264 
THE TROPICAL AGRICULTQRIST. 
[Oct. 1, 1899. 
HANKOW, THE TEA MAET OF CHINA- 
(From " The Biver of Tea " hy E. B. Seidmore 
in the " Century Magazine " for August). 
Hankow, the p;reat tea-market of China, and 
sit companion cities of Hanyang and Wuchang, 
six hundred miles up-stream from Shanp;liai, to- 
gether present one of the tjreatest assemblages 
of population in China. Abbe, Hue, who passed 
this way in 1845 and wrote the most interesting 
and still useful travelers' book about China, 
estimated the combined population of the three 
great cities at eight million, and drew amazing 
pictures of the crowded river lite of the Han 
and Yangtsze, a iloating population depleted by 
thousands in the miles of burning junks when the 
Taiping rebels got their first taste of blood and 
plunder in the destruction of the three cities. 
For half the year the Yangtsze runs at the 
foot of a forty-foot stone embankment 
where broad flights of steps lead up to the 
park, or bund, of the British concession, a 
model foreign settlement extending from the 
walls of the native city for three quarters of 
a mile along the river-bank. For the rest 
of the year the Yangtsze rises higlier and 
higher, until it often overflows the parapet 
and the great esplanade, the settlement streets 
and the race-course being navigable by small boats 
for weeks at a time. Since the opening of the 
port in 1861 this British concession, with its 
smooth, clean streets shade-trees, and flower- 
beds, has been an object-lesson in municipal 
order wholly thrown away on the Chinese wal- 
lowing in the filth of the native city. Only 
the magnificient, red turbaned Sikh police have 
really impressed the natives, and with tlieir 
splendid scorn and centempt of the yellow race, 
these men from the Punjab have maintained order, 
in fact the most serious decorum, in the settlement. 
The Chinese have conceded land along the river- 
bank adjoining the British concession for a Russian 
settlement, and beyond that tracts for French and 
German settlements, which when embanked and 
improved, will give the great foreign city of the 
future a continuous bund, over three miles in 
length. 
THE CHANGE THAT HAS TAKEN PLACE. 
Hankow, so long the chief source of supply 
of British tea-drinkers with fifteen or twenty tea- 
steamers in port at a time loading for London, 
has undergone a change in this decade. As 
Chinese teas deteriorated in quality and tea-farmers 
became more careless and dishonest, India and 
Ceylon teas began to win favour, and with the 
enormous increase of production in those tv,'o 
British dependencies Chinese tea has lost its 
place in the British market, furnishing only one- 
ninth of England's import in 1896. At that same 
time began the general awakening of Russia. 
At Hankow the Bussian has come, and to stay, 
and the fhadow of the Muscovite is over it all. 
The Russian is not only established at the gates 
of China, but also at its very heart, the inva- 
sion and absori)tion being as remarkable in this 
British settlement at Hankow as everywhere 
in Korea and Manchuria. Hankow is fast be- 
coming a Russian city or outpost, a foothold 
soon to be a stronghold in the valley of the 
Yangtsze, which China has given her word shall 
never be alienated to any power but England. 
Some alarmists may even view the Siberian mer- 
chants at Hankow as emissaries, like those armed 
Jiutjsiivn monks who first established themselves 
in the Caucasus and Asia Minor in stronghold 
monasteries. Although the Russians have their 
own concession at Hankow, they do not care to 
build upon it and live there, amenable then to Rus- 
sian laws and consular jurisdiction, to Russian res- 
trictions and. espionage ; and the consulate and 
a few warehouses were the only buildings on 
the Russian concession in 1896. The Russians 
prefer the laws and the order of the British con- 
cession, crowding in upon it at every opportunity, 
competing for any house that conies into the 
market, and building closely over former lawns 
and garden -spaces. They compete with and out- 
bid the few British tea-merchants who remain 
in these days of active Russian tiade aggression. 
Only one lea-steamer took a cargo to London in 
1896; two more British firms closed out and left 
Hankow that year ; and. still more significant, 
only one pony showed the colors of tiie one 
British racing-stable at the autumn races. In 
the retail shops prices are quoted and bills made 
out as often in rubles as in taels or dollars, 
and the Russians have gradually assumed an air 
of ownership, of seigniorial rights, as complete as 
if they held the lease or diplomatic deeds to the 
place for ninety-nine years. 
THE ANNUAL MARKET. 
This great tea-market of foreign Hankow 
is a city of six weeks only, the heads of the 
great hongs, or their managers, occupying 
their residences from the first of May to the 
middle of June each year. Leaf-teas are fired 
and shipped until September and even later, and 
brick-tea is made until January, but the choice tea 
is all looked to in those few weeks. For that first 
quality the Russians buy only the first " flush," or 
crop of young leaves unfolding at the ti|)s of the 
new twigs of the evergreen camellia-bush each 
April. These pekoe ami souchong " leaves of the 
second moon " are carefully picked hy hand, while 
the next crop of tougher leaves isCTit with a knife, 
and at the third and fourth gleanings [he knife 
takes whole twigs, woody stems as well as leaves. 
The first crop of pale, downy leafllets is cured, or 
put through the wilting, rolling, fermenting and 
drying processes, at the tea-farm, the fermentation 
changing the colour of the leaf to a reddish brown, 
and converting part of the tannic acid to sugar, in 
which regard black teas differ from green teas, the 
leaves of wliich are diied as they come from the 
bush. With all the machines invented and used on 
tea-plantations in India and Ceylon, a drier haa 
only once been used in China. All attempts to- 
ward greater care and cleanliness in preparation 
have been as vain as attempts toward introducing 
machinery at the tea-farms themselves. Not de- 
clining trade or prices— for the tea trade is not 
nearly what it Avas eight years ago — can stimulate 
the tea-growers to any change, and only when the 
whole country is open to foreign trade and residence 
will each village or valley have its own tea factory 
to cure and pack the tea for final shipment oin 
the spot. 
THE COMMENCEMENT IN MAY. 
The dried tea leaves of the first crop are gathered 
up by middlemen and brought to Hankow, and on 
some day in the first week of May the Chinese 
brokers, in silk array, are borne in sedan-chairs 
from the native city and set down in the compounds 
of the great hongs to offer their first musters, or 
samples of tea. The high season begins at that 
moment, and for six weeks, in the first scorch and 
stew of its .summer climate, Hankow runs at high 
pressure. The musters are tested by foreign ex« 
