Page:Illustrations of China and Its People vol. I. 2ed edition.pdf/61

 ROLLING SCENTED CAPER AND

GUNPOWDER TEAS. THE manipulation required to produce Gunpowder Tea is one of the most curious and interesting of all the processes to which the leaf is submitted. The visitor, upon entering the Gunpowder department of a Tea House, is surprised to find a number of able-bodied coolies, each dressed in a short pair of cotton drawers, tucked up so as to give free action to the naked limbs. It is puzzling, at first, to conjecture what these men are about. Can they be at work, or is it only play ? They rest their arms on a cross beam, or against the wall, and with their feet busily roll and toss balls, of perhaps a foot in diameter, up and down the floor of the room. One soon perceives, however, that it is work they are after, and hard work too. The balls beneath their feet consist of canvas bags, packed full of tea leaves, which, by the constant rolling motion, assume the pellet shape. As the leaves become more compact, the bag loosens, and requires to be twisted up tightly at the neck, and again rolled ; the twisting and rolling being repeated until the leaf has become perfectly globose. It is afterwards divided through sieves into different sizes or qualities. The scent or bouquet of the tea is imparted after the final drying and scorching, and before the leaves have become quite cool, by intermixing them with the chloranthus, olea, aglaia, and other flowers. These flowers are left in the baskets of tea until it is ready for packing, and are then removed by passing the tea through a sieve.

WEIGHING TEA FOR EXPORTATION.

WHEN the market is about to open, the new teas are sorted out into qualities, or " chops," as they are usually termed. Samples of these assorted teas are then submitted to the foreign merchants, who carefully test the colour, size, make, taste and smell of the leaves, and their general appearance, wet and dry. When the professional tea-taster has settled all these points, a bargain is struck for so-many thousand chests of the various descriptions of tea, and a day is appointed for examining and weighing the whole. The process of weighing is as follows:— The lead-lined chests (with which we are all familiar), soldered up and ready for exportation, are piled in symmetrical blocks in the weighing-room of the Chinese tea-house. Narrow passages are left between the rows to admit the foreign inspector, and he places his mark upon a score or more of chests, and directs them to be removed, opened and examined on the spot. This done, they are con- veyed to the scales, and it is now that the caution of the inspector is called most prominently into play, for experience has taught the practised Chinese weigher how to poise his apparatus by placing his hands lightly upon the ropes of the balance, so that, by a slight effort on his part, the scale may be made to turn either way and confer an appearance of favour on a purchaser, whom in reality he is cheating out of his goods. Fair dealing, however, is as much a characteristic among Chinese merchants of repute as among the mercantile classes of our own community, and the tea chests selected, as described, from the bulk of the cargo, generally show that the transaction has been fulfilled with scrupulous honesty and exactitude.