Page:History of the Indian Archipelago Vol 3.djvu/539

 ARTICLES OF IMPORTATION. 523 as Bohea and Hangke. A picul of bohea tea is rec- koned to cost on board the jnnks at Araoy about Sj^- Spanish dollars per picul, orSkl. per pound, which is probably not less than 50 per cent, cheaper than the same commodity at Canton. The retail price in Java, as the trade is now taxed, is annually at an advance of i^OO to iiOO per cent, on the Amoy prices. In the earlier periods of the European tea-trade, the whole of the teas consumed in Europe were obtained through the medium of the Indian Islands. The taste for tea does not appear to have reached Europe during the Portuguese supremacy in the Indies, notwithstanding their direct and intimate connection with the inhabitants of China. The Dutch, who seem to have learnt the use of it from the Chinese they met with at Bantam, were the jfirst to introduce it into our part of the world. The English, now the principal consumers of tea, acquired it from the same quarter about the mid- dle of the seventeenth century, and our first im- portations, like those of the Dutch, were from Java. This continued until 1686, when we were expelled from that island by the Dutch, on which we procured our teas from Surat and Madras, to which, however, they were brought by private traders from Bantam, and other ports frequented by the junks of China. This state of things continued until the first years of the eighteenth century, when we traded for the first time di-