too, thus far, only where it has been possible to procure the water supply in comparatively unpopulated hill lands. But such opportunities cannot remain available indefinitely, any more than they did in China and Japan, and already typhoid epidemics break out in our large cities and citizens are advised to boil their drinking water.
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Fig. 192.—Near view of tea garden with ground heavily mulched with straw, adjoining a Japanese farm village.
If tea drinking in the family is to remain general in
most portions of the world, and especially if it shall
increase in proportion to population, there is great industrial
and commercial promise for China, Korea and Japan in
their tea industry if they will develop tea culture still
further over the extensive and still unused flanks of the
hill lands; improve their cultural methods; their
manufacture; and develop their export trade. They have the
best of climatic and soil conditions and people sufficiently
capable of enormously expanding the industry. Both
improvement and expansion of methods along all essential
lines, are needed, enabling them to put upon the market
pure teas of thoroughly uniform grades of guaranteed
quality, and with these the maintenance of an international
