14 EARLY HISTORY. 



called Sesataei, of short stature, broad faces, and flat 

 noses " evidently natives of China adds " that the arti- 

 cles they bring for traffic outwardly resemble vine leaves, 

 being wrapped in mats, which they leave behind them 

 on their departure to their own country in the interior. 

 From these mats the Thinae pick out a haulm, called 

 petros, from which they draw the fibre and stalks ; spread- 

 ing out the leaves, they double and make them up into 

 balls, passing the fibre through them, in which form they 

 take the name of Malabathrum, and under this name 

 they are brought into India by those who so prepare 

 them." Under any interpretation this account sounds 

 like a remote, obscure and confused story. Still one of 

 the authors of the able " Historical Account of China," 

 published in 1836, has ventured to identify this Mala- 

 bathrum of the Thinae with the Tea of the Chinese. 

 Vossius Vincent and other authors, while admitting the 

 difficulty of understanding why it should be carried from 

 Arracan to China, and from China back to India, unhesi- 

 tatingly assert that Malabathrum was nothing more than 

 the Betel-leaf, so widely used in the East at the time as 

 a masticatory. Horace mentions Malabathrum, but only 

 as an ointment. Pliny refers to it both in that sense 

 and as a medicine. Dioscorides describing it as a mas- 

 ticatory only. While the author of the " Historical Ac- 

 count " prefers to consider the passage in the Periplous 

 as a very clumsy description of a process not intelli- 

 gently understood by the describer, but as agreeing far 

 better with the manipulation of Tea than with that of 

 the Betel-leaf, and his conjecture, unsupported as it is, 

 merits citation if only for its originality. 



The first positive reference to Tea is that by Kieu- 

 lung in the fourth century, who not only describes the 

 plant, but also the process of preparing it, of which the 



