Shortly after Tea had become a popular beverage in China, it was exported to Japan, the only nation with which the Chinese were suffered to hold intercourse. In those islands it assumed even a more important position than it held in the “Flowery Land,” so that to be able to make and serve the beverage with a polished grace was recognised as an indubitable sign of a polite and aristocratic education. The Japanese devoted their artistic and mechanical skill to the production of tea-caddies, tea-trays, tea-pots, and tea-cups and saucers, remarkable for exquisiteness of design no less than peculiarity of fabric. Tea-houses were opened in the leading cities of Japan. These were frequented by the Daimios, or lesser nobles, and the lower classes alike, who took their chief pleasure in such popular resorts. Eminent writers, also, considered it no indignity to extol the precious beverage. What Bacchanalian and hunting songs, cavalier and sea songs, rhapsodical treatises in laudation of hunting, coaching, and so forth, are to the literature of England, such was Tea to the writers, artists, and musicians of China and Japan. In other words their Dickenses, their Goldsmiths, their Nimrods, their Dibdins, their Tom Moores, and their Leeches, instead of having a wide variety of topics to treat of, as was the case with their English compeers, were confined to one subject--Tea. Indeed, each plantation was supposed to possess its peculiar virtues and excellences, like to the slightly varying vineyards of the Rhine, the Rhone, the Garonne, or the Moselle. Each had its poet to sing its praises in running rhymes. In illustration, one Chinese bard, who seemingly was an Anacreon in his way, magnifies the shrub that grows on the Mong-shan mountains, in the territory of Ya-chew, in words which, literally translated, mean:-- “One ounce doth all disorders cure, With two your troubles will be few’r; Three to the bones more vigour give; With four for ever you will live, As young as on your day of birth, A true Isyen[A] upon the earth.” [A] An immortal. However hyperbolical this testimony may be considered, it at least serves to show the high estimation in which Tea was held. This fact furnishes the best possible answer to the silly objections of certain modern writers who would fain have us believe that the Chinese cultivate Tea, not for their own consumption, but to sell to foreigners. The only gleam of truth latent in so manifestly absurd an assertion being that the Celestials invariably drink the _pure_ Tea, not that which has undergone artificial preparation for those outer barbarians, the English consumers, it being an admitted fact that they prepare Tea “to order,” and can by the aid of mineral facing-powder transform black Tea into green, or green Tea into black at pleasure. Such transformation, however, only alters the appearance to the eye; the quality, inferior or otherwise, remains concealed.