CHAPTER XXXV
THE TEA TRADE
Since Commodore Perry opened Japan to the world his countrymen have been consuming more and more of its teas each year, the United States and Canada being almost her only customers, England and Russia, the great tea-drinking countries of Europe, buying hardly enough to serve as samples. Each year the United States pays over $3,000,000 for the nerve-racking green tea of Japan. Besides the price of the tea, a trifle of $13,000,000 goes to Japan for raw silk and cocoons. In return, Japan imports from America $5,000,000 in kerosene, $13,000,000 in raw cotton, and $1,000,000 in flour and machinery. In 1889 Japan’s imports from the United States amounted to $19,107,947, and its exports to this country to $31,959,635, while its imports from England had a value of $22,418,497, and its exports to England $5,635,385, a balance of trade disturbing to American commercial pride. Meanwhile Russian petroleum arrives by ship-loads, and, handled by the largest English firm in the East, is being pushed and sold by the smallest retailers at less than the Standard Oil Company’s fluid.
The tea-plant, as every one knows, is a hardy evergreen of the camellia family. It grows a thick and solidly-massed bush, and at a first glance at a field regularly dotted and bordered with the round bushes setting closely to the ground, one might easily mistake it for box. In the spring the young leaves crop out at the ends of the shoots and branches, and when the whole top of the bush is covered with pale golden-green tips, generally in May, the first picking takes place. The second picking belongs to the fire-fly season in June, and after that great festival tea comes in from the plantations in decreasing quantities until the end of August. The choicer qualities of tea are never exported, but consumed at home. Choice basket-fired tea, such as is used in the homes of the rich and well-to-do Japanese, sells for one and two dollars a pound. There are choicer, more carefully grown and prepared teas, which cost as high as from seven to ten dollars a pound; but such teas are shaded from the hot suns by matted awnings, and the picker, going down lines of these carefully tended bushes, nips off only the youngest leaves or buds at the tip of each shoot. The average tea, bought by the exporters for shipment to the United States and Canada, is of the commonest quality, and according to Japanese trade statistics, the average value is eleven cents a pound as it stands, subject to the export duty and ready for shipment abroad. There are often sales of whole cargoes of Japan tea at auction in New York for fifteen cents a pound. Families who buy this same brand from their grocers at forty or sixty cents a pound may judge to whom the greater profits accrue.
Japan tea came into market as a cheaper substitute for the green teas of China, those carefully rolled young hysons and gunpowders of our grandmothers’ fancy. Europe has never received the Japan teas with favor, but the bulk of American importations is Japanese, and the taste for black tea is being cultivated very slowly in the great republic. For green tea, the leaves are dried over hot fires almost immediately after picking, leaving the theine, or active principle of the leaf, in full strength. For black tea, the leaves are allowed to wilt and ferment in heaps for from five to fourteen days, or until the leaf turns red, and the harmful properties of theine have been partly destroyed. The Oolong tea of South China is nearest to green tea, its fermentation being limited to three or five days only, while the richly-flavored black teas of North China, from the Hangkow, Ningchow, and Keemung districts, are allowed to ferment for twice that period to prepare them for the Russian and English markets. The choicest of these black teas go to Russia, a part of the crop still being carried by camel trains from the end of the Grand Canal near Pekin to the terminus of the trans-Siberian railway. It is also shipped by steamers to Odessa; and as the tea is thoroughly fired and sealed in air-tight packages, it makes no difference in the quality of the infusion afterwards whether the tea-chests were jolted by camel caravans from Tungchow to Irkutsk, or pitched about in a ship’s hold—much as caravan tea is celebrated in advertisements for the American public.
The Japanese Government made experiments in the manufacture of black tea in the province of Ise, but the results were not satisfactory, and no further efforts have been made to compete in that line with China. Japan will continue to furnish the world’s supply of green tea, but as the demand for such stimulants declines, a great problem will confront its tea-farmers.
Kobé and Yokohama are the great tea ports, each one draining wide districts, and their streets being fragrant with the peculiarly sweet odor of toasting tea-leaves all summer long.
At Kobé thirteen firms, of which only two are American, are engaged in the tea-trade. In Yokohama there are twenty-eight firms, thirteen being English, eleven American, two German, and two Japanese. One American firm has invented machinery for firing and coloring the tea, the leaves being tossed and turned by inanimate iron instead of by perspiring coolies. About a half-dozen firms now employ machinery for drying and coloring this green tea, but all of them also use the old hand process, and toast the leaves over charcoal pans. Several thousand men, women, and even children are busily employed during the four months of the busy season—May, June, July, and August. A steam saw-mill, set up by a speculative American, makes a business of supplying tea-chests to these firms, although some still depend on their own carpenters. The matting and the sheets of lead for covering and lining the boxes come from China. Each firm, too, has a little art and printing establishment attached, where the gaudy labels for chests and cans are block-printed. One firm often has a hundred different pictorial labels for its packages of tea, that number of names being applied to the one kind of tea shipped.
Of each consignment made, a sample can of tea is forwarded by mail, while a duplicate sample can is retained by the exporter.
The young tea-leaves picked in May and early June comprise more than half of the whole season’s crop, succeeding growths of leaves being coarser and having less flavor. This tea, picked by women and children in the fields, is roughly dried in shallow baskets lined with paper over charcoal fires, and is then sold to commission dealers in the interior towns and villages. They sort it into grades, toast it once more, and ship it to the treaty ports in rough paper sacks, boxes, and baskets. Some of it comes by junks to Yokohama. Over and over the tea is tested by sample infusions and the leaves carefully inspected. All summer, at the exporting houses, the tea-tasters are busy with their rows of white cups. A certain weight of leaves is put in each cup, the boiling water is poured on and allowed to stand for five minutes. The expert notes, meanwhile, the color of the liquid and the aroma, carefully watches the unrolling of the leaves, and then tastes the brew by slow sips, meditatively, discriminatingly. The tea-taster takes care to swallow very little, as its effects are disastrous in time. Tea-tasters as a rule follow their business but a few years, severe nerve and stomach trouble being brought on by the constant sipping of so much powerful stimulant. Of course they command high salaries. Astonishing stories are told of the acuteness of their sense of taste and the certainty of their judgments. Their decision sets the price, and the dickering with the Japanese commission merchant is always settled by the tea-taster’s estimates.