully tended bushes, nips off only the youngest leaves or buds at the tip of each shoot. The average tea, bought by the exporters for shipment to the United States and Canada, is of the commonest quality, and according to Japanese trade statistics, the average value is eleven cents a pound as it stands, subject to the export duty and ready for shipment abroad. There are often sales of whole cargoes of Japan tea at auction in New York for fifteen cents a pound. Families who buy this same brand from their grocers at forty or sixty cents a pound may judge to whom the greater profits accrue.
Japan tea came into market as a cheaper substitute for the green teas of China, those carefully rolled young hysons and gunpowders of our grandmothers’ fancy. Europe has never received the Japan teas with favor, but the bulk of American importations is Japanese, and the taste for black tea is being cultivated very slowly in the great republic. For green tea, the leaves are dried over hot fires almost immediately after picking, leaving the theine, or active principle of the leaf, in full strength. For black tea, the leaves are allowed to wilt and ferment in heaps for from five to fourteen days, or until the leaf turns red, and the harmful properties of theine have been partly destroyed. The Oolong tea of South China is nearest to
351
