BURMESE TEA 



Plant of 

 Karly Time*. 



CAMELLIA 



THEA 



Manufacture 



and the conco. I mn thus lor <i is eaten ;in<l considered a great 



Besides nein^ regarded, as a dainty, however, the ' Leppeti 

 ruditionul food amoMi: Bunuans. At the important junctures of a 

 i's life, such as birth, initiation into the church, marriage and death, 

 plays an important part, and no ceremony is complete without 

 .>imi|.iioii of that article. The tea remains in the same basket from 

 the linn- it is boiiL'ht at the gardens until it is sold by the merchant to the 

 aetual consumer. Large numbers of baskets are to be seen at every wharf 

 the Irrawaddy banks and in the bazaars throughout the country." 

 It would seem probable, however, that in Burma the word lapet denotes 

 ilrtt/>i/< m, and that that species may possibly have been 

 iployed in the manufacture of letpet tea before the adoption of <'. 'J'/n-n 

 preferable plant. Further, there appears little doubt that tea was 

 used as a medicine, then as a vegetable, and finally as a beverage. It 

 ; the discovery of this final property that gave the greatest impetus to the 

 tivation of f '. 'Uiea in China and Japan, and possibly also in Burma 

 anterior to any records of the introduction and cultivation of 

 plant in India. Symes (Emb. to Ava, 1795, ii., 255) mentions 

 or pickled tea, and Mason (Burma and Its People, 1860, 505) has 

 similar reference.] 



6. Jyree Tea. Some few years ago a tea was much talked of in 

 public press as having special merits. This was found to consist of 

 tea mixed with a certain percentage of the leaves of Albizziii 

 n<n-(t (see p. 45). 



CHEMISTRY OF TEA. Within the scope of this work it is neither 

 sible nor desirable to give a detailed account of all the substances 

 uch have up to the present time been found to occur in the tea-leaf, 

 le soluble materials combine to make the liquor produced by infusing 

 manufactured tea. But it may be observed that both the commercial 

 the hygienic value of tea* as a beverage depend on three or four 

 stances. The first of these is the so-called ESSENTIAL OIL, the 

 jposed cause of the flavour. It is impossible to deal with this sub- 

 ince here ; briefly its character is all but unknown, its quantity re- 

 rkably small even in the most flavoury teas, for though Mulder (Poggend, 

 inalen, xliii., 133) obtained 0*6 to 1 per cent., no one since his time has 

 3n able to isolate anything like that amount. In fact it has been denied 

 it he was dealing with the oil which was subsequently extracted by Van 

 jmburgh (1895) by the distillation of freshly fermented leaves, the yield 

 5ing only 0'006 per cent. It is a product of fermentation. The essential 

 has, generally speaking, almost entirely eluded investigation. Its 

 jnnection with flavour is well known, but the oil itself remains 

 lost unexamined. [Cf. Gildemeistei and Hoffmann, Volatile Oils, 



501-2.] 

 The second of the important constituents of tea is the CAFFEINE or Caffeine 



to which almost the whole of the stimulating power of the tea 

 ems to be due. From a medical point of view it is the most important 

 substance : from a commercial standpoint it appears to have little value. 

 The higher-priced grades of tea certainly contain more caffeine than the 

 l"\ver, but this is simply because the younger leaves (which have a higher 

 percentage) form the bulk of the finer grades. Given two Broken Orange 

 Pekoes, however, the relative quantities of cafieine they contain will bear 

 little or no relation to their prices. 



237 



Chemistry 

 of Tea. 



Essential Oil 

 and Flavour. 



,,r Tilt-in.'. 



