Tea and the Effects of Tea Drinking
9781465672735
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
In March, 1904, the Southwark Borough Council at the request of Sir William Collins gave permission for an inquiry to be made into the constituents of tea in order to ascertain what injurious ingredients were present, and if it were possible to obtain the characteristic effects without subjecting tea-drinkers to any of the deleterious symptoms. The subject will be seen to be of importance and I propose to include a brief history of the use of the Tea plant, together with a general review of the experience gained by those best competent to judge of the effects since its introduction of what has now come to be considered a necessity of life. In addition there are set forth the results of examination of different samples of tea and the general conclusions to which I have arrived. What we call tea, is called by the Chinese tcha, tha, or te, and by the Russians tchai. The original English word was tee, at least this is the name used by Samuel Pepys one of the earliest to allude to the herb in this country. Tee was afterwards altered to tay, as will be seen from Pope’s lines in the “Rape of the Lock.” The tea-plant, Thea Sinensis, botanically speaking a close ally of the Camellia is in its natural state a tree which attains to 20 or 30 feet in height. Under cultivation it remains a shrub from three to six feet high. It grows in all tropical and sub-tropical countries, and roughly it takes the labour of one man a day to produce a pound of tea. The leaves—the only part of the plant used in commerce—vary from two to six inches long, are evergreen, lanceolate and serrated throughout nearly the whole margin; the leaves are stalked and arranged alternately on axis, the flowers somewhat resemble apple blossoms but are smaller. The shrubs are planted in rows three or four feet apart and look like a field of currant or gooseberry bushes; at the end of the third year the bushes become large enough to allow of the first picking and in the eighth year the plant is cut down, when new shoots spring up from the old roots. In Ceylon and parts of India the first picking is in March and there may be as many as 25 pickings in the season until October; in China the first picking is in April, and in Japan late in April or early May. The early pickings make the finest quality of tea, and the very late leaves are not usually exported at all, but are used by the peasants locally. In preparation for commerce the leaves are subjected to various processes of drying, rolling and roasting, into which it would not be necessary at any length to enter; the essential point to remember is that black tea differs from green in that after a short preliminary rolling and roasting, the leaves are exposed to the air in a soft moist state, when they undergo fermentation with the result it is said that a portion of the tannic acid is converted to sugar. Robert Fortune, an authority on the cultivation of the tea plant thought that the differences of manufacture “fully account for the difference in colour, as well as for the effect produced on some constitutions by green tea, such as nervous irritability, sleeplessness, &c.”
