that have been already used, and to dry them, cook them and mix them with imitations of the genuine leaf. This process completed, he next adds pickings, dust and sweepings from the tea-factory, and mixes the whole with foreign materials, so as to lend it a healthy surface hue. Lastly, he perfumes the lot with some sweet-smelling flower — the chlorantus, olea, aglaia and others; and thus provides a cheap, fragrant and polluted cup for the humble consumers abroad. This evil has been to a great extent cured by the competition which has sprung up in the cultivation of tea. China still holds a market in the finer sorts of tea, but her trade has greatly fallen as a whole, and is threatened with extinction unless, by improved methods of culture and preparation, she can rival the cost and quality of the full-flavoured leaf of India and Ceylon. In 1895, as compared with the previous year, the export of black teas to Great Britain and the United States had fallen off 150,000 piculs.
The tea-trade in China is more or less a speculative one, always full of risks (as some of our merchants have found out to their cost) ; and though a vast amount of foreign capital is annually invested in the enterprise, it is probably only every second or third venture that will return, I do not say a handsome profit, but any profit at all.
We will now proceed to another apartment and see the method adopted in the manufacture of gunpowder teas. First the fresh leaves of black tea are partially dried in the sun; these are next rolled, either in the palm of the hand, or on a flat tray, or by the feet in a hempen bag, then they are scorch- ed in hollow iron pans over a charcoal fire, and after this are spread out on bamboo trays, that the broken stems and refuse may be picked out. In this large stone-paved room we notice the leaves in different stages of preparation. The
