The cultivation of Pingsuey tea 平水茶 has a long histoly in Zhejiang Province, and became nationally known from the Tang Dynasty. According to Lu Yu's The Classic of Tea, the earliest book summarizing the function and use of tea, Yuezhou (ancient Shaoxing), offered the greatest quality of tea in East Zhejiang. In the Qing Dynasty, thanks to valious improvements in increasing the production of Pingsuey tea, growers developed Gunpowder tea and sold it overseas. However, after China had to open five ports to international trade during the nineteenth centuly,the overseas trade of Pingsuey tea went through remarkable changes, especially the trade in America. There have been many studies on the tea export of China. Few scholars, however, have analyzed the Pingsuey tea trade individually. Thus,this paper, based on the customs data and local chronicles of Zhejiang, examines changes in Pingsuey tea export during the late nineteenth centuly and the underlying reasons for those changes.
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