Owing to the minute division of land in China, there can be few, if any, large tea-growers ; the plantations are small, and the business of them carried on by the owner and his own family, who carry the produce of each picking immediately to market, where it is disposed of to • class of persons whose business it is to collect and dry the leaves, ready for the Canton tea-merchants.
The process of drying, which should commence as soon as possible after the leaves have been gathered, differs according to the quality of the tea. Some are only exposed under a shed to the sun's rays, and frequently turned. • drying-house will contain from five to ten or twenty small furnaces, on the top of each of which is a flat-bottomed and shallow iron pan ; there is also a long low table, covered with mats, on which the leaves are spread and rolled, after they have gone through the first stage of the process, which we may call baking. When the pans are heated to the proper temperature, a few pounds of fresh gathered leaves are placed upon them ; the fresh and juicy leaves crack as they touch the it is the business of the operator to stir and shift them about as rapidly as possible, with his bare hands, until they become too hot to be touched without pain. At this moment, he takes off the leaves with a kind of shovel, like a fan, and;pours them on the mats before the rollers, who, taking them up by small quantities at a time, roll them in the palms of their hands, in one direction only ; while assistants with fans are employed to fan the leaves, in order that they may be the quicker cooled, and retain their curl the longer. To secure the complete evaporation of all moisture from the leaves, as well as the stability of their curl, the operation of drying and rolling is repeated two or three times, or even oftener, if necessary,—the pans being, on each successive occasion, less and less heated, and the wholeprocess performed with increasing slowness and caution. The leaves are then separated into their several classes, and stored away for domestic use, or for sale. It was, ht one time, supposed that the green teas were dried on copper pans, and that they owed their fine green colour to that circumstance, which was also said to render a free use of them noxious to the human frame ; but this idea is now held to be without any foundation, the most accurate experiments having failed in detecting the slightest particle of copper in the infusion.
After the tea has been thus gathered by the cultivator, and cured and assorted by those who, for want of a better name, we may call tea-collectors, it is finally sold to the "tea-merchants" of Canton, who complete the manufacture by mixing and garbling the different qualities, in which women and children are chiefly employed; the tea then receives a last dryingis divided according to quality, packed in chests, and made up into parcels oefrom one hundred to six hundred cheats each, which are stamped with the name of the district, grower, and manufacturer, and called from a Chinese word, meaning seal or stamp, CHOPS.
In perusing the foregoing process of drying the tea, our mechanical readers will probably think with us, that it might be much better (or more uniformly) performed by a me/chine heated by steam at a regulated temperature, and that full nine-tenths of the labour would thereby be saved. But as such a proposi tion to the manufacturers of the " Celestial Empire " would probably be with indignation, and be rewarded, if it were possible, with the bastiaado, we shall reserve our suggestions for a fitter object Those of our readers who may wish• for more important information respecting the progress of this important trade, than our limits enable us to give, will find it in M'Culloch's Dictionary of Commerce ; to which valuable work we are indebted for some of the mate rials of this article. We have only to observe, that in the century between 1710 and 1810, the teas imported into this country amounted to upwards of 750 millions of pounds, of which more than 630 millions were sold for home consumption ; between 1810 and 1828, the total importation exceeded 427 millions of pounds, being on an average, between 23 and 24 millions a year ; and in 1831, the quantity imported was 26,043,223 pounds.