18 TEA PLANTING IN 



hitherto had been wanting to connect the green shrub 

 by our side with the black product, so familiar as occu- 

 pying the leaden chamber of the domestic caddy. On 

 this occasion (October, 1859) no tea was being actually 

 cooked ; the stoves were cold, and the horizontal pans 

 for black tea and the oblique pans for green tea were 

 inactive. The picking and cooking season was over, 

 but, nevertheless, great activity prevailed, for sorting 

 was going on. Heaps of tea, of various shades of 

 colour and more or less perfectly rolled, were lying 

 about on trays in various parts of the room. Three 

 Chinamen, with a gravity becoming the responsible 

 superintending of the various groups of natives busily 

 engaged around, were sifting and sorting and inspecting 

 the teas, carefully watching that no outsider, in the 

 shape of a straggling Bohea leaf, should desecrate the 

 box intended solely for that glorious product of their 

 united labour, the aromatic, finely rolled, crisp, well- 

 picked, first class, A 1, black tea, the Souchong. The 

 manufacture of tea I had an opportunity of witnessing 

 at a subsequent visit (April, I860). It was the first 

 picking of the season. If the process of sorting it pre- 

 sented an animated scene, the bustle attendant on its 

 manufacture was yet more interesting and exciting. 



The factory was a busy mass of moving life : around 

 the stacks of green leaves, that the pickers from without 

 were constantly increasing, were groups of lads engaged 

 in withering the leaves ; others were carrying in large 

 baskets these leaves to the pans ; some were fetching 

 live charcoal for the drying fires ; while others were 

 heaping into the grates beneath the cooking pans logs 



