How It Is Done

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 24, 1862

How It Is Done.—We yesterday visited a Chinese tea-dealer's establishment, where they were engaged in finishing up green teas for the market, and drying and re-dressing black tea which had been wet by the flood at Sacramento. The black teas were simply dried rapidly over a charcoal fire upon broad circular trays with bottoms of finely split and braided cane. While drying, it was re-curled by hand, and was then ready for repacking. The green teas were dried in the same way, and then finished up with a preparation of Prussian blue and Glenfield starch, giving it a beautiful pearly-green color. A substance was also added, the name of which we could not learn, to give it the fine "bou-quet" or aroma so valued by tea fanciers. We took up some of the fine compound, and said to John, who stood politely at our elbow:

"Do you know that this is poison?"

"Oh, yes!" was his reply, "me know him poison, but Melican man want him zis color!"

And such is the fact. There is poison enough in a single ounce of this green tea to kill a man, if taken at once. "Tea tasters employed in Custom Houses soon sink into the grave from the effects of this slow poison."

San Francisco Morning Call.