Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

THE PREPARATION OF TEA AND, COFFEE. THE tea plant, a tree allied to the camellia, grows wild in Assam, and there is a legend that it was carried to China by an Indian traveller in the sixth century B.C. Be this as it may, tea was a national beverage among the Chinese in the early centuries of this era, when mead was the national drink of the Western world, and there was a Celestial tax upon tea as far back as 793. The oldest newspaper ad- vertisement of tea has Photo : Cassell & Co., Ltd. - BULKING TEA (CUTLER STREET WAREHOUSE). been traced to the year 1658, when it was to be had “at the Sultaness Head, a cophee-house in Sweetings Rents, by the Royal Exchange.” In 1678 the Honourable East India Company glutted the market for years by importing 4,713 lb. in one season. In the first year of the nineteenth century the consumption of tea in the United Kingdom was 23,730,15° lb. ; in the first year of the twentieth the import reached the tremendous total of 298,900,200 lb., of the value of £ 10,686,910, and the duty paid upon that proportion of it which went into home consumption was £4,769,762. These figures serve to show the supreme importance of the tea leaf among the indus- tries of Britain. It is the most valuable leaf in the world, and it is estimated that it furnishes a beverage to one-half of the human race. Its manufacture provides employment for large numbers of people in Greater Britain, for of the total import already mentioned nine-tenths are grown and manufactured in India and Ceylon. The work that remains to be done in this country is comparatively small, and is limited almost wholly to the task of preparing the leaf in an attractive form for the retail buyer. Yet the highest resources of modern engineering science are brought into play, and in this, as in most industries, the division of labour has been raised to a fine art. When tea is landed in the port of London it is conveyed to a bonded warehouse, and the first operation consists in “ bulk- ing.” This, as the photograph shows, is performed by emptying the contents of a particular sort upon the warehouse floor, where the heap is turned over by stalwart labourers with the aid of a shovel. The advantage of this is that a more uniform mixture of the leaf is secured, and its exposure to the air after a long imprisonment in the hold is some- times said to improve its appearance. The leaf is now repacked by human labour, and the weight inscribed upon the chest. A chest is set aside for sampling, and the buying houses send clown their clerks to the docks with sampling orders, the tea supplied to them being given in exchange for an equal weight of tea. These samples are carefully tested for “ body,” colour, fragrance, and other qualities by expert tea tasters, who assess the value of each according to their own judgment. At regular intervals a sale by auction is announced to be held in Mincing Lane, to whose sale rooms the buyers resort, with their catalogues marked with the mystic signs which record the results of their tasting.