to a Buddhist temple. We are in the centre
of the green-tea district.

The priests, belonging, for a wonder, to a
simple-minded class, receive us, of course,
hospitably. The stranger is at all times
welcome to a lodging, and to his portion of
the Buddhist vegetable dinner. These priests
are like some of our monks in mendicancy,
charity, and superstition. In the pagodas
they always have a meal prepared for the
arrival of a hungry traveller. But hungry
we are not; and we came hither to see the
tea-plantations; these we now seek out. They
are small farms upon the lower slopes of hills;
the soil is rich; it must be rich, or the tea-plant
would not long endure the frequent
stripping of its leaves, which usage does of
course sooner or later kill it. Each plant is
at a distance of about four feet from its
neighbours, and the plantations look like little
shrubberies. The small proprietors inhabit
wretched-looking cabins, in which each of
them has fixed a flue and coppers for the
drying of his tea. In the appearance of the
people there is nothing wretched; old men
sit at their doors like patriarchs, expecting
and receiving reverence; young men,
balancing bales across their shoulders, travel
out, and some return with strings of copper
money; the chief tea-harvest is over, and the
merchants have come down now to the little
inns about the district, that each husbandman
may offer them his produce. There are three
tea-making seasons. The first is in the middle
of April, just before the rains, when the first
leaves of spring are plucked : these make the
choicest tea, but their removal tries the
vigour of the plant. Then come the rains :
the tea-plant pushes out new leaves, and
already in May the plantation is again dark
with foliage ; that is the season of the second,
the great gathering. A later gathering of
coarse leaves yields an inferior tea, scarcely
worth exporting. It should be understood
that although black and green tea are both
made from the same kind of leaf, there really
are two tea-plants. The plant cultivated at
Canton for black tea, and known in our
gardens as Thea Bohea, differs from the Thea
viridis, which yields the harvest here. The
Canton plant, however, is not cultivated in
the North; on the Bohea hills themselves,
speaking botanically, there grows no Bohea
tea; the plant there, also, is the Thea viridis.
The difference between our green and black
tea is produced entirely in the making.
Green tea is more quickly and lightly dried,
so that it contains more of the virtues of the
leaf. Black tea is dried more slowly;
exposed, while moist, on mats, when it ferments
a little, and then subjected in drying to a
greater heat, which makes it blacker in its
colour. The bright bloom on our green tea
is added with a dye, to suit the gross taste
of barbarians. The black tea will keep
better, being better dried. There is a kind
of tea called Hyson Pekoe made from
the first young buds which keeps ill, being
very little fired, but when good it is extremely
costly. As for our names of teas,—of the first
delicate harvest, the black tea is called Pekoe,
and the green, Young Hyson; Hyson being
the corruption of Chinese words that mean
"flourishing spring." The produce of the
main or second harvest yields, in green tea,
Hyson; out of which are picked the leaves
that prove to be best rolled for Gunpowder,
or as the Chinese call it, pearl-tea. Souchong
("small or scarce sort") is the best black
tea of the second crop, followed by Congou
(koong-foo, "assiduity"). Twankay is
imported largely, a green tea from older leaves,
which European retailers employ for mixing
with the finer kinds. Bohea, named from the
hills we talked of, is the lowest quality of
black tea, though good Bohea is better than a
middling quality of Congou. The botanical
Thea Bohea comes into our pots, with refuse
Congou, as Canton Bohea. At Canton,
however, Young Hyson and Gunpowder are
manufactured out of these leaves, chopped
and painted; and this branch of the fine
arts is carried on extensively in Chinese
manufactories established there. As the
tea-merchants go out to collect their produce of
the little farmers; so the mercers in the
Nankeen districts leave their cities for the
purchase, in the same way, of home-woven
cloth. It is the same in the silk districts. If
we look now into a larger Chinese farm on
our way back to the Phantom, we shall find
the tenants on a larger scale supplying their
own wants, and making profit of the surplus.
On such a farm we shall find also familiar
friends, fowls, ducks, geese, pigs, goats, and
dogs, bullocks, and buffaloes; in-doors there
will be a best parlour in the shape of a Hall
of Ancestors, containing household gods and
an ancestral picture, before which is a table
or altar with its offerings. There is the head
of the family, who built a room for each son
as he married, and left each son to add other
rooms as they were necessary, till a colony
arose under the common roof about the
common hall, in which rules, as a high priest
and patriarch, the living ancestor. Respect
for the past is the whole essence of Chinese
religion and morality. The oldest emperors
were fountain-heads of wisdom, and he who
imitates the oldest doctrine is the wisest man.
The tombs of ancestors are visited with pious
care; respect and worship is their due. This
had at all times been the Chinese principle,
to which Confucius added the influence of a
good man's support. No nation has been
trained into this feeling so completely as the
Chinese, and as long as they saw nothing
beyond themselves, and were taught to look
down upon barbarians out of the heights of
their own ignorance concerning them, they
were contented to stand still. But the
Chinese are a people sharply stimulated by
the love of gain; they despised what they
had not seen, yet it is evident that they have