Ir is only forty years ago,—or to be strictly accurate, only thirty-eight, since Robert Fortane successfully landed his cargo of tea manufacturers at Cal-cutty, and first taught the Indian planters the mystery, And now the wheel has indeed come full circle, for the Chinese tea grower is very seriously advised to go to Assam or Ceylon and Jearn his business there,—advice which some of the Indian papers seem, somewhat ungratefully, to resent. It is interesting in the light of this new departure to take down Fortune's delightful Wanderings in China (Miss Gordon Cumming should have respected the copyright in that title) and read again his account of his adventures in search of tea seeds, shrubs and growers. Travelling in China in 1848 was in some important respects very different from what it is now. For one thing the foreigner had no right to go more than a day's journey from his Consulate, under penalty of fine or imprisonment by his own authorities, This nece sitated the wearing of Chinese clothes and pigtail, and surreptitious shaving of the head by a coolie among whose few accomplishments barbering was not. Of course too the character had to be supported, and so you were obliged to speak a little Chinese, eat with chopsticks, smoke a hubble bubble, and affect indifference to personal clean-lines and verbal accuracy. Fortune, who was then botanical collector to the Horticultural Society of London, had travelled in China before; indeed on d one occasion he defeated alone and unaided except by a duck gun a fleet of pirates off that old haunt of pirates, aichow. And so when he was engaged by the East India Company to obtain seeds and plants for their plantations in the north-west provinces of India he was able to set about it in the only way at all likely to ensure success; in other words, to go himself to the tea districts and get them. Of the tea districts as then known to foreigners there were two main centres, Hui-chou in Kiangsi (whence the Fychow teas take their names) and the Wu-i hills, which give its title to the -historical Bohea. Tea s known to be grown elsewhere; indeed shrubs and seeds could be obtained in large enough quantities from Chusan and other accessible points near Ningpo, but anyone could go there, and Fortune wished to established a record as the first man to enter the sacred precincts of Hui-chou.
How he did it is set forth in the most entertaining manner in his Wanderings. After many adventures he finally reached the Sung-lo hills and put up in the house of one of his coolies, whence he explored the country, procured seeds and shrubs, and collected information. When he had reduced himself to almost his last dollar he came down the river and across country to Ningpo, from which he explored Chusan and Silver Island. He never seems to have had any trouble, worth calling trouble, with the people, but his own servants seem to have been a thorn iv the flesh. They had an aversion to long walks especially up-hill, and used to lose him whenever they could. Of course they squeezed him, and equally of course they bought ponderous Bargains, the carriage of which he was expected to pay. If sent to procure specimens from a distance they would stay away long enough to have gone there twice over, and though they raught the specimens, he would find that they were all from the immediate bourhood, where the messengers had been meanwhile reposing in tranquil comfort. It was this propensity of theirs that forced him, nathing loath, to go himself in search, and when he had done the green tea district of Hui-chou, he determined to explore the Wu-i Hills. Shipping off his Fychow and Silver Island bs to India, he started in 1849 from Ningpo through Lan-chi Ch'u-chou to the pass between iangsi_ and Fukien, thence to Wu-i-Shan, his description of which is enough to make his reader cool even on an August day in Shanghai, He had a profound belief in a better time coming, "when China shall be really opened to foreigners, and when the naturalist can roam unmolested with no fear of fines and imprisonment to haunt his imagination," and thought, naturally enough, that when that time came all foreigners would flock to the Bohea Hills. As it is, missionaries apart, we don't suppose a dozen Europeans have visited them since passports were invented.
From the Bohea Hills Fortune procured some hundreds of young tea plants, which like their predecessors he shipped off to India. But he had now (1850) a much more difficult task before him. It was not sufficient to send plants, it was necessary to teach the Indiau_ planter how to tum them into tea. With this object Fortune set to work to engage a party of Chinese tea manufacturers from the best tea districts inland—for he was as fastidions about his manufacturers as about his shrubs. After considerable negotiations, conducted through the compradore of his friend Mr. Beale of this port, he succeeded in getting his men together, tea manipulators and lead-box makers, and personally conducted them to Cal cutty, where they arrived on the 15th March 1851. So anxious were the authorities to begin work that the Chinamen were directed almost immediately on their arrival to give a specimen of their art. Firing pans were set up, and everything was ready when it was found that there were no tea leaves. The Chinamen (they were honest rustics from the interior) were completely at a loss, but not so their ingenious conductor. He turned them loose in the Botanical Garden and told them to pick any leaves that might seem suitable. And so the first chop of tea tumed out in India was a veritable lie' tea. Fortune doesn't tell us what became of it, but he observes that it was "so like the tea of commerce that nineteen persons out of twenty would never have suspected it to be anything else." After this triumph of art the manufacturers were taken up the Gauges to Allahabad, and thence in bullock waggons by instalments to Saharunpore. Here they were settled in nice cottages and gardens, and here Fortune left them teaching the rudiments of tea making to the a whose successors now affect to despise both them and their methods.
TREATY REVISION IN JAPAN, We are glad to leam by the telegram from our Nagasaki correspondent which we publish to-day that the state: ment that treaty revision was to be stopped, because the terms accorded to foreign nations were found to be incousistent with the new constitution, is denied, In commenting on the report we asked whether it would be the treaties or the constitution that would ultimately go down in the conflict. The Cabinet has. seen apparently how it would stultify itself and the Emperor if it was to advise him to withhold his ratification from treaties made by properly authorised plenipotentiaries, with the full knowledge and consent, of the government; and it has drawn back in time from an act whose disastrous consequences were fully pointed out by the Japan Mail. The knowledge that repudiation was ever in contemplation may make the Powers that have not. yet concluded revised treaties a little more careful in following the lead. of Mexico, the United States, and Germany; but the fatal step has been avoided and means will no doubt be found to accommodate the constitution to the treaties if they turn out to be actually discordant.
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Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.