Identifier: wanderingseastof00penf (find matches)
Title: Wanderings east of Suez in Ceylon, India, China and Japan
Year: 1907 (1900s)
Authors: Penfield, Frederic Courtland, 1855-1922
Subjects: East Asia -- Description and travel India -- Description and travel Sri Lanka -- Description and travel
Publisher: London : George Bell and Sons New York : Century co.
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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, and pretty large bulkat that. The daily cable from London summarizing thetea market interests each of these men as vitallyas the tale of the ticker interests the Americantaking a flier in stocks. The story is told in twoor three lines, and by a presentation of numeralsappearing exceedingly unimportant to the so-journer whose operations in tea never exceededthe purchase of a jDound package. Yes, the figures tell the story—a tale of occa-sional success, but often of failure and woe. Abracketed set of fractions explains the range ofprices for broken pekoes, another set deals withcommon pekoes, another with orange pekoes, andstill another with common souchongs. Then fol-low such words as steady, generally firm,and somewhat lower—each a phrase with po-tential significance. The crux of the communica-tion, like that of a school-girls letter, comeslast. If it reads general market closed l-8thpenny up, the planter has visions of happinessand affluence, and forthwith orders a peg. But 118
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TAMIL GIRL PLUCKING TEA In Ceylons Hill Country if the postscript says l-8th down, the youngplanter foresees nothing but disaster, and mayconsider levanting with the bags of rupees by thenext steamer from Colombo. A planter is alwaysa bull on prices, while the important buyer in Eu-rope is chronically bearish. The yearly tea product of Ceylon is aggrega-ting 155,000,000 pounds, and of this Uncle Sampurchases 12,000,000 pounds, while 98,000,000 goto Great Britain. The value of the annual outputvaries little from $21,000,000—and from this Cey-lon supports itself so comfortably that the tea-plant seems to merit adoption as the emblem ofthe colony. The rise of the industry affords one of the mostremarkable instances of rapid development of anagricultural pursuit. Coffee used to be the domin-ating crop in the island, until coffee blightruined the industry. Tea was then experimentedwith. In 1875 barely a thousand acres were undertea; now the acreage is 385,000. A journey fromKandy to Nuwa

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