59 



CHAPTER III. 



TEAS. 



Tea. The tea plant (Thea sinensis) is originally a native 

 of south-west China, Assam, and Manipur, occurring in several 

 varieties, of which the true " China " with rather small, and the 

 " Assam " with rather large, leaves are the best marked. It 

 has been largely cultivated in China and Japan for a very long 

 time, and has always formed a staple of the consumption of 

 those countries. From about the middle of the eighteenth 

 century it came largely into use in Europe, but the supply was 

 for a very long period entirely or almost entirely from China, 

 and the great tea merchants were mostly in Foochow and 

 Canton. About 1835 through the efforts of the Botanic 

 Gardens in Calcutta, the cultivation was introduced into Assam, 

 and from almost the very start it has proved successful there, 

 until now Assam is a very large producing country. It was 

 not tried commercially in Ceylon until considerably later, when 

 the collapse of coffee rendered it obligatory to find something 

 else to grow instead of it, but about 1875 the first tea was 

 exported from Ceylon, and proved to be profitable. During the 

 early eighties there was a tremendous rush into tea in the 

 island, and by 1896, when the rush began to fall off rapidly, 

 the area planted in tea was no less than 380,000 acres, and it 

 has remained at that figure since, with trifling change. At a 

 later period it was introduced into Java, and that country 

 now has about 50,000 acres in tea cultivation. It has also 

 been introduced into the West Indian islands, and into other 

 countries, but in none of them is labour sufficiently cheap to 

 render the cultivation profitable against the competition of 

 India and Ceylon. 



