“I dare say 3d. a day seems a very small wage to you,” said the planter youth, “but it is really surprising how little these fellows will live on.”
“It is surprising, indeed, when you see their thin frames, that they live at all.”
“Ah, but they are much worse off at home; you should see them when they come from India.” And so the conversation ended.
And this is how our tea, which we set so much store by, is produced in Ceylon and other places. These plantations are sad-looking places. Commercialism somehow has a way of destroying all natural beauty in those regions where it dwells. Here the mountain sides are torn up, the immense and beautiful forests ravaged from base to summit, and the shaly escarpments that remain planted in geometrical lines with tea-shrubs. You may walk for miles through such weary lands, extending rapidly now all over the mountain region from the base to near the tops of the highest mountains, the blackened skeletons of half-burnt trees alone remaining to tell of the old forests, of which before long there will be but a memory left.
It is curious, when one comes to think of it, that such huge spaces of the earth are devastated, such vast amounts of human toil expended, in the production of two things—tea and wine—which to say the least are not necessaries, and which certainly in the quantities commonly consumed are actually baneful. If their production simply ceased, what a gain it might seem! Yet the commercial policies of the various nations stimulate these, and always to the neglect of the necessaries of life. They stimulate the stimulants. We need not be hypercritical, but there must be something peculiar in the temper of the modern nations that they make such tremendous sacrifices in order to act in this way.
TAMIL GIRL COOLIE, PLUCKING TEA.
On each tea-plantation there are the “lines” (rows of huts) in which the coolies live, and the “factory”—a large wooden building, with rows of windows, a steam engine, and machinery for the various processes concerned—withering, fermenting, rolling, firing, sorting, packing, etc. The tea-bushes (a variety of the camellia) are not allowed to grow more than three or four feet high. In Ceylon the plucking goes on almost all the year round. As soon as the young shoots, with five or six leaves, have had time to form since the last plucking, a gang of workers comes round—mostly girls and women for this job—each with a basket, into which they pluck the young leaves and the little rolled-up leaf-bud, most precious of all. When taken to the factory the leaves are first spread out to wither, then rolled by machinery (to look like buds), then dried or baked by artificial heat. After this they are sorted through a huge sieve, and the finest quality, consisting of the small leaf-bud, is called Flowery Pekoe; the next size, including some of the young leaf, is called Broken Pekoe; and the coarser leaves come out as Pekoe Souchong, Souchong, etc. The difficulty with tea, as with wine, is that no two yields are alike; the conditions of plucking, fermenting, firing, etc., all make a difference in the resultant flavor. Hence a dealer, say in London, who reckons to supply his customers with tea of a certain constant flavor, has simply to make such tea as best he can—namely by “blending” any teas which he can lay hold of in the market, and which will produce the desired result. The names given in these cases are of course mostly fictitious.
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I may as well insert here one or two extracts from letters since received from our friend “Ajax,” which will perhaps help to show the condition of the coolies in the tea-gardens where he is now working. He says:—