The Cultivation and Manufacture of Tea

Six new Chapters are added. So much has been done in Tea since I last wrote, I found it impossible to embody all in the former book, and so preferred to give it separately. The new Chapters treat of—

• Countries outside China and India that produce Tea.
• Tea Statistics.
• Markets for Tea outside Great Britain.
• Making Indian Tea known in the United Kingdom.
• Tea Machinery.
• Weighing and Bulking of Indian Teas at Custom House.

A separate and full Index of the subjects treated of in the additions to this Fourth Edition will be found at the end of the Book.

EDWARD MONEY.

East India Club, St. James’s Square,
July, 1883.

PREFACE
TO
THE THIRD EDITION.

The experience of four more years, which includes six months’ residence in the Neilgherries, is embodied in the following, while the whole of the letter-press of the Second Edition has been corrected and revised.

EDWARD MONEY.

London,
April, 1878.

PREFACE
TO
THE SECOND EDITION.

Three years’ further experience, and visiting two Tea districts I had not seen before, have enabled me to amend whatever was faulty in the First Edition. The whole has been revised, and much new matter is added throughout. A new Chapter at the end on the Past, the Present, and the Future of Indian Tea will, it is hoped, be found interesting. An Index (a great want to the First Edition) is added, so that all information on any point can be at once found. The manufacture of Green Tea, of which I was ignorant when I last wrote, is given, and the advisability of that manufacture is discussed.

In its present form I hope and believe this little work will be found useful and interesting to all connected with Tea.

EDWARD MONEY.

Darjeeling,
May, 1874.

PREFACE
TO
THE FIRST EDITION.

The following Essay was written with, firstly, the object of competing for the Gold Medal and the Money Prize offered by the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India for the best treatise on the cultivation and manufacture of Tea; and, secondly, with the view of arranging the hundreds of notes on these subjects, which, in the course of eleven years, I had collected.

During all these years I have been a Tea planter, making first for myself and others a garden in the Himalayas, and for the last six years doing the same thing for myself in the Chittagong district.

Whenever I have visited other plantations (and I have seen a great number in many districts), I have brought away notes of all I saw. Up to the last, at every such visit, I have learnt something—if rarely nothing to follow, something at least to avoid. I have now tested all and everything connected with the cultivation and manufacture of Tea by my own experience, and I can only hope that what I have written will be found useful to an industry destined yet, I believe, in spite of the late panic—the natural result of wild speculation—to play an important part in India.

I have endeavoured to adapt this Essay to the wants of a beginner, as there are many of that class now, and may yet be more in days to come, who must feel, as I often have, the want of a really practical work on Tea.

To those who have Tea properties in unlikely climates and unlikely sites, I would say two words. No view I have taken of the advantages of different localities can in any way affect the results of enterprises already entered upon. But if the note of warning, sounded in the following pages, checks further losses in Tea, already so vast, while it fosters the cultivation on remunerative sites, I shall not have written in vain.

EDWARD MONEY.

Sungoo River Plantation,
Chittagong,
November, 1870.

CONTENTS