Old photos in the late Qing Dynasty: This is really a tea processing place. Does it look unsanitary for workers to step on it directly?

The man who is making tea. In the first year of Guangxu (1875), Russian social activist Chalushen (Nikolai? Apollonovich Charushin) filmed the process of tea processing, packaging and sales in a certain place in the Qing Dynasty. There is no record of the specific shooting location. Bian Xiao guessed that this was Hankou. In the late Qing Dynasty, Hankou became a national tea distribution center because of its unique transportation advantages. The Russians invested and built a tea processing factory here, which once monopolized the tea foreign trade in Hankou.

A workshop to identify the quality of tea. China is the hometown of tea, with a history of planting and drinking tea for more than 2,000 years. The main export commodity of Qing Dynasty was tea. Before the Opium War, the Qing Dynasty maintained a huge surplus in its trade with European countries. In order to buy tea from the Qing dynasty, the British government even had to open a silver mine in Mexico to raise funds.

Simple machinery for processing tea. The aristocrats in Europe and America have the fashion of drinking tea, and all the tea they drink comes from China. /kloc-in the 0/9th century, the fashion of drinking tea began to spread from aristocrats to civilians, and tea was no longer a luxury, but became a necessity for the public. The demand for tea in the west is increasing, but after the Opium War, the tea export in the Qing Dynasty faced a crisis.

The workers are weighing tea leaves. The crisis of tea export in the late Qing Dynasty came from the spread of tea varieties and tea planting techniques. A few years after the Opium War, Britain mastered the knowledge and technology of growing and making tea and planted it in India. Since then, the tea planting area in India has expanded rapidly, and the output has jumped sharply, which has changed the pattern of the world tea market, and the Qing Dynasty was at a disadvantage.

The workers are stepping on tea leaves. In the traditional tea making process, there is a step of stepping on tea. It is said that the tea made by this method has mellow fragrance and unique flavor. However, this move was flawed in health and was used by the Japanese side to make a big fuss. The traditional tea-making technology is backward and can't progress with the development of society and science and technology, which is another important reason for the tea export crisis in the late Qing Dynasty.

Women are picking tea. Picking tea is an important process to remove impurities and purify tea quality. After picking fresh tea leaves, there will be many sundries, such as tea stalks, tea tendons, tea seeds, grass leaves and so on. If these impurities cannot be removed, it will affect the quality of tea, and then reduce the market price. The manual tea picking in the photo has a large workload and low efficiency.