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.
In the tea-firing godowns the dried leaves are stacked in heaps as high
as a haystack, when it makes a solid, cohesive mass, that can be cut off
like hay with a patent hay-knife. In nearly every case the firing is
superintended by a Chinese compradore, and his assistants are Japanese.
The tea-firers bring their cooked rice and their own teapots with them,
and snatch refreshment whenever there is a lull in the work. They are
searched at night when they leave, and with the sweet simplicity of
children they keep on trying to secrete the leaves, always being caught
at it. Their work consists in standing over round iron pots sunk in a
brick framework for the thirteen hours of a day’s work, and stirring and
tossing tea-leaves. There are charcoal fires under the iron pans, and
all day they must lean over the hot iron and brick. The tea is given
this extra firing to dry it thoroughly before its long sea-trip, and at
the same time it is “polished,” or coated with indigo, Prussian blue,
gypsum, and other things which give it the gray lustre that no dried
tea-leaf ever naturally wore, but that American tea-drinkers insist on
having. Before the tea-leaves are put in the pans for the second firing
men, whose arms are dyed with indigo to the elbows, go down the lines and
dust a little of the powder into each pan. Then the tossing and stirring
of the leaves follows, and the dye is worked thoroughly into them, the
work being regulated by overseers, who determine when each lot has been
fired enough. It requires a certain training to keep the tea-leaves in
constant motion, and it is steady, energetic work.
This skilled labor is paid for at rates to make the Knights of Labor
groan, the wage list showing, however, a rise in the scale of prices
since the fall in the price of silver and the increased cost of living
throughout Japan. During the four busy months of the tea season the
firers are paid the equivalent of fourteen and sixteen cents, United
States gold, for a day’s work of thirteen hours. Less expert hands,
who give the second firing, or polishing, receive twelve cents a day.
Those who sort and finally pack the tea, and who work as rapidly and
automatically as machines, get the immense sum of twenty cents a day.
Whole families engage in tea-firing during the season, earning enough
then to support them for the rest of the year; or, rather, pinching
for the rest of the year on what they earn during this brief season.
In autumn little tea is fired, but the whole force of workmen can be
had at the shortest notice, though the godown may have been closed for
weeks. One compradore, notified at eleven o’clock at night that tea
must be fired the next day to fill a cable order, had four hundred
coolies on hand at daybreak, many of them summoned after midnight
from their villages, distant over seven miles from the godowns. This
mysterious underground telegraphy in the servants’ quarters is one of the
astonishing things of the East.
Tea-firing begins at six o’clock in the morning, the coolies clattering
into the settlements on their wooden clogs at dawn, and going home at
dusk. They wait patiently outside the compounds until the lordly Chinaman
comes to summon as many workers as he wants for the day, whether two
hundred, three hundred, or four hundred. All these guilds in the Orient
have their established rules of precedence among themselves; each one
knows his rights and his place, and desperate as may be their need of
the small pittance, there is no pushing or fighting. Foreigners who live
near godowns complain of the babble of the coolies before daylight,
and a tea-firing godown always declares its nearness by the confused
hum of the several hundred cheerful voices all day long. The Japanese
lower classes are the most talkative people under the sun, and rows of
jinrikisha coolies never sit quietly in waiting, like the red-nosed
Parisian cabmen, dozing or reading feuilletons, but are always jabbering,
laughing, playing games and tricks on one another. The long, hot day’s
work does not check the tea-firers’ loquacity in the least, and at dusk
they are as sociable as at dawn. One frenzied resident, whose door-steps,
window-sills, and shady curb-stones were favorite resting-places for
the tea-firing coolies, determined to know the subjects discussed with
such earnestness and sonorous phrases. His interpreter reported on three
consecutive mornings that, for three mortal hours, one group of ten
coolies, sitting on patient heels, cheerfully discussed the coming rice
crop.
Philanthropists see fit to drop a tear over the lives of the workers
in the tea-godowns, although these victims seem as cheerful and well
satisfied with their lot as human beings can be. The women and young
girls are rather picturesque with their blue cotton towels folded over
their heads, and as the Japanese have remarkably pretty hands, the play
of their fingers in the moving streams of tea-leaves is pleasant to
watch. How they endure the slow, killing heat of the charcoal fires in
torrid weather, on their diet of tea, rice, and shreds of cold fish, is a
marvel to indolent, meat-eating foreigners. The pathetic sights are the
women with young babies on their backs trudging home from the godowns
at sunset, the babies having been danced around on the backs of older
children in the godown-yard all day, or laid down in some safe corner
near the mother’s charcoal-pan. I asked a most humane woman once why
charity did not take the form of a _crèche_, or day nursery. The answer
was that it would be impossible to support such an institution in so
small a community of foreigners. Each godown would need a large _crèche_
of its own; the poor women could not afford to spare a half-penny of
their earnings, and the problem must solve itself.
If man cannot live by bread alone, many foreign residents live by tea
alone, and live luxuriously. Great fortunes are made quickly in the tea
trade no longer, as in earlier days. Romance departed with the clipper
ships, and the cable and freight steamers reduced the tea trade to
prosaic lines. Only the best and most experienced men now succeed in this
trade, but the tea-merchant toils in his counting-room and godown only
from April to October. Then he closes and locks it all behind him, and
usually goes over to the United States to look after his interests and
orders there. Tea has its fluctuations, like corn or cotton, although it
is a crop that never fails, with the added disadvantages of the great
distance from the final markets and the expensive cable communications
to make it uncertain and full of speculation. As it takes fifty days for
the fast tea steamers to reach New York by way of the Suez Canal, the
tea-picking season is over when the exporter learns of the arrival and
sale of his invoices. On account of the heavier freight charges that way,
only a fraction of the crop crosses the Pacific to be shipped by rail
across the continent from San Francisco, the New York steamers by way of
the Suez Canal requiring but a little longer time, saving half the cost
to the shipper, and adding the convenience of a single handling of the
cargo.
The first of the season’s crop is fired and hurried off as quickly as
possible; tea steamers racing through Suez to New York, and the overland
railroads rushing cargoes across the United States in special trains, as
if they were perishable. With the exception of the Pacific Mail steamers
running to San Francisco, English and Japanese ships carry all this tea
to America. The tea steamers discharging cargo at New York usually load
there for Liverpool, and arrive in Japan in time for the next season,
or sometimes make two trips to New York in one season. While the tea is
moving freights are high, but in the autumn they decline. Sailing vessels
no longer carry tea, and the glory of the American fast clipper ships
is but a tradition, a romance of the Eastern trade. The greatest market
for Japan teas in America is now centering at Chicago instead of New
York, and prophetic tea-merchants expect to have San Francisco become the
headquarters and great distributing-point.