The Tea Trade
sand men, women, and even children are busily employed during the four months of the busy season—May, June, July, and August. A steam saw-mill, set up by a speculative American, makes a business of supplying tea-chests to these firms, although some still depend on their own carpenters. The matting and the sheets of lead for covering and lining the boxes come from China. Each firm, too, has a little art and printing establishment attached, where the gaudy labels for chests and cans are block-printed. One firm often has a hundred different pictorial labels for its packages of tea, that number of names being applied to the one kind of tea shipped.
Of each consignment made, a sample can of tea is forwarded by mail, while a duplicate sample can is retained by the exporter.
The young tea-leaves picked in May and early June comprise more than half of the whole season’s crop, succeeding growths of leaves being coarser and having less flavor. This tea, picked by women and children in the fields, is roughly dried in shallow baskets lined with paper over charcoal fires, and is then sold to commission dealers in the interior towns and villages. They sort it into grades, toast it once more, and ship it to the treaty ports in rough paper sacks, boxes, and baskets. Some of it comes by junks to Yokohama. Over and over the tea is tested by sample infusions and the leaves carefully inspected. All summer, at the exporting houses, the tea-tasters are busy with their rows of white cups. A certain weight of leaves is put in each cup, the boiling water is poured on and allowed to stand for five minutes. The expert notes, meanwhile, the color of the liquid and the aroma, carefully watches the unrolling of the leaves, and then tastes the brew by slow sips, meditatively, discriminatingly. The tea-taster takes care to swallow very little, as its effects are disastrous in time. Tea-tasters as a rule follow their business but a few
353
