July i, 1889.J THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST. 
S3 
storm did not last more than ten minutes and gave 
no warning whatever of its coming. Fortunately, no 
lives were lost. A storm of this kind is bad enough 
at any time, but particularly so at this season of the 
year when all was in readiness for the manufacturing 
season. The manager consoled himself that the forest 
trees is the garden could not again be uprooted and put 
on a large force of men to clear away the trees from 
the tea, and'all other available men hands put on to 
repair the damage to the various buildings. Young 
shoots, two feet in length were broken right off at 
the axles by the wind, besides a large number of 
smaller ones. We have had only one storm ap- 
proaching this during the last 25 years, it was accom- 
panied with hail ; luckily the storm of the 1st instant 
was not." 
TEA. 
" China," says Barclay's Complete and Universal 
Dictionary published just eighty years ago, " is the 
only country from whence teas are imported." It 
would be well for foreign residents in China, and 
for the owners of steamers trading to China, if 
this were still true. Unfortunately the truth of 
this statement has, in the last few years, been 
becoming fine by degrees and beautifully less, and 
soon the compiler of the encyclopaedia of the 
period, for we cannot now compress complete 
and universal knowledge into a one- volume dictionary, 
will have to write that China, the original home 
of the leaf, is one of the few Asiatic countries from 
whence no teas are imported into England, India, 
Ceylon and Java now have circulars to them- 
selves in Mincing Lane, which are enlivened 
by occasional depreciatory references to this effete 
empire ; even the Malay Peninsula is beginning to 
grow tea, and the cruelty thereof especially is that 
it is Chinese who are adding this one to the wounds 
from which their native country's onoe leading 
trade is expiring. China may well say to her unfilial 
children : — 
" That eagle's fate and mine are one, 
Who, on the shaft that made him die, 
Espied a feather of his own, 
Wherewith he wont to soar so high." 
For it is by not following Chinese methods of pre- 
paration that India and Ceylon have become such 
fatal competitors to China. They cannot even be 
accused of stealing their seed from China, except 
in part :it was the discovery of the tea plant growing 
wild in Assam that first turned the thoughts of English- 
men in India to the possibility of cultivating 
tea there ; a possibility which has grown so rapidly 
into so lucrative and magnificent an actuality. 
Not that the China trade is dying without friends 
at home, who still profess to hope that a recovery 
is possible. We read in a recent circular of 
Messrs. J. C. Sillar & Co. that their remarks 
about Indian teas are having an effect in England, 
" and sooner or later, the popular taste will under- 
go a change regarding them." And they add, 
with a feeling of disgust that the British taste 
should be so vitiated, that " other nations are 
not so stupid as poor John Bull, to mistake the 
muddy, mucilagenous appearance of the liquor 
of Indian teas for strength." It is pleasant to see 
such old China hanus as the Sillars still trying to 
defend our trade; but there is too much reason to 
fear that it is a foilom bopj. The dootors in 
China have consulted over the case of the mori- 
bund, and their proposed cures have been duly 
collected and published by Sir Robert Hart ; but 
the Inspector-General of Cus'oms himself sees 
little chance of their prescriptions being followed, 
in fact the measures he recon.inends as practicable 
would hardly do more than skin and film the 
lucer o'er. 
Yet no one who saw the flight of tea-swallows 
passing through. Shanghai on their way to Hankow 
this Spring would believe that they were going up to 
an exhausted field. It is true that they were all full 
of sinister prognostications. Year by year, as unim- 
peachable statistics prove, the consumption of China 
tea is falling off at home, and on the other hand 
the first crop of Hankow tea is to be a very large 
one. It has been said — and the same has been 
said no doubt in other trades — that in the tea 
trade you should collect all the information from 
figures or otherwise that you can deduce therefrom 
the wisest course, and then take the opposite. Is 
this the maxim that tea buyers are going to follow ? 
The finest tea by first steamer, say the experts at 
home, should not cost over sixteen pence a pound ; 
and already we hear that six pence a pound more 
than this has been paid. That, it is explained, 
is only an isolated purchase ; the buyer wants a 
small parcel to catch the mail. Unfortunately, 
these isolated purchases set the note to which 
the teamen tune ; and with a hundred buyers, 
English and- Russian, eager to melt their credits, 
the teamen's scale is apt to prevail. Messrs. J. C. 
Sillar & Co. are not the only people who see signs 
— though possibly the wish has too large a 
share in the paternity of the thought— that 
the English taste is backing to China teas; 
and buyers who are conscious that they 
have paid too much and that the tea is going 
forward too fast will perhaps solace themselves 
with this hope. To them we may recall the 
warning of, among others, Messrs. George White 
& Co., who estimate the total requirements at 
home this season at 225,000,000 lb., of which 
India is to furnish 100,000,000 and Ceylon and 
Java 45,000.000; so that only 80,000,000 lb. will 
be wanted from China. " From all accounts," 
they say, " there will be no lack of tea in 
China, as they point to a 'bumper crop' in the 
north, and it remains to be seen whether mer- 
chants will ship to this market with some regard 
to our diminishing requirements from that quarter, 
or whether we are to be over-supplied, as has 
hitherto been the case. Over-supply has been the 
bane of the London market for years past, and 
has brought about the present low level of value, 
which there seems little probability of raising 
until a farther marked lalling-off in China 
shipments is brought about, or fresh markets 
can be found for the sale of Indian 
and Ceylon growths." There is the disheartening 
fact for the China tea-man ; there is no question 
of over-supply from the British possessions ; all 
they produce will be taken ; it is only a supple- 
mentary supply that is wanted now from China ; 
and with China tea in this secondary position, 
to what end all the trouble that Sir Robert Hart 
and his correspondents have taken to investigate 
the best methods of reviving the quality of the 
China leaf? 
The China tea trade as a whole is thus a strik- 
ing instance of the irony of fate, and one branch, 
closely connected with Hankow, gives a special 
instance of this irony. The appeal in the Con- 
ference Case was still going on at home recently, 
and the principal defendants, who led the efforts 
of certain ship-owners to keq) the Hankow trade 
to themselves, are the managers of the celebrated 
Glen line. This year, we are informed, not one 
of their steamers proceeds to Hankow to load for 
London. — N.-C. Herald, May 11th. 
♦ 
ANGLO-DUTCH TOBACCO COMPANY. 
The statutory meeting of the shareholders of the 
Anglo-Dutch Tobacco Company was held on the 15th 
inst. at the offices, 2, Token-house-buildiugs ; Mr. 
David Brown in the chair. 
