BY MR. FORTUNE. 145 



reader must nevertheless not imagine that there is 

 no natural foundation for this colour. The expres- 

 sion of Mr. Fortune is " the leaf has little or none 

 of what we call ' the beautiful bloom ' upon it ; " # 

 but then it has some, and be it ever so little, it is 

 naturally produced in the course of manufacture, 

 as I shall show under the article green tea. It is 

 evident that Europeans could never have suggested 

 to the Chinese to dye their teas blue, if there had 

 not been some foundation for it in the natural 

 process of manipulation. 



I believe also that Mr. Fortune was misinformed, 

 when he was told that the districts in which he was, 

 formerly furnished a portion of the tea intended for 

 foreign consumption. But it is no disparagement 

 to Mr. Fortune even if he was misinformed. He 

 states what he saw and collected. In a paper on 

 the expediency of opening a second port in China, 

 printed in 1816 and published in 1840, I com- 

 puted that the black tea districts were about 240 

 miles from the city of Foo-chew-foo, and about 270 

 from the sea.f Mr. Fortune states that he pene- 

 trated into the interior about thirty or forty miles 

 north of that city ; consequently he must have been 

 at least 150 or 200 miles from the district which 

 supplies the foreign markets with black tea. 



With respect to the exposure of the leaves for 



* Wanderings in China, 2d edit. p. 200. 



f Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, May, 1840, p. 38. 



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