In China the volume of tea produced annually is much larger than in Japan. Hosie places the annual export from Szechwan into Tibet alone at 40,000,000 pounds and this is produced largely in the mountainous portion of the province west of the Min river. Richard places her direct export to foreign countries, in 1905, at 176,027,255 pounds; and in 1906 at 180,271,000 pounds, so that the annual export must exceed 200,000,000 pounds, and her total product of cured tea must be more than 400,000,000.
The general appearance of tea bushes as they are grown in Japan is indicated in Fig. 192. The form of the bushes, the shape and size of the leaves and the dense green, shiny foliage quite suggests our box, so much used in borders and hedges. When the bushes are young, not covering the ground, other crops are grown between the rows, but as the bushes attain their full size, standing after trimming, waist to breast high, the ground between is usually thickly covered with straw, leaves or grass and weeds from the hill lands, which serve as a mulch, as a fertilizer, as a means of preventing washing on the hillsides, and to force the rain to enter the soil uniformly where it falls.
Quite a large per cent of the tea bushes are grown on small, scattering, irregular areas about dwellings, on land not readily tilled, but there are also many tea plantations of considerable size, presenting the appearance seen in Fig. 193. After each picking of the leaves the bushes are trimmed back with pruning shears, giving the rows the appearance of carefully trimmed hedges.
The tea leaves are hand picked, generally by women and girls, after the manner seen in Fig. 194, where they are gathering the tender, newly-formed leaves into baskets to be weighed fresh, as seen in Fig. 195.
Three crops of leaves are usually gathered each season, the first yielding in Japan one hundred kan per tan, the second fifty kan and the third eighty kan per tan. This is at the rate of 3307 pounds, 1653 pounds, and 2645 pounds per acre, making a total of 7605 pounds for the season, from which the grower realizes from a little more than 2.2 to a little more than 3 cents per pound of the green leaves, or a gross earning of $167 to $209.50 per acre.
We were informed that the usual cost for fertilizers for the tea orchards was 15 to 20 yen per tan, or $30 to $40 per acre per annum, the fertilizer being applied in the fall, in the early spring and again after the first picking of the leaves. While the tea plants are yet small one winter crop and one summer crop of vegetables, beans or barley are grown between the rows, these giving a return of some forty dollars per acre. Where the plantations are given good care and ample fertilization the life of a plantation may be prolonged continuously, it is said, through one hundred or more years.
During our walk from Joji to Kowata, along a country road in one of the tea districts, we passed a tea-curing house. This was a long rectangular, one-story building with twenty furnaces arranged, each under an open window, around the sides. In front of each heated furnace with its tray of leaves, a Japanese man, wearing only a breech cloth, and in a state of profuse perspiration, was busy rolling the tea leaves between the palms of his hands.
At another place we witnessed the making of the low grade dust tea, which is prepared from the leaves of bushes which must be removed or from those of the prunings. In this case the dried bushes with their leaves were being beaten with flails on a threshing floor. The dust tea thus produced is consumed by the poorer people.