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the manufacture as I was able to make. Soy is made from 
the seeds of the bean Glycine hispida, which is cultivated 
in China and also in India, and the beans are imported from 
China to Singapore for making Soy and Bean -cheese. 
The present price of the beans is high, six dollars a picul, 
probably owing to the Russo-Japanese war. 
The Soy beans are first boiled, which causes them to swell up 
considerably, and then put into stone jars about three feet tall 
and two feet across, with a quantity of brine made of coarse salt, 
which I was told was made of equal parts of salt and water. 
1 he brine is first made in jars, and occasionally skimmed as the 
extraneous matter floats to the top. The jars when full of beans 
and brine are covered on wet or dull days with a conical tin cover 
which is taken off in sunshine. At one factory I was told that 
wheat Hour was put into the jars with the beans, and a note in 
* c Spon s Encyclopaedia ’’ states that an equal quantity of roughly 
ground barley or wheat is boiled with the beans, but this does not 
appear to be done here. 
1 he beans are left to soak for from sixteen days, when there is 
a big demand for the product, to a year, and the longer it is 
kept the better the Soy is considered* Six to eight months, 
however, seems the usual length of time. 
The beans are then strained out, squeezed in a cloth, and the 
deep brown liquor filtered through a cloth laid in a rattan basket, 
and then boiled. It is afterwards poured into stone jars such as 
the Chinese use for their pickled cabbages, and sold to various 
places in the East. 
1 could not find that any ferment was added to produce 
fermentation of the beans, and the Chinese said there was none.. 
1 here is, however, a general idea of there being some secrets, 
known only to the head man and religiously preserved 1^ him, 
as to the manufacture. This is, however, commonly st^d by 
any Chinese manufacturer, however simple and well known his 
manufacture may be. 
There are two kinds of beans of the Glycine , black and white, 
which are used separately. 
Soy is extensively used as a condiment both by Chinese and 
Europeans in the East, and forms the basis of most of the sauces 
used throughout the world. 
Bean Cheese. 
Bean cheese or bean -cake, is also make from the Soy hearts* 
hut the white ones only are used. The beans are first cracked 
in a stone quern or mill, worked by hand, the beans being poured 
through a hole in the upper millstone. They are then immersed 
in water for a day, which causes them to swell. Then they ace 
tiansferred to another quern and ground to the consistency 
of a cream. This is boiled and when cool poured into a cloth 
and squeezed and pounded on a small table with a square hole 
in the centre till much of the water is squeezed out, when the 
cheese is made into square fiat cakes four or five inches across 
Vm 
