Excerpt from Tea Industry Tea is so familiar a thing to us that we seldom stop to think of its origin unless we happen to be fortunate enough to visit Darjeeling, Assam, or some other district in India where it is grown and manufactured. We know that the brown liquid which we drink is made from small black leaves, but apart from that we are perhaps like the boy who, when asked where tea came from, replied, 'The shop.' But where does the shopman get his tea? To that question we shall get the answer as we read this book. Like so many of the things which supply our daily needs, tea comes from a plant, and in answering our question we shall start with the plant rather than with the shopman. This means that we must go to a tea garden where the plant is grown and to a factory where the leaves of the plant are made into tea. Ordinarily we think of a garden as a small plot of land beside our house in which we grow flowers and fruit and vegetables. In China, which is looked upon as the original home of tea, the plant has for many many years been grown in gardens somewhat like those to which we are accustomed; and this may be the reason why the word is used for great tracts of land which seem to us to be very unlike gardens in the ordinary sense. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.