The Tea Trade
requires a certain training to keep the tea-leaves in constant motion, and it is steady, energetic work.
This skilled labor is paid for at rates to make the Knights of Labor groan, the wage list showing how impossible tea-culture is for the United States until protectionist tea-drinkers are ready to pay ten dollars a pound for the commonest grades. During the four busy months of the tea season the firers are paid the equivalent of eleven and four-tenths cents, United States gold, for a day's work of thirteen hours. Less expert hands, who give the second firing, or polishing, receive nine and six-tenths cents a day. Those who sort and finally pack the tea, and who work as rapidly and automatically as machines, get the immense sum of fifteen cents a day. Whole families engage in tea-firing during the season, earning enough then to support them for the rest of the year; or, rather, pinching for the rest of the year on what they earn during this brief season. In autumn little tea is fired, but the whole force of workmen can be had at the shortest notice, though the godown may have been closed for weeks. One compradore, notified at eleven o’clock at night that tea must be fired the next day to fill a cable order, had four hundred coolies on hand at day-break, many of them summoned after midnight from their villages, distant over seven miles from the godowns. This mysterious underground telegraphy in the servants’ quarters is one of the astonishing things of the East.
Tea-firing begins at six o’clock in the morning, the coolies clattering into the settlements on their wooden clogs at dawn, and going home at dusk. They wait patiently outside the compounds until the lordly Chinaman comes to summon as many workers as he wants for the day, whether two- hundred, three hundred, or four hundred. All these guilds in the Orient have their established rules of precedence among themselves; each one knows his rights and his place, and desperate as may be
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