The following Essay was written with, firstly, the object of competing for the Gold Medal and the Money Prize offered by the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India for the best treatise on the cultivation and manufacture of Tea; and, secondly, with the view of arranging the hundreds of notes on these subjects, which, in the course of eleven years, I had collected.

During all these years I have been a Tea planter, making first for myself and others a garden in the Himalayas, and for the last six years doing the same thing for myself in the Chittagong district.

Whenever I have visited other plantations (and I have seen a great number in many districts), I have brought away notes of all I saw. Up to the last, at every such visit, I have learnt something—if rarely nothing to follow, something at least to avoid. I have now tested all and everything connected with the cultivation and manufacture of Tea by my own experience, and I can only hope that what I have written will be found useful to an industry destined yet, I believe, in spite of the late panic—the natural result of wild speculation—to play an important part in India.

I have endeavoured to adapt this Essay to the wants of a beginner, as there are many of that class now, and may yet be more in days to come, who must feel, as I often have, the want of a really practical work on Tea.

To those who have Tea properties in unlikely climates and unlikely sites, I would say two words. No view I have taken of the advantages of different localities can in any way affect the results of enterprises already entered upon. But if the note of warning, sounded in the following pages, checks further losses in Tea, already so vast, while it fosters the cultivation on remunerative sites, I shall not have written in vain.

EDWARD MONEY.

Sungoo River Plantation,
Chittagong,
November, 1870.