504 Voyage of the Novara. 



introduction of European labour and machinery, wlien this 

 valuable and costly product will gain materially both in fine- 

 ness and suitability. 



Only a few years since German and Austrian merchants 

 attached but a small value to Chinese silk as suited to our 

 market, and it seemed to them a positive absurdity, when 

 any one spoke, as we ourselves repeatedly have done from a 

 profound conviction of its truth, of the future influenco 

 exercised over the silk markets of the world by the influence 

 of this Chinese raw material. Now-a-days we hear that 

 there is scarcely one single silk factory which can hold its 

 ground, unless, in addition to French and Italian silk, it 

 imports Chinese silk, while the demand for that material in- 

 creases from year to year, and has very probably not yet 

 attained the one-hundredth part of the development of 

 which it is susceptible. 



Tea (Chd*) ranks next to silk among the articles which 

 have raised the trade with China to sucli an importance. 

 The cultivation of the tea plant is of far later date than that 

 of the mulberry tree, and its leaves, although used by the 

 Chinese as a curative from the third century of our era, only 

 came into general use, as providing a universal di'ink, towards 

 the end of the sixth century. f Statesmen and poets sounded 



* The word Cha is, however, used by the Chinese to designate not the tea plant 

 alone, but every description of Camelia. 



f Arabian travellers who visited China in the 9th century, a.d. 850, speak thus 

 early of tea, as of a beverage in universal use. According to Kampfer tea was intro- 

 duced from China into Japan about A. D. 519, by a native prince named Daeme, who, 



