The book about tea, green tea, black tea and tea history continues…

To particularize further, and yet generalize at the same time, we
will say here that the Tea plant or tree is greatly modified in
hardiness, in height, in size of leaf, and in the quality of the
leaf for a beverage, by soil, by moisture, tillage, and climate.
Some soils and some climates develop a tea plant decidedly more
suitable for a green tea than for a black tea, and vice-versa.

The Formosa Oolong, with its natural flowery fragrance is a
product of a peculiar soil, said to be a clay topped with rich
humus. Analysis would probably disclose peculiarities in that
soil not yet found in other tea districts. In removal to other
soils and other localities, the Formosa Tea plant loses its most
precious characteristic, its sweet flowery aroma and taste.

The total product of this tea is but 18,000,000 lbs. per annum, an
insignificant quantity compared with the aggregate crops of
Chinese or of Indian tea gardens. If the exceptional
characteristics of Formosa Oolong accompanied the plant when
removed to other localities, its cultivation would quickly become
greatly extended.

What is known or believed concerning the remote history of Tea
and of its dissemination among other nations than the Chinese and
Japanese, has been told so often that its recapitulation becomes
tedious to those who are familiar with the story. But this book
is intended for the general reader, and for the purpose of
collecting and welding together disconnected and floating facts
and scraps of tea literature gathered from many sources.

HISTORICAL.

Until a quite recent period botanists believed that the tea plant
was a native of China, and that its growth was confined to China
and Japan. But it is now definitely known that the tea plant is a
native of India, where the wild plant attains a size and
perfection which concealed its true character from botanical
experts, as well as from ordinary observers, for many years after
it had become familiar to them as a native of Indian forests.

How early in the history of the Chinese that people discovered
and developed the inestimable qualities of the tea plant is not
known. That Chinese scholar, S. Wells Williams, in his Middle
Kingdom places the date about 350 A.D. But somewhere between 500
A.D. and 700 A.D.

Tea had become a favorite beverage in Chinese
families. Some of the written records of that ancient people push
the epoch of tea-drinking back as far as 2700 B.C., appealing to
ambiguous utterances of Confucius for corroboration. Tea in China
had obtained sufficient importance in political economy in 783 or
793 A.D. to become an object of taxation by the Chinese
Government.

Much more to come…