C H A P T E R 11. 



Tea cultivation in China and adjacent countries. 



British and Netherlands East India hâve this point in common, with 

 regard to tea cultivation, that they represent European industry, working 

 both with modem machinery, producing tea wholesale for European 

 markefs, putting the results of modem science to the service of agriculture 

 and manufacture; — and so contrasting in every respect with the old 

 fashioned, not to say primitive methods of the Chinese '), and with the 

 primitive, or rather barbarian customs of the Shan tribes in the inland 

 of Indochina and Burma. It is, however, to China that we are indebted for 

 our first knowledge of tea manufacture as well as for the first plants 

 and seeds ever grown hère; and it is from its border-lands, the mysterious 

 Tibetan mountain-walls and the scarcely explored jungles of Southern 

 Yunnan and Upper Indochina, that we hâve to expect the solution, if ever 

 attainable, of the primary problem in tea history: the origin of the tea plant. 



So we shall hâve to survey the distribution of the tea plant in China 

 first of ail. But everybody knows, even if possessing only a faint notion 

 of China and its inhabitants, that this vast country is so inaccessible and 

 imperfectly known (at least at any distance from the habituai routes), that 

 it is extremely difficult to obtain any trustworthy information about such 

 a purely scientific question as to where this or that plant grows wild; 

 much the more so, if the plaqt in question has also been cultivated 

 through many centuries, as the tea plant has. 



Bretschneider -) says that the Chinese knew the plant as early as 

 500 b. C. and that it was regularly cultivated in 800 a. C. If such is the 



') China is however, awakening at last: recently an extensive reorganization 

 programme was published, included in which the foundation of fivc tea expérimental 

 stations, tJie modcrnization of manufacturing metlwds and t/ie introduction of scientific 

 sélection. 

 Sec Far Eastern Review, Oct. 1915, Jan. 1918, and Wade 1915. 



2) E. BRtTSCHNEiDER 1870, p. 13; 1892, p. 130. The dictionary Rli-ya. that waswritten 

 in the fifth, partly in the twelîth century b. C, calls the plant „/àa" or A'u t'a" 

 (= bitter Ju'). A commentary of Kuo P'O (276-324 a, C ) says: „ A small evergreen 

 „tree resembling the clii {Gardénia). A beverage is made from the leaves by boiling. 

 „Now the earliest gathering is called fa, the latest ming. Another name for the plant 

 „is dïuan. The people of shu (Sz'ch'uan) call it /r'zi /V. (Bretschneider 1892, p. 130 ) 

 According to G. Watt, Bretschneider says that the plant was known as early as 

 2700 b. C, but 1 suppose that this is an incorrect quotation, as the Materia medica 

 Shên-nung-pân-ts'ao-king (2700 b. C.) does not contain anything about tea. Professor 

 J. J. M. de Groot, the learned sinologue at Berlin, had the goodness to inform me, 

 that the above assertions of Bretschneider are utterly in accu rate. Not only 



