ii6 AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY. 



The picking of the leaves begins in the third or fourth year of the 

 plant's age, according as a garden is planted with seeds or with 

 nursery-shoots. The crop increases up to the tenth or twelfth year 

 if the trees are carefully tended and the weather is normal. Then 

 there follows a gradual diminution, till, somewhere between the 

 fifteenth and eighteenth years, a new laying out is necessary. But it 

 often happens that a plantation is dead and the soil exhausted in 

 ten or twelve years. On the other hand, one finds some which 

 are at least twenty-five or thirty years old, and still productive, 

 as for example in the celebrated tea district Uji, to which 

 Kaempfer, even in his day, referred. " Udsi tsjaa nominavi ; de 

 qua ne quid in historia omittatur, pauca addimus Udsi oppidulum 

 est ad limites maris situm (it is five miles north from the sea at 

 Osaka), non procol a metropoli et Pontificali sede Miaco. . . . 

 Ejus clima mira benignitate favet culturae fruticus." The produce 

 of this town of 2,400 inhabitants, however, owes its ancient repu- 

 tation, less to an unusually favourable climate than to the peculiar 

 handling and care of the tea-bushes at the time of the first growth 

 of leaves, a fact I learned in Uji itself, and to which no one, to my 

 knowledge, has yet called attention. 



It is really two places, on each side of the Yodogawa, three- 

 fourths of a mile above the town of Fushimi. That on the right 

 bank belongs to Uji-gori, that on the left to Kuse-gori, both of them 

 districts in the province of Yamashiro, of which the old capital, 

 Kioto (Miaco or Myako), is somewhat over one geographical mile 

 distant. 



The river emerges here from its narrow bed among the moun- 

 tains and spreads over the plain which now begins. On the low 

 hills of this transition-zone, and likewise in the plain itself, is raised 

 the most valued tea of Uji, the choicest of which, to this day, costs 

 ten yen — forty shillings — per kilo, as compared with two or three 

 yen for the common sort. 



About thirty days before the first harvest, which begins in the 

 middle of May (the second commencing at the close of the rainy 

 season, about two months later), the tea-gardens of Uji are roofed 

 over. The roof rests on stakes and poles, and is composed of mats 

 made from reeds laid closely side by side. It stands from one and 

 a half to two meters above the ground — the bushes are from a 

 half to one meter high — so that the people at work can walk about 

 under it comfortably, and attend to the first crop of leaves. When 

 this is over, the roof is taken down and put away in houses or 

 sheds set apart for it, till the next year. It is said that it was 

 in use more than two hundred years ago. Its object is to protect 

 the bushes from the cold dew, which reddens the young leaves 

 and gives them a bitter taste. It evidently diminishes the radiation 

 of heat from ground and leaves, and thus the nocturnal cooling ; 

 the softened light, at the same time, lengthens the internodes of 

 the young shoots and makes the leaves more tender. Both in 



