TEA AND THE POETS.
The subdued irascibility, the refreshed spirits, and the renewed energies which the student and the poet so often owed to tea has been the theme of many an accomplished pen, eminent writers of all times and all countries considering it no indignity to extol the virtues of this precious and fascinating beverage. What Bacchanalian and hunting songs, cavalier and sea songs, rhapsodies and laudations of other subjects have been to our literature, such was tea to the writers, poets, artists and musicians of China and Japan, theirs being confined to the simple subject—Tea. Each plantation was supposed to possess its own peculiar virtues and excellences, not unlike the vineyards of the Rhine, the Rhone and the Moselle, each had its poet to sing its praises in running rhymes. One Chinese bard, who seemingly was an Anacreon in his way, magnifying the product of the Woo-e-shan mountains in terms literally translated as follows:—
“One ounce does all disorders cure.
With two your troubles will be fewer,
Three to the bones more vigor give,
With four forever you will live
As young as on your day of birth,
A true immortal on the earth.”
However hyperbolical this testimony may be considered, it at least serves to show the high estimation in which the plant was held in China.
The first literary eulogist to espouse the cause of the new drink in Europe was Edmund Waller, reciting how he became first induced to taste it. In a poem containing several references to the leaf occurs the following pregnant allusion to tea:—
“The muses friend doth our fancy aid,
Repress these vapors which the head invade,
Keeping that palace of the soul serene.”
That Queen Anne ranked among its votaries is manifest from Pope’s celebrated couplet:—
“Though great Anna, whom the realms obey,
Doth sometimes counsel take and—sometimes Tea.”
Johnson did not make verses in its honor, but he has drawn his own portrait as “a hardened and shameless tea drinker, who for twenty years diluted his meals with an infusion of this fascinating plant, whose kettle had scarcely time to cool, who with tea amused the evening, with tea solaced the night, and with tea welcomed the morning.” While Brady, in his well-known metrical version of the psalms, thus illustrates its advantages:—
“Over our tea conversations we employ,
Where with delight instructions we enjoy,
Quaffing without waste of time or wealth
The soverign drink of pleasure and of health.”
Cooper’s praise of the beverage has been sadly hackneyed, nevertheless, as the Laureate of the tea table, his lines are worthy of reproduction here:—
“While the bubbling and loud hissing urn
Throws up a steaming column, and the cup
That cheers, but not inebriates, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in.”
That Coleridge, in his younger days, must have liked tea is inferred from the following stanza:—
“Though all unknown to Greek and Roman song,
The paler Hyson and the dark Souchong,
Which Kieu-lung, imperial poet praised
So high that cent, per cent. its price was raised.”
Gray eulogizing it:—
“Through all the room
From flowing tea exhales a fragrant fume.”
Byron, in his latter years, became an enthusiast on the use of tea, averring that he “Must have recourse to black Bohea,” still later pronouncing Green tea to be the “Chinese nymph of tears.” And in addition to the praises sung to it by English-speaking poets and essayists, its virtues have also been sounded by Herricken and Francius in Greek verse, by Pecklin, in Latin epigraphs, by Pierre Pettit, in a poem of five hundred lines, as well as by a German versifier, who celebrated, in a fashion of his own, “The burial and happy resurrection of tea.” In opposition to the “country parson,” who calls tea “a nerveless and vaporous liquid,” and Balzac, who describes it as an “insipid and depressing beverage,” the author of “Eothen” records his testimony to “the cheering, soothing influence of the steaming cup that Orientals and Europeans alike enjoy.”
CHAPTER IX.
WORLD’S PRODUCTION
AND
CONSUMPTION.
The first direct importation of tea into England was in 1669, and consisted of but “100 pounds of the best tea that could be procured.” In 1678 this order was increased to 4,713 pounds, which appears to have “glutted the market;” the following six years the total importations amounting to only 410 pounds during that entire period. How little was it possible from these figures to have foreseen that tea would one day become one of the most important articles of foreign productions consumed.
Up to 1864 China and Japan were practically the only countries producing teas for commercial purposes. In that year India first entered the list as an exporter of tea, being subsequently followed by Java and Ceylon. In 1864, when India first entered the list of tea-producing countries, China furnished fully 97 per cent. of the world’s supply and India only 3, the latter increasing at such a marvelous rate that it now furnishes 57, China declining to 43 per cent. of the total.
TABLE 1.
ESTIMATED TEA PRODUCTION OF THE WORLD.
| Countries. | Production (Pounds). | Exportation (Pounds). |
| China, | 1,000,000,000 | 300,000,000 |
| Japan, | 100,000,000 | 50,000,000 |
| India, | 100,000,000 | 95,000,000 |
| Ceylon, | 50,000,000 | 40,000,000 |
| Java, | 20,000,000 | 10,000,000 |
| Singapore, | 20,000 | 10,000 |
| Fiji Islands, | 30,000 | 20,000 |
| South Africa, | 50,000 | 20,000 |
| —————— | ————— | |
| Total, | 1,270,100,000 | 495,050,000 |
From these estimates it will be noted that China ranks first in tea-producing countries, followed by Japan, India, Ceylon and Java in the order of their priority; the total product of the other countries having little or no effect as yet on the world’s supply.
This most important food auxiliary is now in daily use as a beverage by probably over one-half the population of the entire world, civilized as well as savage, the following being the principal countries of consumption:—
TABLE 2.
ESTIMATED TEA CONSUMPTION OF THE WORLD.
From these estimates it will be observed that England ranks first in the list of tea-consuming countries, the United States second, and Russia third, the Australian colonies and Canada coming next in order, comparatively little tea being used in France, Germany and the other European countries. It is rarely used in some parts of the globe, and is practically unknown in a great many other countries. It is also apparent that 90 per cent. of the world’s supply is chiefly consumed by English-speaking people, fully 75 per cent. of this being used by England and her dependencies alone, the United States being next in importance as a tea-consuming country. And it may here be noted that while the world’s production of tea has been very largely increased during the last quarter of a century in greater ratio than that of any other of the great staples of commerce, the production of China and Japan having increased at least 50 per cent. in that period, to which must be added that of India and Ceylon, from which countries little or none was received until a few years ago. Yet it cannot be said that the consumption has increased in anything like the same proportion, which will account for the great decline in price in later years, and to prevent prices from going still lower it is evident that new markets must be opened up for its sale in other countries where it has not yet been introduced.
TABLE 3.
SUMMARY.
| World’s Production, | 1,377,600,000 |
| “ Consumption, | 1,307,130,000 |
| ————— | |
| Surplus, | 70,470,000 |
| or | |
| Quantity exported, | 503,100,000 |
| Consumption in non-producing countries, | 432,630,000 |
| ————— | |
| Surplus, | 70,470,000 |
In England, particularly, the increase in the consumption of tea in late years borders on the marvelous, the figures for 1890 reaching upwards of 195,000,000 pounds, which, at the present rate of increase, will, in all probability, exceed 200,000,000 in 1892, as in the quarter of a century between 1865 and 1890 the consumption rose from 3½ to 5 pounds per capita of the population. But as in the latter half of that period strong India teas were more freely used, being increased appreciably by the similar Ceylon product in the closing years of that time largely displacing the lighter liquored teas of China, a larger consumption is indicated by the number of gallons of liquid yielded. This is calculated on the moderate estimate formed in a report to the Board of Custom to the effect that if one pound of China leaf produces five gallons of liquor of a certain depth of color and body, one pound of India tea will yield seven and a half gallons of a similar beverage. Then by allowing for an apparent arrest of the advancing consumption when the process of displacement was only commencing, the increase in the consumption of tea in the British Islands has not only been steady but rapid; thus, from 17 gallons per head in 1865 to 24 in 1876, 28 in 1886, reaching 33½ gallons per head per annum in 1890, the figures of last year almost exactly doubling that of the first year of the series, so that in consequence of the introduction of the stronger products of India and Ceylon the people of Britain have been enabled to double their consumption of the beverage, although the percentage of increase in the leaf has been only from 3½ to 5 pounds during the same period. Ceylon tea, which a decade ago was only beginning to intrude itself as a new and suspiciously regarded competitor in the English market with products so well known and established as the teas of China and India, has recently made such rapid progress that its position in the British market in 1890, rated by home consumption, occupying third place on the list. India teas 52 per cent., China 30 per cent., Ceylon 18 per cent.