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FARMERS OF FORTY CENTURIES

OR

PERMANENT AGRICULTURE IN CHINA, KOREA AND JAPAN

By

F. H. KING, D. Sc.

1911






PREFACE





By DR. L. H. BAILEY.

We have not yet gathered up the experience of mankind in the tilling
of the earth; yet the tilling of the earth is the bottom condition
of civilization. If we are to assemble all the forces and agencies
that make for the final conquest of the planet, we must assuredly
know how it is that all the peoples in all the places have met the
problem of producing their sustenance out of the soil.

We have had few great agricultural travelers and few books that
describe the real and significant rural conditions. Of natural
history travel we have had very much; and of accounts of sights and
events perhaps we have had too many. There are, to be sure, famous
books of study and travel in rural regions, and some of them, as
Arthur Young's "Travels in France," have touched social and
political history; but for the most part, authorship of agricultural
travel is yet undeveloped. The spirit of scientific inquiry must now
be taken into this field, and all earth-conquest must be compared
and the results be given to the people that work.

This was the point of view in which I read Professor King's
manuscript. It is the writing of a well-trained observer who went
forth not to find diversion or to depict scenery and common wonders,
but to study the actual conditions of life of agricultural peoples.
We in North America are wont to think that we may instruct all the
world in agriculture, because our agricultural wealth is great and
our exports to less favored peoples have been heavy; but this wealth
is great because our soil is fertile and new, and in large acreage
for every person. We have really only begun to farm well. The first
condition of farming is to maintain fertility. This condition the
oriental peoples have met, and they have solved it in their way. We
may never adopt particular methods, but we can profit vastly by
their experience. With the increase of personal wants in recent
time. the newer countries may never reach such density of population
as have Japan and China; but we must nevertheless learn the first
lesson in the conservation of natural resources, which are the
resources of the land. This is the message that Professor King
brought home from the East.

This book on agriculture should have good effect in establishing
understanding between the West and the East. If there could be such
an interchange of courtesies and inquiries on these themes as is
suggested by Professor King, as well as the interchange of athletics
and diplomacy and commerce, the common productive people on both
sides should gain much that they could use; and the results in amity
should be incalculable.

It is a misfortune that Professor King could not have lived to write
the concluding "Message of China and Japan to the World." It would
have been a careful and forceful summary of his study of eastern
conditions. At the moment when the work was going to the printer, he
was called suddenly to the endless journey and his travel here was
left incomplete. But he bequeathed us a new piece of literature, to
add to his standard writings on soils and on the applications of
physics and devices to agriculture. Whatever he touched he
illuminated.






CONTENTS





PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

FIRST GLIMPSES OF JAPAN

GRAVE LANDS OF CHINA

TO HONGKONG AND CANTON

UP THE SI-KIANG, WEST RIVER

EXTENT OF CANALIZATION AND SURFACE FITTING OF FIELDS

SOME CUSTOMS OF THE COMMON PEOPLE

THE FUEL PROBLEM, BUILDING AND TEXTILE MATERIALS

TRAMPS AFIELD

THE UTILIZATION OF WASTE

IN THE SHANTUNG PROVINCE

ORIENTALS CROWD BOTH TIME AND SPACE

RICE CULTURE IN THE ORIENT

SILK CULTURE

THE TEA INDUSTRY

ABOUT TIENTSIN

MANCHURIA AND KOREA

RETURN TO JAPAN






INTRODUCTION





A word of introduction is needed to place the reader at the best
view point from which to consider what is said in the following
pages regarding the agricultural practices and customs of China,
Korea and Japan. It should be borne in mind that the great factors
which today characterize, dominate and determine the agricultural
and other industrial operations of western nations were physical
impossibilities to them one hundred years ago, and until then had
been so to all people.

It should be observed, too, that the United States as yet is a
nation of but few people widely scattered over a broad virgin land
with more than twenty acres to the support of every man, woman and
child, while the people whose practices are to be considered are
toiling in fields tilled more than three thousand years and who have
scarcely more than two acres per capita,* more than one-half of
which is uncultivable mountain land.

*[Footnote: This figure was wrongly stated in the first edition as
one acre, owing to a mistake in confusing the area of cultivated
land with total area.]

Again, the great movement of cargoes of feeding stuffs and mineral
fertilizers to western Europe and to the eastern United States began
less than a century ago and has never been possible as a means of
maintaining soil fertility in China, Korea or Japan, nor can it be
continued indefinitely in either Europe or America. These
importations are for the time making tolerable the waste of plant
food materials through our modern systems of sewage disposal and
other faulty practices; but the Mongolian races have held all such
wastes, both urban and rural, and many others which we ignore,
sacred to agriculture, applying them to their fields.

We are to consider some of the practices of a virile race of some
five hundred millions of people who have an unimpaired inheritance
moving with the momentum acquired through four thousand years; a
people morally and intellectually strong, mechanically capable, who
are awakening to a utilization of all the possibilities which
science and invention during recent years have brought to western
nations; and a people who have long dearly loved peace but who can
and will fight in self defense if compelled to do so.

We had long desired to stand face to face with Chinese and Japanese
farmers; to walk through their fields and to learn by seeing some of
their methods, appliances and practices which centuries of stress
and experience have led these oldest farmers in the world to adopt.
We desired to learn how it is possible, after twenty and perhaps
thirty or even forty centuries, for their soils to be made to
produce sufficiently for the maintenance of such dense populations
as are living now in these three countries. We have now had this
opportunity and almost every day we were instructed, surprised and
amazed at the conditions and practices which confronted us whichever
way we turned; instructed in the ways and extent to which these
nations for centuries have been and are conserving and utilizing
their natural resources, surprised at the magnitude of the returns
they are getting from their fields, and amazed at the amount of
efficient human labor cheerfully given for a daily wage of five
cents and their food, or for fifteen cents, United States currency,
without food.

The three main islands of Japan in 1907 had a population of
46,977,003 maintained on 20,000 square miles of cultivated field.
This is at the rate of more than three people to each acre, and of
2,349 to each square mile; and yet the total agricultural imports
into Japan in 1907 exceeded the agricultural exports by less than
one dollar per capita. If the cultivated land of Holland is
estimated at but one-third of her total area, the density of her
population in 1905 was, on this basis, less than one-third that of
Japan in her three main islands. At the same time Japan is feeding
69 horses and 56 cattle, nearly all laboring animals, to each square
mile of cultivated field, while we were feeding in 1900 but 30
horses and mules per same area, these being our laboring animals.

As coarse food transformers Japan was maintaining 16,500,000
domestic fowl, 825 per square mile, but only one for almost three of
her people. We were maintaining, in 1900, 250,600,000 poultry, but
only 387 per square mile of cultivated field and yet more than three
for each person. Japan's coarse food transformers in the form of
swine, goats and sheep aggregated but 13 to the square mile and
provided but one of these units for each 180 of her people while in
the United States in 1900 there were being maintained, as
transformers of grass and coarse grain into meat and milk, 95
cattle, 99 sheep and 72 swine per each square mile of improved
farms. In this reckoning each of the cattle should be counted as the
equivalent of perhaps five of the sheep and swine, for the
transforming power of the dairy cow is high. On this basis we are
maintaining at the rate of more than 646 of the Japanese units per
square mile, and more than five of these to every man, woman and
child, instead of one to every 180 of the population, as is the case
in Japan.

Correspondingly accurate statistics are not accessible for China but
in the Shantung province we talked with a farmer having 12 in his
family and who kept one donkey, one cow, both exclusively laboring
animals, and two pigs on 2.5 acres of cultivated land where he grew
wheat, millet, sweet potatoes and beans. Here is a density of
population equal to 3,072 people, 256 donkeys, 256 cattle and 512
swine per square mile. In another instance where the holding was one
and two-thirds acres the farmer had 10 in his family and was
maintaining one donkey and one pig, giving to this farm land a
maintenance capacity of 3,840 people, 384 donkeys and 384 pigs to
the square mile, or 240 people, 24 donkeys and 24 pigs to one of our
forty-acre farms which our farmers regard too small for a single
family. The average of seven Chinese holdings which we visited and
where we obtained similar data indicates a maintenance capacity for
those lands of 1,783 people, 212 cattle or donkeys and 399
swine,--1,995 consumers and 399 rough food transformers per square
mile of farm land. These statements for China represent strictly
rural populations. The rural population of the United States in 1900
was placed at the rate of 61 per square mile of improved farm land
and there were 30 horses and mules. In Japan the rural population
had a density in 1907 of 1,922 per square mile, and of horses and
cattle together 125.

The population of the large island of Chungming in the mouth of the
Yangtse river, having an area of 270 square miles, possessed,
according to the official census of 1902, a density of 3,700 per
square mile and yet there was but one large city on the island,
hence the population is largely rural.

It could not be other than a matter of the highest industrial,
educational and social importance to all nations if there might be
brought to them a full and accurate account of all those conditions
which have made it possible for such dense populations to be
maintained so largely upon the products of Chinese, Korean and
Japanese soils. Many of the steps, phases and practices through
which this evolution has passed are irrevocably buried in the past
but such remarkable maintenance efficiency attained centuries ago
and projected into the present with little apparent decadence merits
the most profound study and the time is fully ripe when it should be
made. Living as we are in the morning of a century of transition
from isolated to cosmopolitan national life when profound
readjustments, industrial, educational and social, must result, such
an investigation cannot be made too soon. It is high time for each
nation to study the others and by mutual agreement and co-operative
effort, the results of such studies should become available to all
concerned, made so in the spirit that each should become coordinate
and mutually helpful component factors in the world's progress.

One very appropriate and immensely helpful means for attacking this
problem, and which should prove mutually helpful to citizen and
state, would be for the higher educational institutions of all
nations, instead of exchanging courtesies through their baseball
teams, to send select bodies of their best students under competent
leadership and by international agreement, both east and west,
organizing therefrom investigating bodies each containing components
of the eastern and western civilization and whose purpose it should
be to study specifically set problems. Such a movement well
conceived and directed, manned by the most capable young men, should
create an international acquaintance and spread broadcast a body of
important knowledge which would develop as the young men mature and
contribute immensely toward world peace and world progress. If some
broad plan of international effort such as is here suggested were
organized the expense of maintenance might well be met by diverting
so much as is needful from the large sums set aside for the
expansion of navies for such steps as these, taken in the interests
of world uplift and world peace, could not fail to be more
efficacious and less expensive than increase in fighting equipment.
It would cultivate the spirit of pulling together and of a square
deal rather than one of holding aloof and of striving to gain
unneighborly advantage.

Many factors and conditions conspire to give to the farms and
farmers of the Far East their high maintenance efficiency and some
of these may be succinctly stated. The portions of China, Korea and
Japan where dense populations have developed and are being
maintained occupy exceptionally favorable geographic positions so
far as these influence agricultural production. Canton in the south
of China has the latitude of Havana, Cuba, while Mukden in
Manchuria, and northern Honshu in Japan are only as far north as New
York city, Chicago and northern California. The United States lies
mainly between 50 degrees and 30 degrees of latitude while these
three countries lie between 40 degrees and 20 degrees, some seven
hundred miles further south. This difference of position, giving
them longer seasons, has made it possible for them to devise systems
of agriculture whereby they grow two, three and even four crops on
the same piece of ground each year. In southern China, in Formosa
and in parts of Japan two crops of rice are grown; in the Chekiang
province there may be a crop of rape, of wheat or barley or of
windsor beans or clover which is followed in midsummer by another of
cotton or of rice. In the Shantung province wheat or barley in the
winter and spring may be followed in summer by large or small
millet, sweet potatoes, soy beans or peanuts. At Tientsin, 39 deg
north, in the latitude of Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Springfield,
Illinois, we talked with a farmer who followed his crop of wheat on
his small holding with one of onions and the onions with cabbage,
realizing from the three crops at the rate of $163, gold, per acre;
and with another who planted Irish potatoes at the earliest
opportunity in the spring, marketing them when small, and following
these with radishes, the radishes with cabbage, realizing from the
three crops at the rate of $203 per acre.

Nearly 500,000,000 people are being maintained, chiefly upon the
products of an area smaller than the improved farm lands of the
United States. Complete a square on the lines drawn from Chicago
southward to the Gulf and westward across Kansas, and there will be
enclosed an area greater than the cultivated fields of China, Korea
and Japan and from which five times our present population are fed.

The rainfall in these countries is not only larger than that even in
our Atlantic and Gulf states, but it falls more exclusively during
the summer season when its efficiency in crop production may be
highest. South China has a rainfall of some 80 inches with little of
it during the winter, while in our southern states the rainfall is
nearer 60 inches with less than one-half of it between June and
September. Along a line drawn from Lake Superior through central
Texas the yearly precipitation is about 30 inches but only 16 inches
of this falls during the months May to September; while in the
Shantung province, China, with an annual rainfall of little more
than 24 inches, 17 of these fall during the months designated and
most of this in July and August. When it is stated that under the
best tillage and with no loss of water through percolation, most of
our agricultural crops require 300 to 600 tons of water for each ton
of dry substance brought to maturity, it can be readily understood
that the right amount of available moisture, coming at the proper
time, must be one of the prime factors of a high maintenance
capacity for any soil, and hence that in the Far East, with their
intensive methods, it is possible to make their soils yield large
returns.

The selection of rice and of the millets as the great staple food
crops of these three nations, and the systems of agriculture they
have evolved to realize the most from them, are to us remarkable and
indicate a grasp of essentials and principles which may well cause
western nations to pause and reflect.

Notwithstanding the large and favorable rainfall of these countries,
each of the nations have selected the one crop which permits them to
utilize not only practically the entire amount of rain which falls
upon their fields, but in addition enormous volumes of the run-off
from adjacent uncultivable mountain country. Wherever paddy fields
are practicable there rice is grown. In the three main islands of
Japan 56 per cent of the cultivated fields, 11,000 square miles, is
laid out for rice growing and is maintained under water from
transplanting to near harvest time, after which the land is allowed
to dry, to be devoted to dry land crops during the balance of the
year, where the season permits.

To anyone who studies the agricultural methods of the Far East in
the field it is evident that these people, centuries ago, came to
appreciate the value of water in crop production as no other nations
have. They have adapted conditions to crops and crops to conditions
until with rice they have a cereal which permits the most intense
fertilization and at the same time the ensuring of maximum yields
against both drought and flood. With the practice of western nations
in all humid climates, no matter how completely and highly we
fertilize, in more years than not yields are reduced by a deficiency
or an excess of water.

It is difficult to convey, by word or map, an adequate conception of
the magnitude of the systems of canalization which contribute
primarily to rice culture. A conservative estimate would place the
miles of canals in China at fully 200,000 and there are probably
more miles of canal in China, Korea and Japan than there are miles
of railroad in the United States. China alone has as many acres in
rice each year as the United States has in wheat and her annual
product is more than double and probably threefold our annual wheat
crop, and yet the whole of the rice area produces at least one and
sometimes two other crops each year.

The selection of the quick-maturing, drought-resisting millets as
the great staple food crops to be grown wherever water is not
available for irrigation, and the almost universal planting in hills
or drills, permitting intertillage, thus adopting centuries ago the
utilization of earth mulches in conserving soil moisture, has
enabled these people to secure maximum returns in seasons of drought
and where the rainfall is small. The millets thrive in the hot
summer climates; they survive when the available soil moisture is
reduced to a low limit, and they grow vigorously when the heavy
rains come. Thus we find in the Far East, with more rainfall and a
better distribution of it than occurs in the United States, and with
warmer, longer seasons, that these people have with rare wisdom
combined both irrigation and dry farming methods to an extent and
with an intensity far beyond anything our people have ever dreamed,
in order that they might maintain their dense populations.

Notwithstanding the fact that in each of these countries the soils
are naturally more than ordinarily deep, inherently fertile and
enduring, judicious and rational methods of fertilization are
everywhere practiced; but not until recent years, and only in Japan,
have mineral commercial fertilizers been used. For centuries,
however, all cultivated lands, including adjacent hill and mountain
sides, the canals, streams and the sea have been made to contribute
what they could toward the fertilization of cultivated fields and
these contributions in the aggregate have been large. In China, in
Korea and in Japan all but the inaccessible portions of their vast
extent of mountain and hill lands have long been taxed to their full
capacity for fuel, lumber and herbage for green manure and compost
material; and the ash of practically all of the fuel and of all of
the lumber used at home finds its way ultimately to the fields as
fertilizer.

In China enormous quantities of canal mud are applied to the fields,
sometimes at the rate of even 70 and more tons per acre. So, too,
where there are no canals, both soil and subsoil are carried into
the villages and there between the intervals when needed they are,
at the expense of great labor, composted with organic refuse and
often afterwards dried and pulverized before being carried back and
used on the fields as home-made fertilizers. Manure of all kinds,
human and animal, is religiously saved and applied to the fields in
a manner which secures an efficiency far above our own practices.
Statistics obtained through the Bureau of Agriculture, Japan, place
the amount of human waste in that country in 1908 at 23,950,295
tons, or 1.75 tons per acre of her cultivated land. The
International Concession of the city of Shanghai, in 1908, sold to a
Chinese contractor the privilege of entering residences and public
places early in the morning of each day in the year and removing the
night soil, receiving therefor more than $31,000, gold, for 78,000
tons of waste. All of this we not only throw away but expend much
larger sums in doing so.

Japan's production of fertilizing material, regularly prepared and
applied to the land annually, amounts to more than 4.5 tons per acre
of cultivated field exclusive of the commercial fertilizers
purchased. Between Shanhaikwan and Mukden in Manchuria we passed, on
June 18th, thousands of tons of the dry highly nitrified compost
soil recently carried into the fields and laid down in piles where
it was waiting to be "fed to the crops."

It was not until 1888, and then after a prolonged war of more than
thirty years, generaled by the best scientists of all Europe, that
it was finally conceded as demonstrated that leguminous plants
acting as hosts for lower organisms living on their roots are
largely responsible for the maintenance of soil nitrogen, drawing it
directly from the air to which it is returned through the processes
of decay. But centuries of practice had taught the Far East farmers
that the culture and use of these crops are essential to enduring
fertility, and so in each of the three countries the growing of
legumes in rotation with other crops very extensively for the
express purpose of fertilizing the soil is one of their old, fixed
practices.

Just before, or immediately after the rice crop is harvested, fields
are often sowed to "clover" (Astragalus sinicus) which is allowed to
grow until near the next transplanting time when it is either turned
under directly, or more often stacked along the canals and saturated
while doing so with soft mud dipped from the bottom of the canal.
After fermenting twenty or thirty days it is applied to the field.
And so it is literally true that these old world farmers whom we
regard as ignorant, perhaps because they do not ride sulky plows as
we do, have long included legumes in their crop rotation, regarding
them as indispensable.

Time is a function of every life process as it is of every physical,
chemical and mental reaction. The husbandman is an industrial
biologist and as such is compelled to shape his operations so as to
conform with the time requirements of his crops. The oriental farmer
is a time economizer beyond all others. He utilizes the first and
last minute and all that are between. The foreigner accuses the
Chinaman of being always long on time, never in a fret, never in a
hurry. This is quite true and made possible for the reason that they
are a people who definitely set their faces toward the future and
lead time by the forelock. They have long realized that much time is
required to transform organic matter into forms available for plant
food and although they are the heaviest users in the world, the
largest portion of this organic matter is predigested with soil or
subsoil before it is applied to their fields, and at an enormous
cost of human time and labor, but it practically lengthens their
growing season and enables them to adopt a system of multiple
cropping which would not otherwise be possible. By planting in hills
and rows with intertillage it is very common to see three crops
growing upon the same field at one time, but in different stages of
maturity, one nearly ready to harvest one just coming up, and the
other at the stage when it is drawing most heavily upon the soil. By
such practice, with heavy fertilization, and by supplemental
irrigation when needful, the soil is made to do full duty throughout
the growing season.

Then, notwithstanding the enormous acreage of rice planted each year
in these countries, it is all set in hills and every spear is
transplanted. Doing this, they save in many ways except in the
matter of human labor, which is the one thing they have in excess.
By thoroughly preparing the seed bed, fertilizing highly and giving
the most careful attention, they are able to grow on one acre,
during 30 to 50 days, enough plants to occupy ten acres and in the
mean time on the other nine acres crops are maturing, being
harvested and the fields being fitted to receive the rice when it is
ready for transplanting, and in effect this interval of time is
added to their growing season.

Silk culture is a great and, in some ways, one of the most
remarkable industries of the Orient. Remarkable for its magnitude;
for having had its birthplace apparently in oldest China at least
2700 years B. C.; for having been laid on the domestication of a
wild insect of the woods; and for having lived through more than
4000 years, expanding until a million-dollar cargo of the product
has been laid down on our western coast and rushed by special fast
express to the cast for the Christmas trade.

A low estimate of China's production of raw silk would be
120,000,000 pounds annually, and this with the output of Japan,
Korea and a small area of southern Manchuria, would probably exceed
150,000,000 pounds annually, representing a total value of perhaps
$700,000,000, quite equaling in value the wheat crop of the United
States, but produced on less than one-eighth the area of our wheat
fields.

The cultivation of tea in China and Japan is another of the great
industries of these nations, taking rank with that of sericulture if
not above it in the important part it plays in the welfare of the
people. There is little reason to doubt that this industry has its
foundation in the need of something to render boiled water palatable
for drinking purposes. The drinking of boiled water is universally
adopted in these countries as an individually available and
thoroughly efficient safeguard against that class of deadly disease
germs which thus far it has been impossible to exclude from the
drinking water of any densely peopled country.

Judged by the success of the most thorough sanitary measures thus
far instituted, and taking into consideration the inherent
difficulties which must increase enormously with increasing
populations, it appears inevitable that modern methods must
ultimately fail in sanitary efficiency and that absolute safety can
be secured only in some manner having the equivalent effect of
boiling drinking water, long ago adopted by the Mongolian races.

In the year 1907 Japan had 124,482 acres of land in tea plantations,
producing 60,877,975 pounds of cured tea. In China the volume
annually produced is much larger than that of Japan, 40,000,000
pounds going annually to Tibet alone from the Szechwan province and
the direct export to foreign countries was, in 1905, 176,027,255
pounds, and in 1906 it was 180,271,000, so that their annual export
must exceed 200,000,000 pounds with a total annual output more than
double this amount of cured tea.

But above any other factor, and perhaps greater than all of them
combined in contributing to the high maintenance efficiency attained
in these countries must be placed the standard of living to which
the industrial classes have been compelled to adjust themselves,
combined with their remarkable industry and with the most intense
economy they practice along every line of effort and of living.

Almost every foot of land is made to contribute material for food,
fuel or fabric. Everything which can be made edible serves as food
for man or domestic animals. Whatever cannot be eaten or worn is
used for fuel. The wastes of the body, of fuel and of fabric worn
beyond other use are taken back to the field; before doing so they
are housed against waste from weather, compounded with intelligence
and forethought and patiently labored with through one, three or
even six months, to bring them into the most efficient form to serve
as manure for the soil or as feed for the crop. It seems to be a
golden rule with these industrial classes, or if not golden, then an
inviolable one, that whenever an extra hour or day of labor can
promise even a little larger return then that shall be given, and
neither a rainy day nor the hottest sunshine shall be permitted to
cancel the obligation or defer its execution.






I

FIRST GLIMPSES OF JAPAN





We left the United States from Seattle for Shanghai, China, sailing
by the northern route, at one P. M. February second, reaching
Yokohama February 19th and Shanghai, March 1st. It was our aim
throughout the journey to keep in close contact with the field and
crop problems and to converse personally, through interpreters or
otherwise, with the farmers, gardeners and fruit growers themselves;
and we have taken pains in many cases to visit the same fields or
the same region two, three or more times at different intervals
during the season in order to observe different phases of the same
cultural or fertilization methods as these changed or varied with
the season.

Our first near view of Japan came in the early morning of February
19th when passing some three miles off the point where the Pacific
passenger steamer Dakota was beached and wrecked in broad daylight
without loss of life two years ago. The high rounded hills were
clothed neither in the dense dark forest green of Washington and
Vancouver, left sixteen days before, nor yet in the brilliant
emerald such as Ireland's hills in June fling in unparalleled
greeting to passengers surfeited with the dull grey of the rolling
ocean. This lack of strong forest growth and even of shrubs and
heavy herbage on hills covered with deep soil, neither cultivated
nor suffering from serious erosion, yet surrounded by favorable
climatic conditions, was our first great surprise.

To the southward around the point, after turning northward into the
deep bay, similar conditions prevailed, and at ten o'clock we stood
off Uraga where Commodore Perry anchored on July 8th, 1853, bearing
to the Shogun President Fillmore's letter which opened the doors of
Japan to the commerce of the world and, it is to be hoped brought to
her people, with their habits of frugality and industry so indelibly
fixed by centuries of inheritance, better opportunities for
development along those higher lines destined to make life still
more worth living.

As the Tosa Maru drew alongside the pier at Yokohama it was raining
hard and this had attired an army after the manner of Robinson
Crusoe, dressed as seen in Fig. 1, ready to carry you and yours to
the Customs house and beyond for one, two, three or five cents.
Strong was the contrast when the journey was reversed and we
descended the gang plank at Seattle, where no one sought the
opportunity of moving baggage.

Through the kindness of Captain Harrison of the Tosa Maru in calling
an interpreter by wireless to meet the steamer, it was possible to
utilize the entire interval of stop in Yokohama to the best
advantage in the fields and gardens spread over the eighteen miles
of plain extending to Tokyo, traversed by both electric tram and
railway lines, each running many trains making frequent stops; so
that this wonderfully fertile and highly tilled district could be
readily and easily reached at almost any point.

We had left home in a memorable storm of snow, sleet and rain which
cut out of service telegraph and telephone lines over a large part
of the United States; we had sighted the Aleutian Islands, seeing
and feeling nothing on the way which could suggest a warm soil and
green fields, hence our surprise was great to find the jinricksha
men with bare feet and legs naked to the thighs, and greater still
when we found, before we were outside the city limits, that the
electric tram was running between fields and gardens green with
wheat, barley, onions, carrots, cabbage and other vegetables. We
were rushing through the Orient with everything outside the car so
strange and different from home that the shock came like a bolt of
lightning out of a clear sky.

In the car every man except myself and one other was smoking tobacco
and that other was inhaling camphor through an ivory mouthpiece
resembling a cigar holder closed at the end. Several women, tiring
of sitting foreign style, slipped off--I cannot say out of--their
shoes and sat facing the windows, with toes crossed behind them on
the seat. The streets were muddy from the rain and everybody
Japanese was on rainy-day wooden shoes, the soles carried three to
four inches above the ground by two cross blocks, in the manner seen
in Fig. 2. A mother, with baby on her back and a daughter of sixteen
years came into the car. Notwithstanding her high shoes the mother
had dipped one toe into the mud. Seated, she slipped her foot off.
Without evident instructions the pretty black-eyed, glossy-haired,
red-lipped lass, with cheeks made rosy, picked up the shoe, withdrew
a piece of white tissue paper from the great pocket in her sleeve,
deftly cleaned the otherwise spotless white cloth sock and then the
shoe, threw the paper on the floor, looked to see that her fingers
were not soiled, then set the shoe at her mother's foot, which found
its place without effort or glance.

Everything here was strange and the scenes shifted with the speed of
the wildest dream. Now it was driving piles for the foundation of a
bridge. A tripod of poles was erected above the pile and from it
hung a pulley. Over the pulley passed a rope from the driving weight
and from its end at the pulley ten cords extended to the ground. In
a circle at the foot of the tripod stood ten agile Japanese women.
They were the hoisting engine. They chanted in perfect rhythm,
hauled and stepped, dropped the weight and hoisted again, making up
for heavier hammer and higher drop by more blows per minute. When we
reached Shanghai we saw the pile driver being worked from above.
Fourteen Chinese men stood upon a raised staging, each with a
separate cord passing direct from the hand to the weight below. A
concerted, half-musical chant, modulated to relieve monotony, kept
all hands together. What did the operation of this machine cost?
Thirteen cents, gold, per man per day, which covered fuel and
lubricant, both automatically served. Two additional men managed the
piles, two directed the hammer, eighteen manned the outfit. Two
dollars and thirty-four cents per day covered fuel, superintendence
and repairs. There was almost no capital invested in machinery. Men
were plenty and to spare. Rice was the fuel, cooked without salt,
boiled stiff, reinforced with a hit of pork or fish, appetized with
salted cabbage or turnip and perhaps two or three of forty and more
other vegetable relishes. And are these men strong and happy? They
certainly were strong. They are steadily increasing their millions,
and as one stood and watched them at their work their faces were
often wreathed in smiles and wore what seemed a look of satisfaction
and contentment.

Among the most common sights on our rides from Yokohama to Tokyo,
both within the city and along the roads leading to the fields,
starting early in the morning, were the loads of night soil carried
on the shoulders of men and on the backs of animals, but most
commonly on strong carts drawn by men, bearing six to ten tightly
covered wooden containers holding forty, sixty or more pounds each.
Strange as it may seem, there are not today and apparently never
have been, even in the largest and oldest cities of Japan, China or
Korea, anything corresponding to the hydraulic systems of sewage
disposal used now by western nations. Provision is made for the
removal of storm waters but when I asked my interpreter if it was
not the custom of the city during the winter months to discharge its
night soil into the sea, as a quicker and cheaper mode of disposal,
his reply came quick and sharp, "No, that would be waste. We throw
nothing away. It is worth too much money." In such public places as
rail way stations provision is made for saving, not for wasting, and
even along the country roads screens invite the traveler to stop,
primarily for profit to the owner more than for personal
convenience.

Between Yokohama and Tokyo along the electric car line and not far
distant from the seashore, there were to be seen in February very
many long, fence-high screens extending east and west, strongly
inclined to the north, and built out of rice straw, closely tied
together and supported on bamboo poles carried upon posts of wood
set in the ground. These screens, set in parallel series of five to
ten or more in number and several hundred feet long, were used for
the purpose of drying varieties of delicate seaweed, these being
spread out in the manner shown in Fig. 3.

The seaweed is first spread upon separate ten by twelve inch straw
mats, forming a thin layer seven by eight inches. These mats are
held by means of wooden skewers forced through the body of the
screen, exposing the seaweed to the direct sunshine. After becoming
dry the rectangles of seaweed are piled in bundles an inch thick,
cut once in two, forming packages four by seven inches, which are
neatly tied and thus exposed for sale as soup stock and for other
purposes. To obtain this seaweed from the ocean small shrubs and the
limbs of trees are set up in the bottom of shallow water, as seen in
Fig. 4. To these limbs the seaweeds become attached, grow to
maturity and are then gathered by hand. By this method of culture
large amounts of important food stuff are grown for the support of
the people on areas otherwise wholly unproductive.

Another rural feature, best shown by photograph taken in February,
is the method of training pear orchards in Japan, with their limbs
tied down upon horizontal over-bead trellises at a height under
which a man can readily walk erect and easily reach the fruit with
the hand while standing upon the ground. Pear orchards thus form
arbors of greater or less size, the trees being set in quincunx
order about twelve feet apart in and between the rows. Bamboo poles
are used overhead and these carried on posts of the same material
1.5 to 2.5 inches in diameter, to which they are tied. Such a pear
orchard is shown in Fig. 5.

The limbs of the pear trees are trained strictly in one plane, tying
them down and pruning out those not desired. As a result the ground
beneath is completely shaded and every pear is within reach, which
is a great convenience when it becomes desirable to protect the
fruit from insects, by tying paper bags over every pear as seen in
Figs. 6 and 7. The orchard ground is kept free from weeds and not
infrequently is covered with a layer of rice or other straw,
extensively used in Japan as a ground cover with various crops and
when so used is carefully laid in handfuls from bundles, the straws
being kept parallel as when harvested.

To one from a country of 160-acre farms, with roads four rods wide;
of cities with broad streets and residences with green lawns and
ample back yards; and where the cemeteries are large and beautiful
parks, the first days of travel in these old countries force the
over-crowding upon the attention as nothing else can. One feels that
the cities are greatly over-crowded with houses and shops, and these
with people and wares; that the country is over-crowded with fields
and the fields with crops; and that in Japan the over-crowding is
greatest of all in the cemeteries, gravestones almost touching and
markers for families literally in bundles at a grave, while round
about there may be no free country whatever, dwellings, gardens or
rice paddies contesting the tiny allotted areas too closely to leave
even foot-paths between.

Unless recently modified through foreign influence the streets of
villages and cities are narrow, as seen in Fig. 8, where however the
street is unusually broad. This is a village in the Hakone district
on a beautiful lake of the same name, where stands an Imperial
summer palace, seen near the center of the view on a hill across the
lake. The roofs of the houses here are typical of the neat, careful
thatching with rice straw, very generally adopted in place of tile
for the country villages throughout much of Japan. The shops and
stores, open full width directly upon the street, are filled to
overflowing, as seen in Fig. 9 and in Fig. 22.

In the canalized regions of China the country villages crowd both
banks of a canal, as is the case in Fig. 10. Here, too, often is a
single street and it very narrow, very crowded and very busy. Stone
steps lead from the houses down into the water where clothing,
vegetables, rice and what not are conveniently washed. In this
particular village two rows of houses stand on one side of the canal
separated by a very narrow street, and a single row on the other.
Between the bridge where the camera was exposed and one barely
discernible in the background, crossing the canal a third of a mile
distant, we counted upon one side, walking along the narrow street,
eighty houses each with its family, usually of three generations and
often of four. Thus in the narrow strip, 154 feet broad, including
16 feet of street and 30 feet of canal, with its three lines of
houses. lived no less than 240 families and more than 1200 and
probably nearer 2000 people.

When we turn to the crowding of fields in the country nothing except
seeing can tell so forcibly the fact as such landscapes as those of
Figs. 11, 12 and 13, one in Japan, one in Korea and one in China,
not far from Nanking, looking from the hills across the fields to
the broad Yangtse kiang, barely discernible as a band of light along
the horizon.

The average area of the rice field in Japan is less than five square
rods and that of her upland fields only about twenty. In the case of
the rice fields the small size is necessitated partly by the
requirement of holding water on the sloping sides of the valley, as
seen in Fig. 11. These small areas do not represent the amount of
land worked by one family, the average for Japan being more nearly
2.5 acres. But the lands worked by one family are seldom contiguous,
they may even be widely scattered and very often rented.

The people generally live in villages, going often considerable
distances to their work. Recognizing the great disadvantage of
scattered holdings broken into such small areas, the Japanese
Government has passed laws for the adjustment of farm lands which
have been in force since 1900. It provides for the exchange of
lands; for changing boundaries; for changing or abolishing roads,
embankments, ridges or canals and for alterations in irrigation and
drainage which would ensure larger areas with channels and roads
straightened, made less numerous and less wasteful of time, labor
and land. Up to 1907 Japan had issued permits for the readjustment
of over 240,000 acres, and Fig. 14 is a landscape in one of these
readjusted districts. To provide capable experts for planning and
supervising these changes the Government in 1905 intrusted the
training of men to the higher agricultural school belonging to the
Dai Nippon Agricultural Association and since 1906 the Agricultural
College and the Kogyokusha have undertaken the same task and now
there are men sufficient to push the work as rapidly as desired.

It may be remembered, too, as showing how, along other fundamental
lines, Japan is taking effective steps to improve the condition of
her people, that she already has her Imperial highways extending
from one province to another; her prefectural roads which connect
the cities and villages within the prefecture; and those more local
which serve the farms and villages. Each of the three systems of
roads is maintained by a specific tax levied for the purpose which
is expended under proper supervision, a designated section of road
being kept in repair through the year by a specially appointed crew,
as is the practice in railroad maintenance. The result is, Japan has
roads maintained in excellent condition, always narrow, sacrificing
the minimum of land, and everywhere without fences.

How the fields are crowded with crops and all available land is made
to do full duty in these old, long-tilled countries is evident in
Fig. 15 where even the narrow dividing ridges but a foot wide, which
retain the water on the rice paddies, are bearing a heavy crop of
soy beans; and where may be seen the narrow pear orchard standing on
the very slightest rise of ground, not a foot above the water all
around, which could better be left in grading the paddies to proper
level.

How closely the ground itself may be crowded with plants is seen in
Fig. 16, where a young peach orchard, whose tree tops were six feet
through, planted in rows twenty-two feet apart, had also ten rows of
cabbage, two rows of large windsor beans and a row of garden peas.
Thirteen rows of vegetables in 22 feet, all luxuriant and strong,
and note the judgment shown in placing the tallest plants, needing
the most sun, in the center between the trees.

But these old people, used to crowding and to being crowded, and
long ago capable of making four blades of grass grow where Nature
grew but one, have also learned how to double the acreage where a
crop needs more elbow than it does standing room, as seen in Fig.
17. This man's garden had an area of but 63 by 68 feet and two
square rods of this was held sacred to the family grave mound, and
yet his statement of yields, number of crops and prices made his
earning $100 a year on less than one-tenth of an acre.

His crop of cucumbers on less than .06 of an acre would bring him
$20. He had already sold $5 worth of greens and a second crop would
follow the cucumbers. He had just irrigated his garden from an
adjoining canal, using a foot-power pump, and stated that until it
rained he would repeat the watering once per week. It was his wife
who stood in the garden and, although wearing trousers, her dress
showed full regard for modesty.

But crowding crops more closely in the field not only requires
higher feeding to bring greater returns, but also relatively greater
care, closer watchfulness in a hundred ways and a patience far
beyond American measure; and so, before the crowding of the crops in
the field and along with it, there came to these very old farmers a
crowding of the grey matter in the brain with the evolution of
effective texture. This is shown in his fields which crowd the
landscape. It is seen in the crops which crowd his fields. You see
it in the old man's face, Fig. 18, standing opposite his compeer,
Prince Ching, Fig. 19, each clad in winter dress which is the
embodiment of conversation, retaining the fires of the body for its
own needs, to release the growth on mountain sides for other uses.
And when one realizes how, nearly to the extreme limits,
conservation along all important lines is being practiced as an
inherited instinct, there need be no surprise when one reflects that
the two men, one as feeder and the other as leader, are standing in
the fore of a body of four hundred millions of people who have
marched as a nation through perhaps forty centuries, and who now, in
the light and great promise of unfolding science have their faces
set toward a still more hopeful and longer future.

On February 21st the Tosa Maru left Yokohama for Kobe at schedule
time on the tick of the watch, as she had done from Seattle. All
Japanese steamers appear to be moved with the promptness of a
railway train. On reaching Kobe we transferred to the Yamaguchi Maru
which sailed the following morning, to shorten the time of reaching
Shanghai. This left but an afternoon for a trip into the country
between Kobe and Osaka, where we found, if possible, even higher and
more intensive culture practices than on the Tokyo plain, there
being less land not carrying a winter crop. And Fig. 20 shows how
closely the crops crowd the houses and shops. Here were very many
cement lined cisterns or sheltered reservoirs for collecting manures
and preparing fertilizers and the appearance of both soil and crops
showed in a marked manner to what advantage. We passed a garden of
nearly an acre entirely devoted to English violets just coming into
full bloom. They were grown in long parallel east and west beds
about three feet wide. On the north edge of each bed was erected a
rice-straw screen four feet high which inclined to the south,
overhanging the bed at an angle of some thirty-five degrees, thus
forming a sort of bake-oven tent which reflected the sun, broke the
force of the wind and checked the loss of heat absorbed by the soil.

The voyage from Kobe to Moji was made between 10 in the morning,
February 24th, and 5 .30 P. M. of February 25th over a quiet sea
with an enjoyable ride. Being fogbound during the night gave us the
whole of Japan's beautiful Inland Sea, enchanting beyond measure, in
all its near and distant beauty but which no pen, no brush, no
camera may attempt. Only the eye can convey. Before reaching harbor
the tide had been rising and the strait separating Honshu from
Kyushu island was running like a mighty swirling river between Moji
and Shimonoseki, dangerous to attempt in the dark, so we waited
until morning.

There was cargo to take on board and the steamer must coal. No
sooner had the anchor dropped and the steamer swung into the current
than lighters came alongside with out-going freight. The small,
strong, agile Japanese stevedores had this task completed by 8:30 P.
M. and when we returned to the deck after supper another scene was
on. The cargo lighters had gone and four large barges bearing 250
tons of coal had taken their places on opposite sides of the
steamer, each illuminated with buckets of blazing coal or by burning
conical heaps on the surface. From the bottom of these pits in the
darkness the illumination suggested huge decapitated ant heaps in
the wildest frenzy, for the coal seemed covered and there was hurry
in every direction. Men and women, boys and girls, bending to their
tasks, were filling shallow saucer-shaped baskets with coal and
stacking them eight to ten high in a semi-circle, like coin for
delivery. Rising out of these pits sixteen feet up the side of the
steamer and along her deck to the chutes leading to her bunkers were
what seemed four endless human chains, in service the prototype of
our modern conveyors, but here each link animated by its own power.
Up these conveyors the loaded buckets passed, one following another
at the rate of 40 to 60 per minute, to return empty by the
descending line, and over the four chains one hundred tons per hour,
for 250 tons of coal passed to the bunkers in two and a half hours.
Both men and women stood in the line and at the upper turn of one of
these, emptying the buckets down the chute, was a mother with her
two-year-old child in the sling on back, where it rocked and swayed
to and fro, happy the entire time. It was often necessary for the
mother to adjust her baby in the sling whenever it was leaning
uncomfortably too far to one side or the other, but she did it
skillfully, always with a shrug of the shoulders, for both hands
were full. The mother looked strong, was apparently accepting her
lot as a matter of course and often, with a smile, turned her face
to the child, who patted it and played with her ears and hair.
Probably her husband was doing his part in a more strenuous place in
the chain and neither had time to be troubled with affinities for it
was 10:30 P. M. when the baskets stopped, and somewhere no doubt
there was a home to be reached and perhaps supper to get. Shall we
be able, when our numbers have vastly increased, to permit all
needful earnings to be acquired in a better way?

We left Moji in the early morning and late in the evening of the
same day entered the beautiful harbor of Nagasaki, all on board
waiting until morning for a launch to go ashore. We were to sail
again at noon so available time for observation was short and we set
out in a ricksha at once for our first near view of terraced
gardening on the steep hillsides in Japan. In reaching them and in
returning our course led through streets paved with long, thick and
narrow stone blocks, having deep open gutters on one or both sides
close along the houses, into which waste water was emptied and
through which the storm waters found their way to the sea. Few of
these streets were more than twelve feet wide and close watching,
with much dodging, was required to make way through them. Here, too,
the night soil of the city was being removed in closed receptacles
on the shoulders of men, on the backs of horses and cattle and on
carts drawn by either. Other men and women were hurrying along with
baskets of vegetables well illustrated in Fig. 21, some with fresh
cabbage, others with high stacks of crisp lettuce, some with
monstrous white radishes or turnips, others with bundles of onions,
all coming down from the terraced gardens to the markets. We passed
loads of green bamboo poles just cut, three inches in diameter at
the butt and twenty feet long, drawn on carts. Both men and women
were carrying young children and older ones were playing and singing
in the street. Very many old women, some feeble looking, moved,
loaded, through the throng. Homely little dogs, an occasional lean
cat, and hens and roosters scurried across the street from one low
market or store to another. Back of the rows of small stores and
shops fronting on the clean narrow streets were the dwellings whose
exits seemed to open through the stores, few or no open courts of
any size separating them from the market or shop. The opportunity
which the oriental housewife may have in the choice of vegetables on
going to the market, and the attractive manner of displaying such
products in Japan, are seen in Fig. 22.

We finally reached one of the terraced hillsides which rise five
hundred to a thousand feet above the harbor with sides so steep that
garden areas have a width of seldom more than twenty to thirty feet
and often less, while the front of each terrace may be a stone wall,
sometimes twelve feet high, often more than six, four and five feet
being the most common height. One of these hillside slopes is seen
in Fig. 23. These terraced gardens are both short and narrow and
most of them bounded by stone walls on three sides, suggesting house
foundations, the two end walls sloping down the hill from the height
of the back terrace, dropping to the ground level in front, these
forming foot-paths leading up the slope occasionally with one, two
or three steps in places.

Each terrace sloped slightly down the hill at a small angle and had
a low ridge along the front. Around its entire border a narrow drain
or furrow was arranged to collect surface water and direct it to
drainage channels or into a catch basin where it might be put back
on the garden or be used in preparing liquid fertilizer. At one
corner of many of these small terraced gardens were cement lined
pits, used both as catch basins for water and as receptacles for
liquid manure or as places in which to prepare compost. Far up the
steep paths, too, along either side, we saw many piles of stable
manure awaiting application, all of which had been brought up the
slopes in backets on bamboo poles, carried on the shoulders of men
and women.






II

GRAVE LANDS OF CHINA





The launch had returned the passengers to the steamer at 11:30; the
captain was on the bridge; prompt to the minute at the call "Hoist
away" the signal went below and the Yamaguchi's whistle filled the
harbor and over-flowed the hills. The cable wound in, and at twelve,
noon, we were leaving Nagasaki, now a city of 153,000 and the
western doorway of a nation of fifty-one millions of people but of
little importance before the sixteenth century when it became the
chief mart of Portuguese trade. We were to pass the Koreans on our
right and enter the portals of a third nation of four hundred
millions. We had left a country which had added eighty-five millions
to its population in one hundred years and which still has twenty
acres for each man, woman and child, to pass through one which has
but one and a half acres per capita, and were going to another whose
allotment of acres, good and bad, is less than 2.4. We had gone from
practices by which three generations had exhausted strong virgin
fields, and were coming to others still fertile after thirty
centuries of cropping. On January 30th we crossed the head waters of
the Mississippi-Missouri, four thousand miles from its mouth, and on
March 1st were in the mouth of the Yangtse river whose waters are
gathered from a basin in which dwell two hundred millions of people.

The Yamaguchi reached Woosung in the night and anchored to await
morning and tide before ascending the Hwangpoo, believed by some
geographers to be the middle of three earlier delta arms of the
Yangtse kiang, the southern entering the sea at Hangchow 120 miles
further south, the third being the present stream. As we wound
through this great delta plain toward Shanghai, the city of foreign
concessions to all nationalities, the first striking feature was the
"graves of the fathers", of "the ancestors". At first the numerous
grass-covered hillocks dotting the plain seemed to be stacks of
grain or straw; then came the query whether they might not be huge
compost heaps awaiting distribution in the fields, but as the river
brought us nearer to them we seemed to be moving through a land of
ancient mound builders and Fig. 24 shows, in its upper section,
their appearance as seen in the distance.

As the journey led on among the fields, so large were the mounds,
often ten to twelve feet high and twenty or more feet at the base;
so grass-covered and apparently neglected; so numerous and so
irregularly scattered, without apparent regard for fields, that when
we were told these were graves we could not give credence to the
statement, but before the city was reached we saw places where, by
the shifting of the channel, the river had cut into some of these
mounds, exposing brick vaults, some so low as to be under water part
of the time, and we wonder if the fact does not also record a slow
subsidence of the delta plain under the ever increasing load of
river silt.

A closer view of these graves in the same delta plain is given in
the lower section of Fig. 24, where they are seen in the midst of
fields and to occupy not only large areas of valuable land but to be
much in the way of agricultural operations. A still closer view of
other groups, with a farm village in the background, is shown in the
middle section of the same illustration, and here it is better seen
how large is the space occupied by them. On the right in the same
view may be seen a line of six graves surmounting a common lower
base which is a type of the larger and higher ones so suggestive of
buildings seen in the horizon of the upper section.

Everywhere we went in China, about all of the very old and large
cities, the proportion of grave land to cultivated fields is very
large. In the vicinity of Canton Christian college, on Honam island,
more than fifty per cent of the land was given over to graves and in
many places they were so close that one could step from one to
another. They are on the higher and dryer lands, the cultivated
areas occupying ravines and the lower levels to which water may be
more easily applied and which are the most productive. Hilly lands
not so readily cultivated, and especially if within reach of cities,
are largely so used, as seen in Fig. 25, where the graves are marked
by excavated shelves rather than by mounds, as on the plains. These
grave lands are not altogether unproductive for they are generally
overgrown with herbage of one or another kind and used as pastures
for geese, sheep, goats and cattle, and it is not at all uncommon,
when riding along a canal, to see a huge water buffalo projected
against the sky from the summit of one of the largest and highest
grave mounds within reach. If the herbage is not fed off by animals
it is usually cut for feed, for fuel, for green manure or for use in
the production of compost to enrich the soil.

Caskets may be placed directly upon the surface of a field, encased
in brick vaults with tile roofs, forming such clusters as was seen
on the bank of the Grand Canal in Chekiang province, represented in
the lower section of Fig. 26, or they may stand singly in the midst
of a garden, as in the upper section of the same figure; in a rice
paddy entirely surrounded by water parts of the year, and indeed in
almost any unexpected place. In Shanghai in 1898, 2,763 exposed
coffined corpses were removed outside the International Settlement
or buried by the authorities.

Further north, in the Shantung province, where the dry season is
more prolonged and where a severe drought had made grass short, the
grave lands had become nearly naked soil, as seen in Fig. 27 where a
Shantung farmer had just dug a temporary well to irrigate his little
field of barley. Within the range of the camera, as held to take
this view, more than forty grave mounds besides the seven near by,
are near enough to be fixed on the negative and be discernible under
a glass, indicating what extensive areas of land, in the aggregate,
are given over to graves.

Still further north, in Chihli, a like story is told in, if
possible, more emphatic manner and fully vouched for in the next
illustration, Fig. 28, which shows a typical family group, to be
observed in so many places between Taku and Tientsin and beyond
toward Peking. As we entered the mouth of the Pei-ho for Tientsin,
far away to the vanishing horizon there stretched an almost naked
plain except for the vast numbers of these "graves of the fathers",
so strange, so naked, so regular in form and so numerous that more
than an hour of our journey had passed before we realized that they
were graves and that the country here was perhaps more densely
peopled with the dead than with the living. In so many places there
was the huge father grave, often capped with what in the distance
suggested a chimney, and the many associated smaller ones, that it
was difficult to realize in passing what they were.

It is a common custom, even if the residence has been permanently
changed to some distant province, to take the bodies back for
interment in the family group; and it is this custom which leads to
the practice of choosing a temporary location for the body, waiting
for a favorable opportunity to remove it to the family group. This
is often the occasion for the isolated coffin so frequently seen
under a simple thatch of rice straw, as in Fig. 29; and the many
small stone jars containing skeletons of the dead, or portions of
them, standing singly or in rows in the most unexpected places least
in the way in the crowded fields and gardens, awaiting removal to
the final resting place. It is this custom, too, I am told, which
has led to placing a large quantity of caustic lime in the bottom of
the casket, on which the body rests, this acting as an effective
absorbent.

It is the custom in some parts of China, if not in all, to
periodically restore the mounds, maintaining their height and size,
as is seen in the next two illustrations, and to decorate these once
in the year with flying streamers of colored paper, the remnants of
which may be seen in both Figs. 30 and 31, set there as tokens that
the paper money has been burned upon them and its essence sent up in
the smoke for the maintenance of the spirits of their departed
friends. We have our memorial day; they have for centuries observed
theirs with religious fidelity.

The usual expense of a burial among the working people is said to be
$100, Mexican, an enormous burden when the day's wage or the yearly
earning of the family is considered and when there is added to this
the yearly expense of ancestor worship. How such voluntary burdens
are assumed by people under such circumstances is hard to
understand. Missionaries assert it is fear of evil consequences in
this life and of punishment and neglect in the hereafter that leads
to assuming them. Is it not far more likely that such is the price
these people are willing to pay for a good name among the living and
because of their deep and lasting friendship for the departed? Nor
does it seem at all strange that a kindly, warm-hearted people with
strong filial affection should have reached, carry in their long
history, a belief in one spirit of the departed which hovers about
the home, one which hovers about the grave and another which wanders
abroad, for surely there are associations with each of these
conditions which must long and forcefully awaken memories of friends
gone. If this view is possible may not such ancestral worship be an
index of qualities of character strongly fixed and of the highest
worth which, when improvements come that may relieve the heavy
burdens now carried, will only shine more brightly and count more
for right living as well as comfort?

Even in our own case it will hardly be maintained that our burial
customs have reached their best and final solution, for in all
civilized nations they are unnecessarily expensive and far too
cumbersome. It is only necessary to mentally add the accumulation of
a few centuries to our cemeteries to realize how impossible our
practice must become. Clearly there is here a very important line
for betterment which all nationalities should undertake.

When the steamer anchored at Shanghai the day was pleasant and the
rain coats which greeted us in Yokohama were not in evidence but the
numbers who had met the steamer in the hope of an opportunity for
earning a trifle was far greater and in many ways in strong contrast
with the Japanese. We were much surprised to find the men of so
large stature, much above the Chinese usually seen in the United
States. They were fully the equal of large Americans in frame but
quite without surplus flesh yet few appeared underfed. To realize
that these are strong, hardy men it was only necessary to watch them
carrying on their shoulders bales of cotton between them, supported
by a strong bamboo; while the heavy loads they transport on
wheel-barrows through the country over long distances, as seen in
Fig. 32, prove their great endurance. This same type of vehicle,
too, is one of the common means of transporting people, especially
Chinese women, and four six and even eight may be seen riding
together, propelled by a single wheelbarrow man.






III

TO HONGKONG AND CANTON





We had come to learn how the old-world farmers bad been able to
provide materials for food and clothing on such small areas for so
many millions, at so low a price, during so many centuries, and were
anxious to see them at the soil and among the crops. The sun was
still south of the equator, coming north only about twelve miles per
day, so, to save time, we booked on the next steamer for Hongkong to
meet spring at Canton, beyond the Tropic of Cancer, six hundred
miles farther south, and return with her.

On the morning of March 4th the Tosa Maru steamed out into the
Yangtse river, already flowing with the increased speed of ebb tide.
The pilots were on the bridge to guide her course along the narrow
south channel through waters seemingly as brown and turbid as the
Potomac after a rain. It was some distance beyond Gutzlaff Island,
seventy miles to sea, where there is a lighthouse and a telegraph
station receiving six cables, that we crossed the front of the
out-going tide, showing in a sharp line of contrast stretching in
either direction farther than the eye could see, across the course
of the ship and yet it was the season of low water in this river.
During long ages this stream of mighty volume has been loading upon
itself in far-away Tibet, without dredge, barge, fuel or human
effort, unused and there unusable soils, bringing them down from
inaccessible heights across two or three thousand miles, building up
with them, from under the sea, at the gateways of commerce, miles
upon miles of the world's most fertile fields and gardens. Today on
this river, winding through six hundred miles of the most highly
cultivated fields, laid out on river-built plains, go large ocean
steamers to the city of Hankow-Wuchang-Hanyang where 1,770,000
people live and trade within a radius less than four miles; while
smaller steamers push on a thousand miles and are then but 130 feet
above sea level.

Even now, with the aid of current, tide and man, these brown turbid
waters are rapidly adding fertile delta plains for new homes. During
the last twenty-five years Chungming island has grown in length some
1800 feet per year and today a million people are living and growing
rice, wheat, cotton and sweet potatoes on 270 square miles of
fertile plain where five hundred years ago were only submerged river
sands and silt. Here 3700 people per square mile have acquired
homes.

The southward voyage was over a quiet sea and as we passed among and
near the off-shore islands these, as seen in Japan, appeared
destitute of vegetation other than the low herbaceous types with few
shrubs and almost no forest growth and little else that gave the
appearance of green. Captain Harrison informed me that at no time in
the year are these islands possessed of the grass-green verdure so
often seen in northern climates, and yet the islands lie in a region
of abundant summer rain, making it hard to understand why there is
not a more luxuriant growth.

Sunday morning, March 7th, passing first extensive sugar refineries,
found us entering the long, narrow and beautiful harbor of Hongkong.
Here, lying at anchor in the ten square miles of water, were five
battleships, several large ocean steamers, many coastwise vessels
and a multitude of smaller craft whose yearly tonnage is twenty to
thirty millions. But the harbor lies in the track of the terrible
East Indian typhoon and, although sheltered on the north shore of a
high island, one of these storms recently sunk nine vessels, sent
twenty-three ashore, seriously damaged twenty-one others, wrought
great destruction among the smaller craft and over a thousand dead
were recovered. Such was the destruction wrought by the September
storm of 1906.

Our steamer did not go to dock but the Nippon Yusen Kaisha's launch
transferred us to a city much resembling Seattle in possessing a
scant footing between a long sea front and high steep mountain
slopes behind. Here cliffs too steep to climb rise from the very
sidewalk and are covered with a great profusion and variety of
ferns, small bamboo, palms, vines, many flowering shrubs, all
interspersed with pine and great banyan trees that do so much toward
adding the beauty of northern landscapes to the tropical features
which reach upward until hidden in a veil of fog that hung, all of
the time we were there, over the city, over the harbor and stretched
beyond Old and New Kowloon.

Hongkong island is some eleven miles long and but two to five miles
wide, while the peak carrying the signal staff rises 1,825 feet
above the streets from which ascends the Peak tramway, where,
hanging from opposite ends of a strong cable, one car rises up the
slope and another descends every fifteen to twenty minutes,
affording communication with business houses below and homes in
beautiful surroundings and a tempered climate above. Extending along
the slopes of the mountains, too, above the city, are very excellent
roads, carefully graded, provided with concrete gutters and bridges,
along which one may travel on foot, on horseback, by ricksha or
sedan chair, but too narrow for carriages. Over one of these we
ascended along one side of Happy Valley, around its head and down
the other side. Only occasionally could we catch glimpses of the
summit through the lifting fog but the views, looking down and
across the city and beyond the harbor with its shipping, and up and
down the many ravines from via-ducts, are among the choicest and
rarest ever made accessible to the residents of any city. It was the
beginning of the migratory season for birds, and trees and shrubbery
thronged with many species.

Many of the women in Hongkong were seen engaged in such heavy manual
labor with the men as carrying crushed rock and sand, for concrete
and macadam work, up the steep street slopes long distances from the
dock, but they were neither tortured nor incapacitated by bound
feet. Like the men, they were of smaller stature than most seen at
Shanghai and closely resemble the Chinese in the United States. Both
sexes are agile, wiry and strong. Here we first saw lumber sawing in
the open streets after the manner shown in Fig. 33, where wide
boards were being cut from camphor logs. In the damp, already warm
weather the men were stripped to the waist, their limbs bare to
above the knee, and each carried a large towel for wiping away the
profuse perspiration.

It was here, too, that we first met the remarkable staging for the
erection of buildings of four and six stories, set up without saw,
hammer or nail; without injury to or waste of lumber and with the
minimum of labor in construction and removal. Poles and bamboo stems
were lashed together with overlapping ends, permitting any interval
or height to be secured without cutting or nailing, and admitting of
ready removal with absolutely no waste, all parts being capable of
repeated use unless it be some of the materials employed in tying
members. Up inclined stairways, from staging to staging, in the
erection of six-story granite buildings, mortar was being carried in
baskets swinging from bamboo poles on the shoulders of men and
women, as the cheapest hoists available in English Hongkong where
there is willing human labor and to spare.

The Singer sewing machine, manufactured in New Jersey, was seen in
many Chinese shops in Hongkong and other cities, operated by Chinese
men and women, purchased, freight prepaid, at two-thirds the retail
price in the United States. Such are the indications of profit to
manufacturers on the home sale of home-made goods while at the same
time reaping good returns from a large trade in heathen lands, after
paying the freight.

Industrial China, Korea and Japan do not observe our weekly day of
rest and during our walk around Happy Valley on Sunday afternoon,
looking down upon its terraced gardens and tiny fields, we saw men
and women busy fitting the soil for new crops, gathering vegetables
for market, feeding plants with liquid manure and even irrigating
certain crops, notwithstanding the damp, foggy, showery weather.
Turning the head of the valley, attention was drawn to a walled
enclosure and a detour down the slope brought us to a florist's
garden within which were rows of large potted foliage plants of
semi-shrubbery habit, seen in Fig. 35, trained in the form of
life-size human figures with limbs, arms and trunk provided with
highly glazed and colored porcelain feet, hands and head. These,
with many other potted plants and trees, including dwarf varieties,
are grown under out-door lattice shelters in different parts of
China, for sale to the wealthy Chinese families.

How thorough is the tillage, how efficient and painstaking the
garden fitting, and how closely the ground is crowded to its upper
limit of producing power are indicated in Fig. 36; and when one
stops and studies the detail in such gardens he expects in its
executor an orderly, careful, frugal and industrious man, getting
not a little satisfaction out of his creations however arduous his
task or prolonged his day. If he is in the garden or one meets him
at the house, clad as the nature of his duties and compensation have
determined, you may be disappointed or feel arising an unkind
judgment. But who would risk a reputation so clad and so environed?
Many were the times, during our walks in the fields and gardens
among these old, much misunderstood, misrepresented and undervalued
people, when the bond of common interest was recognized between us,
that there showed through the face the spirit which put aside both
dress and surroundings and the man stood forth who, with fortitude
and rare wisdom, is feeding the millions and who has carried through
centuries the terrible burden of taxes levied by dishonor and
needless wars. Nay, more than this, the man stood forth who has kept
alive the seeds of manhood and has nourished them into such sturdy
stock as has held the stream of progress along the best interests of
civilization in spite of the driftwood heaped upon it.

Not only are these people extremely careful and painstaking in
fitting their fields and gardens to receive the crop, but they are
even more scrupulous in their care to make everything that can
possibly serve as fertilizer for the soil, or food for the crop
being grown, do so unless there is some more remunerative service it
may render. Expense is incurred to provide such receptacles as are
seen in Fig. 37 for receiving not only the night soil of the home
and that which may be bought or otherwise procured, but in which may
be stored any other fluid which can serve as plant food. On the
right of these earthenware jars too is a pile of ashes and one of
manure. All such materials are saved and used in the most
advantageous ways to enrich the soil or to nourish the plants being
grown.

Generally the liquid manures must be diluted with water to a greater
or less extent before they are "fed", as the Chinese say, to their
plants, hence there is need of an abundant and convenient water
supply. One of these is seen in Fig. 38, where the Chinaman has
adopted the modern galvanized iron pipe to bring water from the
mountain slope of Happy Valley to his garden. By the side of this
tank are the covered pails in which the night soil was brought,
perhaps more than a mile, to be first diluted and then applied. But
the more general method for supplying water is that of leading it
along the ground in channels or ditches to a small reservoir in one
corner of a terraced field or garden, as seen in Fig. 39, where it
is held and the surplus led down from terrace to terrace, giving
each its permanent supply. At the upper right corner of the
engraving may be seen two manure receptacles and a third stands near
the reservoir. The plants on the lower terrace are water cress and
those above the same. At this time of the year, on the terraced
gardens of Happy Valley, this is one of the crops most extensively
grown.

Walking among these gardens and isolated homes, we passed a pig pen
provided with a smooth, well-laid stone floor that had just been
washed scrupulously clean, like the floor of a house. While I was
not able to learn other facts regarding this case, I have little
doubt that the washings from this floor had been carefully collected
and taken to some receptacle to serve as a plant food.

Looking backward as we left Hongkong for Canton on the cloudy
evening of March 8th, the view was wonderfully beautiful. We were
drawing away from three cities, one, electric-lighted Hongkong
rising up the steep slopes, suggesting a section of sky set with a
vast array of stars of all magnitudes up to triple Jupiters;
another, old and new Kowloon on the opposite side of the harbor; and
between these two, separated from either shore by wide reaches of
wholly unoccupied water, lay the third, a mid-strait city of
sampans, junks and coastwise craft of many kinds segregated, in
obedience to police regulation, into blocks and streets with each
setting sun, but only to scatter again with the coming morn. At
night, after a fixed hour, no one is permitted to leave shore and
cross the vacant water strip except from certain piers and with the
permission of the police, who take the number of the sampan and the
names of its occupants. Over the harbor three large search lights
were sweeping and it was curious to see the junks and other craft
suddenly burst into full blazes of light, like so many monstrous
fire-flies, to disappear and reappear as the lights came and went.
Thus is the mid-strait city lighted and policed and thus have steps
been taken to lessen the number of cases of foul play where people
have left the wharves at night for some vessel in the strait, never
to be heard from again.

Some ninety miles is the distance by water to Canton, and early the
next morning our steamer dropped anchor off the foreign settlement
of Shameen. Through the kindness of Consul-General Amos P. Wilder in
sending a telegram to the Canton Christian College, their little
steam launch met the boat and took us directly to the home of the
college on Honam Island, lying in the great delta south of the city
where sediments brought by the Si-kiang--west, Pei-kiang--north, and
Tung-kiang--east--rivers through long centuries have been building
the richest of land which, because of the density of population, are
squared up everywhere to the water's edge and appropriated as fast
as formed, and made to bring forth materials for food fuel and
raiment in vast quantities.

It was on Honam Island that we walked first among the grave lands
and came to know them as such, for Canton Christian College stands
in the midst of graves which, although very old, are not permitted
to be disturbed and the development of the campus must wait to
secure permission to remove graves, or erect its buildings in places
not the most desirable. Cattle were grazing among the graves and
with them a flock of some 250 of the brown Chinese geese, two-thirds
grown, was watched by boys, gleaning their entire living from the
grave lands and adjacent water. A mature goose sells in Canton for
$1.20, Mexican, or less than 52 cents, gold, but even then how can
the laborer whose day's wage is but ten or fifteen cents afford one
for his family? Here, too, we saw the Chinese persistent,
never-ending industry in keeping their land, their sunshine and
their rain, with themselves, busy in producing something needful.
Fields which had matured two crops of rice during the long summer,
had been laboriously, and largely by hand labor, thrown into strong
ridges as seen in Fig. 40, to permit still a third winter crop of
some vegetable to be taken from the land.

But this intensive, continuous cropping of the land spells soil
exhaustion and creates demands for maintenance and restoration of
available plant food or the adding of large quantities of something
quickly convertible into it, and so here in the fields on Honam
Island, as we had found in Happy Valley, there was abundant evidence
of the most careful attention and laborious effort devoted to plant
feeding. The boat standing in the canal in Fig. 41 had come from
Canton in the early morning with two tons of human manure and men
were busy applying it, in diluted form, to beds of leeks at the rate
of 16,000 gallons per acre, all carried on the shoulders in such
pails as stand in the foreground. The material is applied with
long-handled dippers holding a gallon, dipping it from the pails,
the men wading, with bare feet and trousers rolled above the knees,
in the water of the furrows between the beds. This is one of their
ways of "feeding the crop," and they have other methods of "manuring
the soil."

One of these we first met on Honam Island. Large amounts of canal
mud are here collected in boats and brought to the fields to be
treated and there left to drain and dry before distributing. Both
the material used to feed the crop and that used for manuring the
land are waste products, hindrances to the industry of the region,
but the Chinese make them do essential duty in maintaining its life.
The human waste must be disposed of. They return it to the soil. We
turn it into the sea. Doing so, they save for plant feeding more
than a ton of phosphorus (2712 pounds) and more than two tons of
potassium (4488 pounds) per day for each million of adult
population. The mud collects in their canals and obstructs movement.
They must be kept open. The mud is highly charged with organic
matter and would add humus to the soil if applied to the fields, at
the same time raising their level above the river and canal, giving
them better drainage; thus are they turning to use what is otherwise
waste, causing the labor which must be expended in disposal to count
in a remunerative way.

During the early morning ride to Canton Christian College and three
others which we were permitted to enjoy in the launch on the canal
and river waters, everything was again strange, fascinating and full
of human interest. The Cantonese water population was a surprise,
not so much for its numbers as for the lithe, sinewy forms, bright
eyes and cheerful faces, particularly among the women, young and
old. Nearly always one or more women, mother and daughter oftenest,
grandmother many times, wrinkled, sometimes grey, but strong, quick
and vigorous in motion, were manning the oars of junks, houseboats
and sampans. Sometimes husband and wife and many times the whole
family were seen together when the craft was both home and business
boat as well. Little children were gazing from most unexpected peek
holes, or they toddled tethered from a waist belt at the end of as
much rope as would arrest them above water, should they go
overboard. And the cat was similarly tied. Through an overhanging
latticed stern, too, hens craned their necks, longing for scenes
they could not reach. With bare heads, bare feet, in short trousers
and all dressed much alike, men, women, boys and girls showed equal
mastery of the oar. Beginning so young, day and night in the open
air on the tide-swept streams and canals, exposed to all of the
sunshine the fogs and clouds will permit, and removed from the dust
and filth of streets, it would seem that if the children survive at
all they must develop strong. The appearance of the women somehow
conveyed the impression that they were more vigorous and in better
fettle than the men.

Boats selling many kinds of steaming hot dishes were common. Among
these was rice tied in green leaf wrappers, three small packets in a
cluster suspended by a strand of some vegetable fiber, to be handed
hot from the cooker to the purchaser, some one on a passing junk or
on an in-coming or out-going boat. Another would buy hot water for a
brew of tea, while still another, and for a single cash, might be
handed a small square of cotton cloth, wrung hot from the water,
with which to wipe his face and hands and then be returned.

Perhaps nothing better measures the intensity of the maintenance
struggle here, and better indicates the minute economies practiced,
than the value of their smallest currency unit, the Cash, used in
their daily retail transactions. On our Pacific coast, where less
thought is given to little economies than perhaps anywhere else in
the world, the nickel is the smallest coin in general use, twenty to
the dollar. For the rest of the United States and in most English
speaking countries one hundred cents or half pennies measure an
equal value. In Russia 170 kopecks, in Mexico 200 centavos, in
France 250 two-centime pieces, and in Austria-Hungary 250 two-heller
coins equal the United States dollar; while in Germany 400 pfennigs,
and in India 400 pie are required for an equal value. Again 500
penni in Finland and of stotinki in Bulgaria, of centesimi in Italy
and of half cents in Holland equal our dollar; but in China the
small daily financial transactions are measured against a much
smaller unit, their Cash, 1500 to 2000 of which are required to
equal the United States dollar, their purchasing power fluctuating
daily with the price of silver.

In the Shantung province, when we inquired of the farmers the
selling prices of their crops, their replies were given like this:
"Thirty-five strings of cash for 420 catty of wheat and twelve to
fourteen strings of cash for 1000 catty of wheat straw." At this
time, according to my interpreter, the value of one string of cash
was 40 cents Mexican, from which it appears that something like 250
of these coins were threaded on a string. Twice we saw a wheelbarrow
heavily loaded with strings of cash being transported through the
streets of Shanghai, lying exposed on the frame, suggesting chains
of copper more than money. At one of the go-downs or warehouses in
Tsingtao, where freight was being transferred from a steamer, the
carriers were receiving their pay in these coin. The pay-master
stood in the doorway with half a bushel of loose cash in a grain
sack at his feet. With one hand he received the bamboo tally-sticks
from the stevedores and with the other paid the cash for service
rendered.

Reference has been made to buying hot water. In a sampan managed by
a woman and her daughter, who took us ashore, the middle section of
the boat was furnished in the manner of a tiny sitting-room, and on
the sideboard sat the complete embodiment of our fireless cookers,
keeping boiled water hot for making tea. This device and the custom
are here centuries old and throughout these countries boiled water,
as tea, is the universal drink, adopted no doubt as a preventive
measure against typhoid fever and allied diseases. Few vegetables
are eaten raw and nearly all foods are taken hot or recently cooked
if not in some way pickled or salted. Houseboat meat shops move
among the many junks on the canals. These were provided with a
compartment communicating freely with the canal water where the fish
were kept alive until sold. At the street markets too, fish are kept
alive in large tubs of water systematically aerated by the water
falling from an elevated receptacle in a thin stream. A live fish
may even be sliced before the eyes of a purchaser and the unsold
portion returned to the water. Poultry is largely retailed alive
although we saw much of it dressed and cooked to a uniform rich
brown, apparently roasted, hanging exposed in the markets of the
very narrow streets in Canton, shaded from the hot sun under awnings
admitting light overhead through translucent oyster-shell
latticework. Perhaps these fowl had been cooked in hot oil and
before serving would be similarly heated. At any rate it is
perfectly clear that among these people many very fundamental
sanitary practices are rigidly observed.

One fact which we do not fully understand is that, wherever we went,
house flies were very few. We never spent a summer with so little
annoyance from them as this one in China, Korea and Japan. It may be
that our experience was exceptional but, if so, it could not be
ascribed to the season of our visit for we have found flies so
numerous in southern Florida early in April as to make the use of
the fly brush at the table very necessary. If the scrupulous
husbanding of waste refuse so universally practiced in these
countries reduces the fly nuisance and this menace to health to the
extent which our experience suggests, here is one great gain. We
breed flies in countless millions each year, until they become an
intolerable nuisance, and then expend millions of dollars on screens
and fly poison which only ineffectually lessen the intensity and
danger of the evil.

The mechanical appliances in use on the canals and in the shops of
Canton demonstrate that the Chinese possess constructive ability of
a high order, notwithstanding so many of these are of the simplest
forms. This statement is well illustrated in the simple yet
efficient foot-power seen in Fig. 42, where a father and his two
sons are driving an irrigation pump, lifting water at the rate of
seven and a half acre-inches per ten hours, and at a cost, including
wage and food, of 36 to 45 cents, gold. Here, too, were large
stern-wheel passenger boats, capable of carrying thirty to one
hundred people, propelled by the same foot-power but laid crosswise
of the stern, the men working in long single or double lines,
depending on the size of the boat. On these the fare was one cent,
gold, for a fifteen mile journey, a rate one-thirtieth our two-cent
railway tariff. The dredging and clearing of the canals and water
channels in and about Canton is likewise accomplished with the same
foot-power, often by families living on the dredge boats. A dipper
dredge is used, constructed of strong bamboo strips woven into the
form of a sliding, two-horse road scraper, guided by a long bamboo
handle. The dredge is drawn along the bottom by a rope winding about
the projecting axle of the foot-power, propelled by three or more
people. When the dipper reaches the axle and is raised from the
water it is swung aboard, emptied and returned by means of a long
arm like the old well sweep, operated by a cord depending from the
lower end of the lever, the dipper swinging from the other. Much of
the mud so collected from the canals and channels of the city is
taken to the rice and mulberry fields, many square miles of which
occupy the surrounding country. Thus the channels are kept open, the
fields grow steadily higher above flood level, while their
productive power is maintained by the plant food and organic matter
carried in the sediment.

The mechanical principle involved in the boy's button buzz was
applied in Canton and in many other places for operating small
drills as well as in grinding and polishing appliances used in the
manufacture of ornamental ware. The drill, as used for boring metal,
is set in a straight shaft, often of bamboo, on the upper end of
which is mounted a circular weight. The drill is driven by a pair of
strings with one end attached just beneath the momentum weight and
the other fastened at the ends of a cross hand-bar, having a hole at
its center through which the shaft carrying the drill passes.
Holding the drill in position for work and turning the shaft, the
two cords are wrapped about it in such a manner that simple downward
pressure on the hand bar held in the two hands unwinds the cords and
thus revolves the drill. Relieving the pressure at the proper time
permits the momentum of the revolving weight to rewind the cords and
the next downward pressure brings the drill again into service.






IV

UP THE SI-KIANG, WEST RIVER





On the morning of March 10th we took passage on the Nanning for
Wuchow, in Kwangsi province, a journey of 220 miles up the West
river, or Sikiang. The Nanning is one of two English steamers making
regular trips between the two places, and it was the sister boat
which in the summer of 1906 was attacked by pirates on one of her
trips and all of the officers and first class passengers killed
while at dinner. The cause of this attack, it is said, or the excuse
for it, was threatened famine resulting from destructive floods
which had ruined the rice and mulberry crops of the great delta
region and had prevented the carrying of manure and bean cake as
fertilizers to the tea fields in the hill lands beyond, thus
bringing ruin to three of the great staple crops of the region. To
avoid the recurrence of such tragedies the first class quarters on
the Nanning had been separated from the rest of the ship by heavy
iron gratings thrown across the decks and over the hatchways. Armed
guards stood at the locked gateways, and swords were hanging from
posts under the awnings of the first cabin quarters, much as saw and
ax in our passenger coaches. Both British and Chinese gunboats were
patrolling the river; all Chinese passengers were searched for
concealed weapons as they came aboard, even though Government
soldiers, and all arms taken into custody until the end of the
journey. Several of the large Chinese merchant junks which were
passed, carrying valuable cargoes on the river, were armed with
small cannon and when riding by rail from Canton to Sam Shui, a
government pirate detective was in our coach.

The Sikiang is one of the great rivers of China and indeed of the
world. Its width at Wuchow at low water was nearly a mile and our
steamer anchored in twenty-four feet of water to a floating dock
made fast by huge iron chains reaching three hundred feet up the
slope to the city proper, thus providing for a rise of twenty-six
feet in the river at its flood stage during the rainy season. In a
narrow section of river where it winds through Shui Hing gorge, the
water at low stage has a depth of more than twenty-five fathoms, too
deep for anchorage, so in times of prospective fog, boats wait for
clearing weather. Fluctuations in the height of the river limit
vessels passing up to Wuchow to those drawing six and a half feet of
water during the low stage, and at high stage to those drawing
sixteen feet.

When the West river emerges from the high lands, with its burden of
silt, to join its waters with those of the North and East rivers, it
has entered a vast delta plain some eighty miles from east to west
and nearly as many from north to south, and this has been canalized,
diked, drained and converted into the most productive of fields,
bearing three or more crops each year. As we passed westward through
this delta region the broad flat fields, surrounded by dikes to
protect them against high water, were being plowed and fitted for
the coming crop of rice. In many places the dikes which checked off
the fields were planted with bananas and in the distance gave the
appearance of extensive orchards completely occupying the ground.
Except for the water and the dikes it was easy to imagine that we
were traversing one of our western prairie sections in the early
spring, at seeding time, the scattered farm villages here easily
suggested distant farmsteads; but a nearer approach to the houses
showed that the roofs and sides were thatched with rice straw and
stacks were very numerous about the buildings. Many tide gates were
set in the dikes, often with double trunks.

At times we approached near enough to the fields to see how they
were laid out. From the gates long canals, six to eight feet wide,
led back sometimes eighty or a hundred rods. Across these and at
right angles, head channels were cut and between them the fields
were plowed in long straight lands some two rods wide, separated by
water furrows. Many of the fields were bearing sugar cane standing
eight feet high. The Chinese do no sugar refining but boil the sap
until it will solidify, when it is run into cakes resembling
chocolate or our brown maple sugar. Immense quantities of sugar
cane, too, are exported to the northern provinces, in bundles
wrapped with matting or other cover, for the retail markets where it
is sold, the canes being cut in short sections and sometimes peeled,
to be eaten from the hands as a confection.

Much of the way this water-course was too broad to permit detailed
study of field conditions and crops, even with a glass. In such
sections the recent dikes often have the appearance of being built
from limestone blocks but a closer view showed them constructed from
blocks of the river silt cut and laid in walls with slightly sloping
faces. In time however the blocks weather and the dikes become
rounded earthen walls.

We passed two men in a boat, in charge of a huge flock of some
hundreds of yellow ducklings. Anchored to the bank was a large
houseboat provided with an all-around, over-hanging rim and on board
was a stack of rice straw and other things which constituted the
floating home of the ducks. Both ducks and geese are reared in this
manner in large numbers by the river population. When it is desired
to move to another feeding ground a gang plank is put ashore and the
flock come on board to remain for the night or to be landed at
another place.

About five hours journey westward in this delta plain, where the
fields lie six to ten feet above the present water stage, we reached
the mulberry district. Here the plants are cultivated in rows about
four feet apart, having the habit of small shrubs rather than of
trees, and so much resembling cotton that our first impression was
that we were in an extensive cotton district. On the lower lying
areas, surrounded by dikes, some fields were laid out in the manner
of the old Italian or English water meadows, with a shallow
irrigation furrow along the crest of the bed and much deeper
drainage ditches along the division line between them. Mulberries
were occupying the ground before the freshly cut trenches we saw
were dug, and all the surface between the rows had been evenly
overlaid with the fresh earth removed with the spade, the soil lying
in blocks essentially unbroken. In Fig. 43 may be seen the mulberry
crop on a similarly treated surface, between Canton and Samshui,
with the earth removed from the trenches laid evenly over the entire
surface between and around the plants, as it came from the spade.

At frequent intervals along the river, paths and steps were seen
leading to the water and within a distance of a quarter of a mile we
counted thirty-one men and women carrying mud in baskets on bamboo
poles swung across their shoulders, the mud being taken from just
above the water line. The disposition of this material we could not
see as it was carried beyond a rise in ground. We have little doubt
that the mulberry fields were being covered with it. It was here
that a rain set in and almost like magic the fields blossomed out
with great numbers of giant rain hats and kittysols, where people
had been unobserved before. From one o'clock until six in the
afternoon we had traveled continuously through these mulberry fields
stretching back miles from our line of travel on either hand, and
the total acreage must have been very large. But we had now nearly
reached the margin of the delta and the mulberries changed to fields
of grain, beans, peas and vegetables.

After leaving the delta region the balance of the journey to Wuchow
was through a hill country, the slopes rising steeply from near the
river bank, leaving relatively little tilled or readily tillable
land. Rising usually five hundred to a thousand feet, the sides and
summits of the rounded, soil-covered hills were generally clothed
with a short herbaceous growth and small scattering trees, oftenest
pine, four to sixteen feet high, Fig. 44 being a typical landscape
of the region.

In several sections along the course of this river there are limited
areas of intense erosion where naked gulleys of no mean magnitude
have developed but these were exceptions and we were continually
surprised at the remarkable steepness of the slopes, with convexly
rounded contours almost everywhere, well mantled with soil, devoid
of gulleys and completely covered with herbaceous growth dotted with
small trees. The absence of forest growth finds its explanation in
human influence rather than natural conditions.

Throughout the hill-land section of this mighty river the most
characteristic and persistent human features were the stacks of
brush-wood and the piles of stove wood along the banks or loaded
upon boats and barges for the market. The brush-wood was largely
made from the boughs of pine, tied into bundles and stacked like
grain. The stove wood was usually round, peeled and made from the
limbs and trunks of trees two to five inches in diameter. All this
fuel was coming to the river from the back country, sent down along
steep slides which in the distance resemble paths leading over hills
but too steep for travel. The fuel was loaded upon large barges, the
boughs in the form of stacks to shed rain but with a tunnel leading
into the house of the boat about which they were stacked, while the
wood was similarly corded about the dwelling, as seen in Fig. 44.
The wood was going to Canton and other delta cities while the pine
boughs were taken to the lime and cement kilns, many of which were
located along the river. Absolutely the whole tree, including the
roots and the needles, is saved and burned; no waste is permitted.

The up-river cargo of the Nanning was chiefly matting rush, taken on
at Canton, tied in bundles like sheaves of wheat. It is grown upon
the lower, newer delta lands by methods of culture similar to those
applied to rice, Fig. 45 showing a field as seen in Japan.

The rushes were being taken to one of the country villages on a
tributary of the Sikiang and the steamer was met by a flotilla of
junks from this village, some forty-five miles up the stream, where
the families live who do the weaving. On the return trip the
flotilla again met the steamer with a cargo of the woven matting. In
keeping record of packages transferred the Chinese use a simple and
unique method. Each carrier, with his two bundles, received a pair
of tally sticks. At the gang-plank sat a man with a tally-case
divided into twenty compartments, each of which could receive five,
but no more, tallies. As the bundles left the steamer the tallies
were placed in the tally-case until it contained one hundred, when
it was exchanged for another.

Wuchow is a city of some 65,000 inhabitants, standing back on the
higher ground, not readily visible from the steamer landing nor from
the approach on the river. On the foreground, across which stretched
the anchor chains of the dock, was living a floating population,
many in shelters less substantial than Indian wigwams, but engaged
in a great variety of work, and many water buffalo had been tied for
the night along the anchor chains. Before July much of this area
would lie beneath the flood waters of the Sikiang.

Here a ship builder was using his simple, effective bow-brace,
boring holes for the dowel pins in the planking for his ship, and
another was bending the plank to the proper curvature. The bow-brace
consisted of a bamboo stalk carrying the bit at one end and a
shoulder rest at the other. Pressing the bit to its work with the
shoulder, it was driven with the string of a long bow wrapped once
around the stalk by drawing the bow back and forth, thus rapidly and
readily revolving the bit.

The bending of the long, heavy plank, four inches thick and eight
inches wide, was more simple still, It was saturated with water and
one end raised on a support four feet above the ground. A bundle of
burning rice straw moved along the under side against the wet wood
had the effect of steaming the wood and the weight of the plank
caused it to gradually bend into the shape desired. Bamboo poles are
commonly bent or straightened in this manner to suit any need and
Fig. 46 shows a wooden fork shaped in the manner described from a
small tree having three main branches. This fork is in the hands of
my interpreter and was used by the woman standing at the right, in
turning wheat.

When the old ship builder had finished shaping his plank he sat down
on the ground for a smoke. His pipe was one joint of bamboo stem a
foot long, nearly two inches in diameter and open at one end. In the
closed end, at one side, a small hole was bored for draft. A charge
of tobacco was placed in the bottom, the lips pressed into the open
end and the pipe lighted by suction, holding a lighted match at the
small opening. To enjoy his pipe the bowl rested on the ground
between his legs. With his lips in the bowl and a long breath, he
would completely fill his lungs, retaining the smoke for a time,
then slowly expire and fill the lungs again, after an interval of
natural breathing.

On returning to Canton we went by rail, with an interpreter, to
Samshui, visiting fields along the way, and Fig. 47 is a view of one
landscape. The woman was picking roses among tidy beds of garden
vegetables. Beyond her and in front of the near building are two
rows of waste receptacles. In the center background is a large
"go-down", in function that of our cold storage warehouse and in
part that of our grain elevator for rice. In them, too, the wealthy
store their fur-lined winter garments for safe keeping. These are
numerous in this portion of China and the rank of a city is
indicated by their number. The conical hillock is a large near-by
grave mound and many others serrate the sky line on the hill beyond.

In the next landscape, Fig. 48, a crop of winter peas, trained to
canes, are growing on ridges among the stubble of the second crop of
rice, In front is one canal, the double ridge behind is another and
a third canal extends in front of the houses. Already preparations
were being made for the first crop of rice, fields were being
flooded and fertilized. One such is seen in Fig. 49, where a laborer
was engaged at the time in bringing stable manure, wading into the
water to empty the baskets.

Two crops of rice are commonly grown each year in southern China and
during the winter and early spring, grain, cabbage, rape, peas,
beans, leeks and ginger may occupy the fields as a third or even
fourth crop, making the total year's product from the land very
large; but the amount of thought, labor and fertilizers given to
securing these is even greater and beyond anything Americans will
endure. How great these efforts are will be appreciated from what is
seen in Fig. 50, representing two fields thrown into high ridges,
planted to ginger and covered with straw. All of this work is done
by hand and when the time for rice planting comes every ridge will
again be thrown down and the surface smoothed to a water level. Even
when the ridges and beds are not thrown down for the crops of rice,
the furrows and the beds will change places so that all the soil is
worked over deeply and mainly through hand labor. The statement so
often made, that these people only barely scratch the surface of
their fields with the crudest of tools is very far from the truth,
for their soils are worked deeply and often, notwithstanding the
fact that their plowing, as such, may be shallow.

Through Dr. John Blumann of the missionary hospital at Tungkun, east
from Canton, we learned that the good rice lands there a few years
ago sold at $75 to $130 per acre but that prices are rising rapidly.
The holdings of the better class of farmers there are ten to fifteen
mow--one and two-thirds to two and a half acres--upon which are
maintained families numbering six to twelve. The day's wage of a
carpenter or mason is eleven to thirteen cents of our currency, and
board is not included, but a day's ration for a laboring man is
counted worth fifteen cents, Mexican, or less than seven cents,
gold.

Fish culture is practiced in both deep and shallow basins, the deep
permanent ones renting as high as $30 gold, per acre. The shallow
basins which can be drained in the dry season are used for fish only
during the rainy period, being later drained and planted to some
crop. The permanent basins have often come to be ten or twelve feet
deep, increasing with long usage, for they are periodically drained
by pumping and the foot or two of mud which has accumulated, removed
and sold as fertilizer to planters of rice and other crops. It is a
common practice, too, among the fish growers, to fertilize the
ponds, and in case a foot path leads alongside, screens are built
over the water to provide accommodation for travelers. Fish reared
in the better fertilized ponds bring a higher price in the market.
The fertilizing of the water favors a stronger growth of food forms,
both plant and animal, upon which the fish live and they are better
nourished, making a more rapid growth, giving their flesh better
qualities, as is the case with well fed animals.

In the markets where fish are exposed for sale they are often sliced
in halves lengthwise and the cut surface smeared with fresh blood.
In talking with Dr. Blumann as to the reason for this practice he
stated that the Chinese very much object to eating meat that is old
or tainted and that he thought the treatment simply had the effect
of making the fish look fresher. I question whether this treatment
with fresh blood may not have a real antiseptic effect and very much
doubt that people so shrewd as the Chinese would be misled by such a
ruse.






V

EXTENT OF CANALIZATION AND
SURFACE FITTING OF FIELDS





On the evening of March 15th we left Canton for Hongkong and the
following day embarked again on the Tosa Maru for Shanghai. Although
our steamer stood so far to sea that we were generally out of sight
of land except for some off-shore islands, the water was turbid most
of the way after we had crossed the Tropic of Cancer off the mouth
of the Han river at Swatow. Over a sea bottom measuring more than
six hundred miles northward along the coast, and perhaps fifty miles
to sea, unnumbered acre-feet of the richest soil of China are being
borne beyond the reach of her four hundred millions of people and
the children to follow them. Surely it must be one of the great
tasks of future statesmanship, education and engineering skill to
divert larger amounts of such sediments close along inshore in such
manner as to add valuable new land annually to the public domain,
not alone in China but in all countries where large resources of
this type are going to waste.

In the vast Cantonese delta plains which we had just left, in the
still more extensive ones of the Yangtse kiang to which we were now
going, and in those of the shifting Hwang ho further north,
centuries of toiling millions have executed works of almost
incalculable magnitude, fundamentally along such lines as those just
suggested. They have accomplished an enormous share of these tasks
by sheer force of body and will, building levees, digging canals,
diverting the turbid waters of streams through them and then
carrying the deposits of silt and organic growth out upon the
fields, often borne upon the shoulders of men in the manner we have
seen.

It is well nigh impossible, by word or map, to convey an adequate
idea of the magnitude of the systems of canalization and delta and
other lowland reclamation work, or of the extent of surface fitting
of fields which have been effected in China, Korea and Japan through
the many centuries, and which are still in progress. The lands so
reclaimed and fitted constitute their most enduring asset and they
support their densest populations. In one of our journeys by
houseboat on the delta canals between Shanghai and Hangchow, in
China, over a distance of 117 miles, we made a careful record of the
number and dimensions of lateral canals entering and leaving the
main one along which our boat-train was traveling. This record shows
that in 62 miles, beginning north of Kashing and extending south to
Hangchow, there entered from the west 134 and there left on the
coast side 190 canals. The average width of these canals, measured
along the water line, we estimated at 22 and 19 feet respectively on
the two sides. The height of the fields above the water level ranged
from four to twelve feet, during the April and May stage of water.
The depth of water, after we entered the Grand Canal, often exceeded
six feet and our best judgment would place the average depth of all
canals in this part of China at more than eight feet below the level
of the fields.

In Fig. 51, representing an area of 718 square miles in the region
traversed, all lines shown are canals, but scarcely more than
one-third of those present are shown on the map. Between A, where we
began our records, before reaching Kashing, and B, near the left
margin of the map, there were forty-three canals leading in from the
up-country side, instead of the eight shown, and on the coast side
there were eighty-six leading water out into the delta plain toward
the coast, instead of the twelve shown. Again, on one of our trips
by rail, from Shanghai to Nanking, we made a similar record of the
number of canals seen from the train, close along the track, and the
notes show, in a distance of 162 miles, 593 canals between Lungtan
and Nansiang. This is an average of more than three canals per mile
for this region and that between Shanghai and Hangchow.

The extent, nature and purpose of these vast systems of internal
improvement may be better realized through a study of the next two
sketch maps. The first, Fig. 52, represents an area 175 by 160
miles, of which the last illustration is the portion enclosed in the
small rectangle. On this area there are shown 2,700 miles of canals
and only about one-third of the canals shown in Fig. 51 are laid
down on this map, and according to our personal observations there
are three times as many canals as are shown on the map of which Fig.
51 represents a part. It is probable, therefore, that there exists
today in the area of Fig. 52 not less than 25,000 miles of canals.

In the next illustration, Fig. 53, an area of northeast China, 600
by 725 miles, is represented. The unshaded land area covers nearly
200,000 square miles of alluvial plain. This plain is so level that
at Ichang, nearly a thousand miles up the Yangtse, the elevation is
only 130 feet above the sea. The tide is felt on the river to beyond
Wuhu, 375 miles from the coast. During the summer the depth of water
in the Yangtse is sufficient to permit ocean vessels drawing
twenty-five feet of water to ascend six hundred miles to Hankow, and
for smaller steamers to go on to Ichang, four hundred miles further.

The location, in this vast low delta and coastal plain, of the
system of canals already described, is indicated by the two
rectangles in the south-east corner of the sketch map, Fig. 53. The
heavy barred black line extending from Hangchow in the south to
Tientsin in the north represents the Grand Canal which has a length
of more than eight hundred miles. The plain, east of this canal, as
far north as the mouth of the Hwang ho in 1852, is canalized much as
is the area shown in Fig. 52. So, too, is a large area both sides of
the present mouth of the same river in Shantung and Chihli, between
the canal and the coast. Westward, up the Yangtse valley, the
provinces of Anhwei, Kiangsi, Hunan and Hupeh have very extensive
canalized tracts, probably exceeding 28,000 square miles in area,
and Figs. 54 and 55 are two views in this more western region. Still
further west, in Szechwan province, is the Chengtu plain, thirty by
seventy miles, with what has been called "the most remarkable
irrigation system in China."

Westward beyond the limits of the sketch map, up the Hwang ho
valley, there is a reach of 125 miles of irrigated lands about
Ninghaifu, and others still farther west, at Lanchowfu and at Suchow
where the river has attained an elevation of 5,000 feet, in Kansu
province; and there is still to be named the great Canton delta
region. A conservative estimate would place the miles of canals and
leveed rivers in China, Korea and Japan equal to eight times the
number represented in Fig. 52. Fully 200,000 miles in all. Forty
canals across the United States from east to west and sixty from
north to south would not equal, in number of miles those in these
three countries today. Indeed, it is probable that this estimate is
not too large for China alone.

As adjuncts to these vast canalization works there have been
enormous amounts of embankment, dike and levee construction. More
than three hundred miles of sea wall alone exist in the area covered
by the sketch map, Fig. 52. The east bank of the Grand Canal,
between Yangchow and Hwaianfu, is itself a great levee, holding back
the waters to the west above the eastern plain, diverting them
south, into the Yangtse kiang. But it is also provided with
spillways for use in times of excessive flood, permitting waters to
discharge eastward. Such excess waters however are controlled by
another dike with canal along its west side, some forty miles to the
east, impounding the water in a series of large lakes until it may
gradually drain away. This area is seen in Fig. 53, north of the
Yangtse river.

Along the banks of the Yangtse, and for many miles along the Hwang
ho, great levees have been built, some-times in reinforcing series
of two or three at different distances back from the channel where
the stream bed is above the adjacent country, in order to prevent
widespread disaster and to limit the inundated areas in times of
unusual flood. In the province of Hupeh, where the Han river flows
through two hundred miles of low country, this stream is diked on
both sides throughout the whole distance, and in a portion of its
course the height of the levees reaches thirty feet or more. Again,
in the Canton delta region there are other hundreds of miles of sea
wall and dikes, so that the aggregate mileage of this type of
construction works in the Empire can only be measured in thousands
of miles.

In addition to the canal and levee construction works there are
numerous impounding reservoirs which are brought into requisition to
control overflow waters from the great streams. Some of these
reservoirs, like Tungting lake in Hupeh and Poyang in Hunan, have
areas of 2,000 and 1,800 square miles respectively and during the
heaviest rainy seasons each may rise through twenty to thirty feet,
Then there are other large and small lakes in the coastal plain
giving an aggregate reservoir area exceeding 13,000 square miles,
all of which are brought into service in controlling flood waters,
all of which are steadily filling with the sediments brought from
the far away uncultivable mountain slopes and which are ultimately
destined to become rich alluvial plains, doubtless to be canalized
in the manner we have seen.

There is still another phase of these vast construction works which
has been of the greatest moment in increasing the maintenance
capacity of the Empire,--the wresting from the flood waters of the
enormous volumes of silt which they carry, depositing it over the
flooded areas, in the canals and along the shores in such manner as
to add to the habitable and cultivable land. Reference has been made
to the rapid growth of Chungming island in the mouth of the Yangtse
kiang, and the million people now finding homes on the 270 square
miles of newly made land which now has its canals, as may be seen in
the upper margin of Fig. 52. The city of Shanghai, as its name
signifies, stood originally on the seashore, which has now grown
twenty miles to the northward and to the eastward. In 220 B. C. the
town of Putai in Shantung stood one-third of a mile from the sea,
but in 1730 it was forty-seven miles inland, and is forty-eight
miles from the shore today.

Sienshuiku, on the Pei ho, stood upon the seashore in 500 A. D. We
passed the city, on our way to Tientsin, eighteen miles inland. The
dotted line laid in from the coast of the Gulf of Chihli in Fig. 53
marks one historic shore line and indicates a general growth of land
eighteen miles to seaward.

Besides these actual extensions of the shore lines the centuries of
flooding of lakes and low lying lands has so filled many depressions
as to convert large areas of swamp into cultivated fields. Not only
this, but the spreading of canal mud broadcast over the encircled
fields has had two very important effects,--namely, raising the
level of the low lying fields, giving them better drainage and so
better physical condition, and adding new plant food in the form of
virgin soil of the richest type, thus contributing to the
maintenance of soil fertility, high maintenance capacity and
permanent agriculture through all the centuries.

These operations of maintenance and improvement had a very early
inception; they appear to have persisted throughout the recorded
history of the Empire and are in vogue today. Canals of the type
illustrated in Figs. 51 and 52 have been built between 1886 and
1901, both on the extensions of Chungming island and the newly
formed main land to the north, as is shown by comparison of
Stieler's atlas, revised in 1886, with the recent German survey.

Earlier than 2255 B. C., more than 4100 years ago, Emperor Yao
appointed "The Great" Yu "Superintendent of Works" and entrusted him
with the work of draining off the waters of disastrous floods and of
canalizing the rivers, and he devoted thirteen years to this work.
This great engineer is said to have written several treatises on
agriculture and drainage, and was finally called, much against his
wishes, to serve as Emperor during the last seven years of his life.

The history of the Hwang ho is one of disastrous floods and
shiftings of its course, which have occurred many times in the years
since before the time of the Great Yu, who perhaps began the works
perpetuated today. Between 1300 A. D. and 1852 the Hwang ho emptied
into the Yellow Sea south of the highlands of Shantung, but in that
year, when in unusual flood, it broke through the north levees and
finally took its present course, emptying again into the Gulf of
Chihli, some three hundred miles further north. Some of these
shiftings of course of the Hwang ho and of the Yangtse kiang are
indicated in dotted lines on the sketch map, Fig. 53, where it may
he seen that the Hwang ho during 146 years, poured its waters into
the sea as far north as Tientsin, through the mouth of the Pei ho,
four hundred miles to the northward of its mouth in 1852.

This mighty river is said to carry at low stage, past the city of
Tsinan in Shantung, no less than 4,000 cubic yards of water per
second, and three times this volume when running at flood. This is
water sufficient to inundate thirty-three square miles of level
country ten feet deep in twenty-four hours. What must be said of the
mental status of a people who for forty centuries have measured
their strength against such a Titan racing past their homes above
the level of their fields, confined only between walls of their own
construction? While they have not always succeeded in controlling
the river, they have never failed to try again. In 1877 this river
broke its banks, inundating a vast. area, bringing death to a
million people. Again, as late as 1898, fifteen hundred villages to
the northeast of Tsinan and a much larger area to the southwest of
the same city were devastated by it, and it is such events as these
which have won for the river the names "China's Sorrow," "The
Ungovernable" and "The Scourge of the Sons of Han."

The building of the Grand Canal appears to have been a comparatively
recent event in Chinese history. The middle section, between the
Yangtse and Tsingkiangpu, is said to have been constructed about the
sixth century B. C.; the southern section, between Chingkiang and
Hangchow, during the years 605 to 617 A. D.; but the northern
section, from the channel of the Hwang ho deserted in 1852, to
Tientsin, was not built until the years 1280-1283.

While this canal has been called by the Chinese Yu ho (Imperial
river), Yun ho (Transport river) or Yunliang ho (Tribute bearing
river) and while it has connected the great rivers coming down from
the far interior into a great water-transport system, this feature
of construction may have been but a by-product of the great
dominating purpose which led to the vast internal improvements in
the form of canals, dikes, levees and impounding reservoirs so
widely scattered, so fully developed and so effectively utilized.
Rather the master purpose must have been maintenance for the
increasing flood of humanity. And I am willing to grant to the Great
Yu, with his finger on the pulse of the nation, the power to project
his vision four thousand years into the future of his race and to
formulate some of the measures which might he inaugurated to grow
with the years and make certain perpetual maintenance for those to
follow.

The exhaustion of cultivated fields must always have been the most
fundamental, vital and difficult problem of all civilized people and
it appears clear that such canalization as is illustrated in Figs.
51 and 52 may have been primarily initial steps in the reclamation
of delta and overflow lands. At any rate, whether deliberately so
planned or not, the canalization of the delta and overflow plains of
China has been one of the most fundamental and fruitful measures for
the conservation of her national resources that they could have
taken, for we are convinced that this oldest nation in the world has
thus greatly augmented the extension of its coastal plains,
conserving and building out of the waste of erosion wrested from the
great streams, hundreds of square miles of the richest and most
enduring of soils, and we have little doubt that were a full and
accurate account given of human influence upon the changes in this
remarkable region during the last four thousand years it would show
that these gigantic systems of canalization have been matters of
slow, gradual growth, often initiated and always profoundly
influenced by the labors of the strong, patient, persevering,
thoughtful but ever silent husband-men in their efforts to acquire
homes and to maintain the productive power of their fields.

Nothing appears more clear than that the greatest material problem
which can engage the best thought of China today is that of
perfecting, extending and perpetuating the means for controlling her
flood waters, for better draining of her vast areas of low land, and
for utilizing the tremendous loads of silt borne by her streams more
effectively in fertilizing existing fields and in building and
reclaiming new land. With her millions of people needing homes and
anxious for work; who have done so much in land building, in
reclamation and in the maintenance of soil fertility, the government
should give serious thought to the possibility of putting large
numbers of them at work, effectively directed by the best
engineering skill. It must now be entirely practicable, with
engineering skill and mechanical appliances, to put the Hwang ho,
and other rivers of China subject to overflow, completely under
control. With the Hwang ho confined to its channel, the adjacent low
lands can be better drained by canalization and freed from the
accumulating saline deposits which are rendering them sterile.
Warping may be resorted to during the flood season to raise the
level of adjacent low-lying fields, rendering them at the same time
more fertile. Where the river is running above the adjacent plains
there is no difficulty in drawing off the turbid water by gravity,
under controlled conditions, into diked basins, and even in
compelling the river to buttress its own levees. There is certainly
great need and great opportunity for China to make still better and
more efficient her already wonderful transportation canals and those
devoted to drainage, irrigation and fertilization.

In the United States, along the same lines, now that we are
considering the development of inland waterways, the subject should
be surveyed broadly and much careful study may well be given to the
works these old people have developed and found serviceable through
so many centuries. The Mississippi is annually bearing to the sea
nearly 225,000 acre-feet of the most fertile sediment, and between
levees along a raised bed through two hundred miles of country
subject to inundation. The time is here when there should he
undertaken a systematic diversion of a large part of this fertile
soil over the swamp areas, building them into well drained,
cultivable, fertile fields provided with waterways to serve for
drainage, irrigation, fertilization and transportation. These great
areas of swamp land may thus be converted into the most productive
rice and sugar plantations to be found anywhere in the world, and
the area made capable of maintaining many millions of people as long
as the Mississippi endures, bearing its burden of fertile sediment.

But the conservation and utilization of the wastes of soil erosion,
as applied in the delta plain of China, stupendous as this work has
been, is nevertheless small when measured by the savings which
accrue from the careful and extensive fitting of fields so largely
practiced, which both lessens soil erosion and permits a large
amount of soluble and suspended matter in the run-off to be applied
to, and retained upon, the fields through their extensive systems of
irrigation. Mountainous and hilly as are the lands of Japan, 11,000
square miles of her cultivated fields in the main islands of Honshu,
Kyushu and Shikoku have been carefully graded to water level areas
bounded by narrow raised rims upon which sixteen or more inches of
run-off water, with its suspended and soluble matters, may be
applied, a large part of which is retained on the fields or utilized
by the crop, while surface erosion is almost completely prevented.
The illustrations, Figs. 11, 12 and 13 show the application of the
principle to the larger and more level fields, and in Figs. 151, 152
and 225 may be seen the practice on steep slopes.

If the total area of fields graded practically to a water level in
Japan aggregates 11,000 square miles, the total area thus surface
fitted in China must be eight or tenfold this amount. Such enormous
field erosion as is tolerated at the present time in our southern
and south Atlantic states is permitted nowhere in the Far East, so
far as we observed, not even where the topography is much steeper.
The tea orchards as we saw them on the steeper slopes, not
level-terraced, are often heavily mulched with straw which makes
erosion, even by heavy rains impossible, while the treatment retains
the rain where it falls, giving the soil opportunity to receive it
under the impulse of both capillarity and gravity, and with it the
soluble ash ingredients leached from the straw. The straw mulches we
saw used in this manner were often six to eight inches deep, thus
constituting a dressing of not less than six tons per acre, carrying
140 pounds of soluble potassium and 12 pounds of phosphorus. The
practice, therefore, gives at once a good fertilizing, the highest
conservation and utilization of rainfall, and a complete protection
against soil erosion. It is a multum in parvo treatment which
characterizes so many of the practices of these people, which have
crystallized from twenty centuries of high tension experience.

In the Kiangsu and Chekiang provinces as elsewhere in the densely
populated portions of the Far East, we found almost all of the
cultivated fields very nearly level or made so by grading. Instances
showing the type of this grading in a comparatively level country
are seen in Figs. 56 and 57. By this preliminary surface fitting of
the fields these people have reduced to the lowest possible limit
the waste of soil fertility by erosion and surface leaching. At the
same time they are able to retain upon the field, uniformly
distributed over it, the largest part of the rainfall practicable,
and to compel a much larger proportion of the necessary run off to
leave by under-drainage than would be possible otherwise, conveying
the plant food developed in the surface soil to the roots of the
crops, while they make possible a more complete absorption and
retention by the soil of the soluble plant food materials not taken
up. This same treatment also furnishes the best possible conditions
for the application of water to the fields when supplemental
irrigation would be helpful, and for the withdrawal of surplus
rainfall by surface drainage, should this be necessary.

Besides this surface fitting of fields there is a wide application
of additional methods aiming to conserve both rainfall and soil
fertility, one of which is illustrated in Fig. 58, showing one end
of a collecting reservoir. There were three of these reservoirs in
tandem, connected with each other by surface ditches and with an
adjoining canal. About the reservoir the level field is seen to be
thrown into beds with shallow furrows between the long narrow
ridges. The furrows are connected by a head drain around the margin
of the reservoir and separated from it by a narrow raised rim. Such
a reservoir may be six to ten feet deep but can be completely
drained only by pumping or by evaporation during the dry season.
Into such reservoirs the excess surface water is drained where all
suspended matter carried from the field collects and is returned,
either directly as an application of mud or as material used in
composts. In the preparation of composts, pits are dug near the
margin of the reservoir, as seen in the illustration, and into them
are thrown coarse manure and any roughage in the form of stubble or
other refuse which may be available, these materials being saturated
with the soft mud dipped from the bottom of the reservoir.

In all of the provinces where canals are abundant they also serve as
reservoirs for collecting surface washings and along their banks
great numbers of compost pits are maintained and repeatedly filled
during the season, for use on the fields as the crops are changed.
Fig. 59 shows two such pits on the bank of a canal, already filled.

In other cases, as in the Shantung province, illustrated in Fig. 60,
the surface of the field may be thrown into broad leveled lands
separated and bounded by deep and wide trenches into which the
excess water of very heavy rains may collect. As we saw them there
was no provision for draining the trenches and the water thus
collected either seeps away or evaporates, or it may be returned in
part by underflow and capillary rise to the soil from which it was
collected, or be applied directly for irrigation by pumping. In this
province the rains may often be heavy but the total fall for the
year is small, being little more than twenty-four inches hence there
is the greatest need for its conservation, and this is carefully
practiced.






VI

SOME CUSTOMS OF THE COMMON
PEOPLE





The Tosa Maru brought us again into Shanghai March 20th, just in
time for the first letters from home. A ricksha man carried us and
our heavy valise at a smart trot from the dock to the Astor House
more than a mile, for 8.6 cents, U. S. currency, and more than the
conventional price for the service rendered. On our way we passed
several loaded carryalls of the type seen in Fig. 61, on which women
were riding for a fare one-tenth that we had paid, but at a slower
pace and with many a jolt.

The ringing chorus which came loud and clear when yet half a block
away announced that the pile drivers were still at work on the
foundation for an annex to the Astor House, and so were they on May
27th when we returned from the Shantung province, 88 days after we
saw them first, but with the task then practically completed. Had
the eighteen men labored continuously through this interval, the
cost of their services to the contractor would have been but
$205.92. With these conditions the engine-driven pile driver could
not compete. All ordinary labor here receives a low wage. In the
Chekiang province farm labor employed by the year received $30 and
board, ten years ago, but now is receiving $50. This is at the rate
of about $12.90 and $21.50, gold, materially less than there is paid
per month in the United States. At Tsingtao in the Shantung province
a missionary was paying a Chinese cook ten dollars per month, a man
for general work nine dollars per month, and the cook's wife, for
doing the mending and other family service, two dollars per month,
all living at home and feeding themselves. This service rendered for
$9.03, gold, per month covers the marketing, all care of the garden
and lawn as well as all the work in the house. Missionaries in China
find such servants reliable and satisfactory, and trust them with
the purse and the marketing for the table, finding them not only
honest but far better at a bargain and at economical selection than
themselves.

We had a soil tube made in the shops of a large English ship
building and repair firm, employing many hundred Chinese as
mechanics, using the most modern and complex machinery, and the
foreman stated that as soon as the men could understand well enough
to take orders they were even better shop hands than the average in
Scotland and England. An educated Chinese booking clerk at the
Soochow railway station in Kiangsu province was receiving a salary
of $10.75, gold, per month. We had inquired the way to the Elizabeth
Blake hospital and he volunteered to escort us and did so, the
distance being over a mile.

He would accept no compensation, and yet I was an entire stranger,
without introduction of any kind. Everywhere we went in China, the
laboring people appeared generally happy and contented if they have
something to do, and showed clearly that they were well nourished.
The industrial classes are thoroughly organized, having had their
guilds or labor unions for centuries and it is not at all uncommon
for a laborer who is known to have violated the rules of his guild
to be summarily dealt with or even to disappear without questions
being asked. In going among the people, away from the lines of
tourist travel, one gets the impression that everybody is busy or is
in the harness ready to be busy. Tramps of our hobo type have few
opportunities here and we doubt if one exists in either of these
countries. There are people physically disabled who are asking alms
and there are organized charities to help them, but in proportion to
the total population these appear to be fewer than in America or
Europe. The gathering of unfortunates and habitual beggars about
public places frequented by people of leisure and means naturally
leads tourists to a wrong judgment regarding the extent of these
social conditions. Nowhere among these densely crowded people,
either Chinese, Japanese or Korean, did we see one intoxicated, but
among Americans and Europeans many instances were observed. All
classes and both sexes use tobacco and the British-American Tobacco
Company does a business in China amounting to millions of dollars
annually.

During five months among these people we saw but two children in a
quarrel. The two little boys were having their trouble on Nanking
road, Shanghai, where, grasping each other's pigtails, they tussled
with a vengeance until the mother of one came and parted their ways.

Among the most frequent sights in the city streets are the itinerant
vendors of hot foods and confections. Stove, fuel, supplies and
appliances may all be carried on the shoulders, swinging from a
bamboo pole. The mother in Fig. 63 was quite likely thus supporting
her family and the children are seen at lunch, dressed in the blue
and white calico prints so generally worn by the young. The printing
of this calico by the very ancient, simple yet effective method we
witnessed in the farm village along the canal seen in Fig. 10. This
art, as with so many others in China, was the inheritance of the
family we saw at work, handed down to them through many generations.
The printer was standing at a rough work bench upon which a large
heavy stone in cubical form served as a weight to hold in place a
thoroughly lacquered sheet of tough cardboard in which was cut the
pattern to appear in white on the cloth. Beside the stone stood a
pot of thick paste prepared from a mixture of lime and soy bean
flour. The soy beans were being ground in one corner of the same
room by a diminutive edition of such an outfit as seen in Fig. 64.
The donkey was working in his permanent abode and whenever off duty
he halted before manger and feed. At the operator's right lay a bolt
of white cotton cloth fixed to unroll and pass under the stencil,
held stationary by the heavy weight. To print, the stencil was
raised and the cloth brought to place under it. The paste was then
deftly spread with a paddle over the surface and thus upon the cloth
beneath wherever exposed through the openings in the stencil. This
completes the printing of the pattern on one section of the bolt of
cloth. The free end of the stencil is then raised, the cloth passed
along the proper distance by hand and the stencil dropped in place
for the next application. The paste is permitted to dry upon the
cloth and when the bolt has been dipped into the blue dye the
portions protected by the paste remain white. In this simple manner
has the printing of calico been done for centuries for the garments
of millions of children. From the ceiling of the drying room in this
printery of olden times were hanging some hundreds of stencils
bearing different patterns. In our great calico mills, printing
hundreds of yards per minute, the mechanics and the chemistry differ
only in detail of application and in dispatch, not in fundamental
principle.

In almost any direction we traveled outside the city, in the
pleasant mornings when the air was still, the laying of warp for
cotton cloth could be seen, to be woven later in the country homes.
We saw this work in progress many times and in many places in the
early morning, usually along some roadside or open place, as seen in
Fig. 65, but never later in the day. When the warp is laid each will
be rolled upon its stretcher and removed to the house to be woven.

In many places in Kiangsu province batteries of the large dye pits
were seen sunk in the fields and lined with cement. These were six
to eight feet in diameter and four to five feet deep. In one case
observed there were nine pits in the set. Some of the pits were
neatly sheltered beneath live arbors, as represented in Fig. 66. But
much of this spinning, weaving, dyeing and printing of late years is
being displaced by the cheaper calicos of foreign make and most of
the dye pits we saw were not now used for this purpose, the two in
the illustration serving as manure receptacles. Our interpreter
stated however that there is a growing dissatisfaction with foreign
goods on account of their lack of durability; and we saw many cases
where the cloth dyed blue was being dried in large quantities on the
grave lands.

In another home for nearly an hour we observed a method of beating
cotton and of laying it to serve as the body for mattresses and the
coverlets for beds. This we could do without intrusion because the
home was also the work shop and opened full width directly upon the
narrow street. The heavy wooden shutters which closed the home at
night were serving as a work bench about seven feet square, laid
upon movable supports. There was barely room to work between it and
the sidewalk without impeding traffic, and on the three other sides
there was a floor space three or four feet wide. In the rear sat
grandmother and wife while in and out the four younger children were
playing. Occupying the two sides of the room were receptacles filled
with raw cotton and appliances for the work. There may have been a
kitchen and sleeping room behind but no door, as such, was visible.
The finished mattresses, carefully rolled and wrapped in paper, were
suspended from the ceiling. On the improvised work table, with its
top two feet above the floor, there had been laid in the morning
before our visit, a mass of soft white cotton more than six feet
square and fully twelve inches deep. On opposite sides of this table
the father and his son, of twelve years, each twanged the string of
their heavy bamboo bows, snapping the lint from the wads of cotton
and flinging it broadcast in an even layer over the surface of the
growing mattress, the two strings the while emitting tones pitched
far below the hum of the bumblebee. The heavy bow was steadied by a
cord secured around the body of the operator, allowing him to manage
it with one hand and to move readily around his work in a manner
different from the custom of the Japanese seen in Fig. 67. By this
means the lint was expeditiously plucked and skillfully and
uniformly laid, the twanging being effected by an appliance similar
to that used in Japan.

Repeatedly, taken in small bits from the barrel of cotton, the lint
was distributed over the entire surface with great dexterity and
uniformity, the mattress growing upward with perfectly vertical
sides, straight edges and square corners. In this manner a
thoroughly uniform texture is secured which compresses into a body
of even thickness, free from hard places.

The next step in building the mattress is even more simple and
expeditious. A basket of long bobbins of roughly spun cotton was
near the grandmother and probably her handiwork. The father took
from the wall a slender bamboo rod like a fish-pole, six feet long,
and selecting one of the spools, threaded the strand through an eye
in the small end. With the pole and spool in one hand and the free
end of the thread, passing through the eye, in the other, the father
reached the thread across the mattress to the boy who hooked his
finger over it, carrying it to one edge of the bed of cotton. While
this was doing the father had whipped the pole back to his side and
caught the thread over his own finger, bringing this down upon the
cotton opposite his son. There was thus laid a double strand, but
the pole continued whipping hack and forth across the bed, father
and son catching the threads and bringing them to place on the
cotton at the rate of forty to fifty courses per minute, and in a
very short time the entire surface of the mattress had been laid
with double strands. A heavy bamboo roller was next laid across the
strands at the middle, passed carefully to one side, back again to
the middle and then to the other edge. Another layer of threads was
then laid diagonally and this similarly pressed with the same
roller; then another diagonally the other way and finally straight
across in both directions. A similar network of strands had been
laid upon the table before spreading the cotton. Next a flat
bottomed, circular, shallow basket-like form two feet in diameter
was used to gently compress the material from twelve to six inches
in thickness. The woven threads were now turned over the edge of the
mattress on all sides and sewed down, after which, by means of two
heavy solid wooden disks eighteen inches in diameter, father and son
compressed the cotton until the thickness was reduced to three
inches. There remained the task of carefully folding and wrapping
the finished piece in oiled paper and of suspending it from the
ceiling.

On March 20th, when visiting the Boone Road and Nanking Road markets
in Shanghai, we had our first surprise regarding the extent to which
vegetables enter into the daily diet of the Chinese. We had observed
long processions of wheelbarrow men moving from the canals through
the streets carrying large loads of the green tips of rape in
bundles a foot long and five inches in diameter. These had come from
the country on boats each carrying tons of the succulent leaves and
stems. We had counted as many as fifty wheelbarrow men passing a
given point on the street in quick succession, each carrying 300 to
500 pounds of the green rape and moving so rapidly that it was not
easy to keep pace with them, as we learned in following one of the
trains during twenty minutes to its destination. During this time
not a man in the train halted or slackened his pace.

This rape is very extensively grown in the fields, the tips of the
stems cut when tender and eaten, after being boiled or steamed,
after the manner of cabbage. Very large quantities are also packed
with salt in the proportion of about twenty pounds of salt to one
hundred pounds of the rape. This, Fig. 68, and many other vegetables
are sold thus pickled and used as relishes with rice, which
invariably is cooked and served without salt or other seasoning.

Another field crop very extensively grown for human food, and partly
as a source of soil nitrogen, is closely allied to our alfalfa. This
is the Medicago astragalus, two beds of which are seen in Fig. 69.
Tender tips of the stems are gathered before the stage of blossoming
is reached and served as food after boiling or steaming. It is known
among the foreigners as Chinese "clover." The stems are also cooked
and then dried for use when the crop is out of season. When picked
very young, wealthy Chinese families pay an extra high price for the
tender shoots, sometimes as much as 20 to 28 cents, our currency,
per pound.

The markets are thronged with people making their purchases in the
early mornings, and the congested condition, with the great variety
of vegetables, makes it almost as impressive a sight as Billingsgate
fish market in London. In the following table we give a list of
vegetables observed there and the prices at which they were selling.

-----------------------------------------------------------
LIST OF VEGETABLES DISPLAYED FOR SALE IN BOONE ROAD MARKET,
   SHANGHAI, APRIL 6TH, 1900, WITH PRICES EXPRESSED
                  IN U. S. CURRENCY.--
---------------------------------------------------------
                                       Cents
   Lotus roots, per lb.                 1.60
   Bamboo sprouts, per lb.              6.40
   English cabbage, per lb.             1.33
   Olive greens, per lb.                 .67
   White greens, per lb.                 .33
   Tee Tsai, per lb.                     .53
   Chinese celery, per lb.               .67
   Chinese clover, per lb.               .58
   Chinese clover, very young, lb.     21.33
   Oblong white cabbage, per lb.        2.00
   Red beans, per lb.                   1.33
   Yellow beans, per lb.                1.87
   Peanuts, per lb.                     2.49
   Ground nuts, per lb.                 2.96
   Cucumbers, per lb.                   2.58
   Green pumpkin, per lb.               1.62
   Maize, shelled, per lb.              1.00
   Windsor beans, dry, per lb.          1.72
   French lettuce, per head              .44
   Hau Tsai, per head                    .87
   Cabbage lettuce, per head             .22
   Kale, per lb.                        1.60
   Rape, per lb.                         .23
   Portuguese water cress, basket       2.15
   Shang tsor, basket                   8.60
   Carrots, per lb.                      .97
   String beans; per lb.                1.60
   Irish potatoes, per lb.              1.60
   Red onions, per lb.                  4.96
   Long white turnips, per lb.           .44
   Flat string beans, per lb.           4.80
   Small white turnips, bunch            .44
   Onion stems, per lb.                 1.29
   Lima beans, green, shelled, lb.      6.45
   Egg plants, per lb.                  4.30
   Tomatoes, per lb.                    5.16
   Small flat turnips, per lb.           .86
   Small red beets, per lb.             1.29
   Artichokes, per lb.                  1.29
   White beans, dry, per lb.            4.80
   Radishes, per lb.                    1.29
   Garlic, per lb.                      2.15
   Kohl rabi, per lb.                   2.15
   Mint, per lb.                        4.30
   Leeks, per lb.                       2.18
   Large celery, bleached, bunch        2.10
   Sprouted peas, per lb.                .80
   Sprouted beans, per lb.               .93
   Parsnips, per lb.                    1.29
   Ginger roots, per lb.                1.60
   Water chestnuts, per lb.             1.33
   Large sweet potatoes, per lb.        1.33
   Small sweet potatoes, per lb.        1.00
   Onion sprouts, per lb.               2.13
   Spinach, per lb.                     1.00
   Fleshy stemmed lettuce, peeled,
     per lb.                            2.00
   Fleshy stemmed lettuce, unpeeled,
     per lb.                             .67
   Bean curd, per lb.                   3.93
   Shantung walnuts, per lb.            4.30
   Duck eggs, dozen                     8.34
   Hen's eggs, dozen                    7.30
   Goat's meat, per lb.                 6.45
   Pork, per lb.                        6.88
   Hens, live weight, per lb.           6.45
   Ducks, live weight, per lb.          5.59
   Cockerels, live weight, per lb.      5.59--
---------------------------------------------------------


This long list, made up chiefly of fresh vegetables displayed for
sale on one market day, is by no means complete. The record is only
such as was made in passing down one side and across one end of the
market occupying nearly one city block. Nearly everything is sold by
weight and the problem of correct weights is effectively solved by
each purchaser carrying his own scales, which he unhesitatingly uses
in the presence of the dealer. These scales are made on the pattern
of the old time steelyards but from slender rods of wood or bamboo
provided with a scale and sliding poise, the suspensions all being
made with strings.

We stood by through the purchasing of two cockerels and the
dickering over their weight. A dozen live birds were under cover in
a large, open-work basket. The customer took out the birds one by
one, examining them by touch, finally selecting two, the price being
named. These the dealer tied together by their feet and weighed
them, announcing the result; whereupon the customer checked the
statement with his own scales. An animated dialogue followed,
punctuated with many gesticulations and with the customer tossing
the birds into the basket and turning to go away while the dealer
grew more earnest. The purchaser finally turned back, and again
balancing the roosters upon his scales, called a bystander to read
the weight, and then flung them in apparent disdain at the dealer,
who caught them and placed them in the customer's basket. The storm
subsided and the dealer accepted 92c, Mexican, for the two birds.
They were good sized roosters and must have dressed more than three
pounds each, yet for the two he paid less than 40 cents in our
currency.

Bamboo sprouts are very generally used in China, Korea and Japan and
when one sees them growing they suggest giant stalks of asparagus,
some of them being three and even five inches in diameter and a foot
in height at the stage for cutting. They are shipped in large
quantities from province to province where they do not grow or when
they are out of season. Those we saw in Nagasaki referred to in Fig.
22, had come from Canton or Swatow or possibly Formosa. The form,
foliage and bloom of the bamboo give the most beautiful effects in
the landscape, especially when grouped with tree forms. They are
usually cultivated in small clumps about dwellings in places not
otherwise readily utilized, as seen in Fig. 66. Like the asparagus
bud, the bamboo sprout grows to its full height between April and
August, even when it exceeds thirty or even sixty feet in height.
The buds spring from fleshy underground stems or roots whose stored
nourishment permits this rapid growth, which in its earlier stages
may exceed twelve inches in twenty-four hours. But while the full
size of the plant is attained the first season, three or four years
are required to ripen and harden the wood sufficiently to make it
suitable for the many uses to which the stems are put. It would seem
that the time must come when some of the many forms of bamboo will
be introduced and largely grown in many parts of this country.

Lotus roots form another article of diet largely used and widely
cultivated from Canton to Tokyo. These are seen in the lower section
of Fig. 70, and the plants in bloom in Fig. 71, growing in water,
their natural habitat. The lotus is grown in permanent ponds not
readily drained for rice or other crops, and the roots are widely
shipped.

Sprouted beans and peas of many kinds and the sprouts of other
vegetables, such as onions, are very generally seen in the markets
of both China and Japan, at least during the late winter and early
spring, and are sold as foods, having different flavors and
digestive qualities, and no doubt with important advantageous
effects in nutrition.

Ginger is another. crop which is very widely and extensively
cultivated. It is generally displayed in the market in the root
form. No one thing was more generally hawked about the streets of
China than the water chestnut. This is a small corm or fleshy bulb
having the shape and size of a small onion. Boys pare them and sell
a dozen spitted together on slender sticks the length of a knitting
needle. Then there are the water caltropes, grown in the canals
producing a fruit resembling a horny nut having a shape which
suggests for them the name "buffalo-horn". Still another plant,
known as water-grass (Hydropyrum latifolium) is grown in Kiangsu
province where the land is too wet for rice. The plant has a tender
succulent crown of leaves and the peeling of the outer coarser ones
away suggests the husking of an ear of green corn. The portion eaten
is the central tender new growth, and when cooked forms a delicate
savory dish. The farmers' selling price is three to four dollars,
Mexican, per hundred catty, or $.97 to $1.29 per hundredweight, and
the return per acre is from $13 to $20.

The small number of animal products which are included in the market
list given should not be taken as indicating the proportion of
animal to vegetable foods in the dietaries of these people. It is
nevertheless true that they are vegetarians to a far higher degree
than are most western nations, and the high maintenance efficiency
of the agriculture of China, Korea and Japan is in great measure
rendered possible by the adoption of a diet so largely vegetarian.
Hopkins, in his Soil Fertility and Permanent Agriculture, page 234,
makes this pointed statement of fact: "1000 bushels of grain has at
least five times as much food value and will support five times as
many people as will the meat or milk that can be made from it". He
also calls attention to the results of many Rothamsted feeding
experiments with growing and fattening cattle, sheep and swine,
showing that the cattle destroyed outright, in every 100 pounds of
dry substance eaten, 57.3 pounds, this passing off into the air, as
does all of wood except the ashes, when burned in the stove; they
left in the excrements 36.5 pounds, and stored as increase but 6.2
pounds of the 100. With sheep the corresponding figures were 60.1
pounds; 31.9 pounds and 8 pounds; and with swine they were 65.7
pounds; 16.7 pounds and 17.6 pounds. But less than two-thirds of the
substance stored in the animal can become food for man and hence we
get but four pounds in one hundred of the dry substances eaten by
cattle in the form of human food; but five pounds from the sheep and
eleven pounds from swine.

In view of these relations, only recently established as scientific
facts by rigid research, it is remarkable that these very ancient
people came long ago to discard cattle as milk and meat producers;
to use sheep more for their pelts and wool than for food; while
swine are the one kind of the three classes which they did retain in
the role of middleman as transformers of coarse substances into
human food.

It is clear that in the adoption of the succulent forms of
vegetables as human food important advantages are gained. At this
stage of maturity they have a higher digestibility, thus making the
elimination of the animal less difficult. Their nitrogen content is
relatively higher and this in a measure compensates for loss of
meat. By devoting the soil to growing vegetation which man can
directly digest they have saved 60 pounds per 100 of absolute waste
by the animal, returning their own wastes to the field for the
maintenance of fertility. In using these immature forms of
vegetation so largely as food they are able to produce an immense
amount that would otherwise be impossible, for this is grown in a
shorter time, permitting the same soil to produce more crops. It is
also produced late in the fall and early in the spring when the
season is too cold and the hours of sunshine too few each day to
permit of ripening crops.






VII

THE FUEL PROBLEM, BUILDING AND
TEXTILE MATERIALS





With the vast and ever increasing demands made upon materials which
are the products of cultivated fields, for food, for apparel, for
furnishings and for cordage, better soil management must grow more
important as populations multiply. With the increasing cost and
ultimate exhaustion of mineral fuel; with our timber vanishing
rapidly before the ever growing demands for lumber and paper; with
the inevitably slow growth of trees and the very limited areas which
the world can ever afford to devote to forestry, the time must
surely come when, in short period rotations, there will be grown
upon the farm materials from which to manufacture not only paper and
the substitutes for lumber, but fuels as well. The complete
utilization of every stream which reaches the sea, reinforced by the
force of the winds and the energy of the waves which may be
transformed along the coast lines, cannot fully meet the demands of
the future for power and heat; hence only in the event of science
and engineering skill becoming able to devise means for transforming
the unlimited energy of space through which we are ever whirled,
with an economy approximating that which crops now exhibit, can good
soil management be relieved of the task of meeting a portion of the
world's demand for power and heat.

When these statements were made in 1905 we did not know that for
centuries there had existed in China, Korea and Japan a density of
population such as to require the extensive cultivation of crops for
fuel and building material, as well as for fabrics, by the ordinary
methods of tillage, and hence another of the many surprises we had
was the solution these people had reached of their fuel problem and
of how to keep warm. Their solution has been direct and the simplest
possible. Dress to make fuel for warmth of body unnecessary, and
burn the coarser stems of crops, such as cannot be eaten, fed to
animals or otherwise made useful. These people still use what wood
can be grown on the untillable land within transporting distance,
and convert much wood into charcoal, making transportation over
longer distances easier. The general use of mineral fuels, such as
coal, coke, oils and gas, had been impossible to these as to every
other people until within the last one hundred years. Coal, coke,
oil and natural gas, however, have been locally used by the Chinese
from very ancient times. For more than two thousand years brine from
many deep wells in Szechwan province has been evaporated with heat
generated by the burning of natural gas from wells, conveyed through
bamboo stems to the pans and burned from iron terminals. In other
sections of the same province much brine is evaporated over coal
fires. Alexander Hosie estimates the production of salt in Szechwan
province at more than 600 million pounds annually.

Coal is here used also to some extent for warming the houses, burned
in pits sunk in the floor, the smoke escaping where it may. The same
method of heating we saw in use in the post office at Yokohama
during February. The fires were in large iron braziers more than two
feet across the top, simply set about the room, three being in
operation. Stoves for house warming are not used in dwellings in
these countries.

In both China and Japan we saw coal dust put into the form and size
of medium oranges by mixing it with a thin paste of clay. Charcoal
is similarly molded, as seen in Fig. 72, using a by-product from the
manufacture of rice syrup for cementing. In Nanking we watched with
much interest the manufacture of charcoal briquets by another
method. A Chinese workman was seated upon the earth floor of a shop.
By his side was a pile of powdered charcoal, a dish of rice syrup
by-product and a basin of the moistened charcoal powder. Between his
legs was a heavy mass of iron containing a slightly conical mold two
inches deep, two and a half inches across at the top and a heavy
iron hammer weighing several pounds. In his left hand he held a
short heavy ramming tool and with his right placed in the mold a
pinch of the moistened charcoal; then followed three well directed
blows from the hammer upon the ramming tool, compressing the charge
of moistened, sticky charcoal into a very compact layer. Another
pinch of charcoal was added and the process repeated until the mold
was filled, when the briquet was forced out.

By this simplest possible mechanism, the man, utilizing but a small
part of his available energy, was subjecting the charcoal to an
enormous pressure such as we attain only with the best hydraulic
presses, and he was using the principle of repeated small charges
recently patented and applied in our large and most efficient cotton
and hay presses, which permit much denser bales to be made than is
possible when large charges are added, and the Chinese is here, as
in a thousand other ways, thoroughly sound in his application of
mechanical principles. His output for the day was small but his
patience seemed unlimited. His arms and body, bared to the waist,
showed vigor and good feeding, while his face wore the look of
contentment.

With forty centuries of such inheritance coursing in the veins of
four hundred millions of people, in a country possessed of such
marvelous wealth of coal and water power, of forest and of
agricultural possibilities, there should be a future speedily
blossoming and ripening into all that is highest and best for such a
nation. If they will retain their economies and their industry and
use their energies to develop, direct and utilize the power in their
streams and in their coal fields along the lines which science has
now made possible to them, at the same time walking in paths of
peace and virtue, there is little worth while which may not come to
such a people.

A Shantung farmer in winter dress, Fig. 18, and the Kiangsu woman
portrayed in Fig. 73, in corresponding costume, are typical
illustrations of the manner in which food for body warmth is
minimized and of the way the heat generated in the body is
conserved. Observe his wadded and quilted frock, his trousers of
similar goods tied about the ankle, with his feet clad in multiple
socks and cloth shoes provided with thick felted soles. These types
of dress, with the wadding, quilting, belting and tying, incorporate
and confine as part of the effective material a large volume of air,
thus securing without cost, much additional warmth without
increasing the weight of the garments. Beneath these outer garments
several under pieces of different weights are worn which greatly
conserve the warmth during the coldest weather and make possible a
wide range of adjustment to suit varying changes in temperature. It
is doubtful if there could he devised a wardrobe suited to the
conditions of these people at a smaller first cost and maintenance
expense. Rev. E. A. Evans, of the China Inland Mission, for many
years residing at Sunking in Szechwan, estimated that a farmer's
wardrobe, once it was procured, could be maintained with an annual
expenditure of $2.25 of our currency, this sum procuring the
materials for both repairs and renewals.

The intense individual economy, extending to the smallest matters,
so universally practiced by these people, has sustained the massive
strength of the Mongolian nations through their long history and
this trait is seen in their handling of the fuel problem, as it is
in all other lines. In the home of Mrs. Wu, owner and manager of a
25-acre rice farm in Chekiang province, there was a masonry kang
seven by seven feet, about twenty-eight inches high, which could be
warmed in winter by building a fire within. The top was fitted for
mats to serve as couch by day and as a place upon which to spread
the bed at night. In the Shantung province we visited the home of a
prosperous farmer and here found two kangs in separate sleeping
apartments, both warmed by the waste heat from the kitchen whose
chimney flue passed horizontally under the kangs before rising
through the roof. These kangs were wide enough to spread the beds
upon, about thirty inches high, and had been constructed from brick
twelve inches square and four inches thick, made from the clay
subsoil taken from the fields and worked into a plastic mass, mixed
with chaff and short straw, dried in the sun and then laid in a
mortar of the same material. These massive kangs are thus capable of
absorbing large amounts of the waste heat from the kitchen during
the day and of imparting congenial warmth to the couches by day and
to the beds and sleeping apartments during the night. In some
Manchurian inns large compound kangs are so arranged that the guests
sleep heads together in double rows, separated only by low dividing
rails, securing the greatest economy of fuel, providing the guests
with places where they may sit upon the moderately warmed fireplace,
and spread their beds when they retire.

The economy of the chimney beds does not end with the warmth
conserved. The earth and straw brick, through the processes of
fermentation and through shrinkage, become open and porous after
three or four years of service, so that the draft is defective,
giving annoyance from smoke, which requires their renewal. But the
heat, the fermentation and the absorption of products of combustion
have together transformed the comparatively infertile subsoil into
what they regard as a valuable fertilizer and these discarded brick
are used in the preparation of compost fertilizers for the fields.
On account of this value of the discarded brick the large amount of
labor involved in removing and rebuilding the kangs is not regarded
altogether as labor lost.

Our own observations have shown that heating soils to dryness at a
temperature of 110 deg C. greatly increases the freedom with which
plant food may be recovered from them by the solvent power of water,
and the same heating doubtless improves the physical and biological
conditions of the soil as well. Nitrogen combined as ammonia, and
phosphorus, potash and lime are all carried with the smoke or soot,
mechanically in the draft and arrested upon the inner walls of the
kangs or filter into the porous brick with the smoke, and thus add
plant food directly to the soil. Soot from wood has been found to
contain, as an average, 1.36 per cent of nitrogen; .51 per cent of
phosphorus and 5.34 per cent of potassium. We practice burning straw
and corn stalks in enormous quantities, to get them easily out of
the way, thus scattering on the winds valuable plant food,
thoughtlessly and lazily wasting where these people laboriously and
religiously save. These are gains in addition to those which result
from the formation of nitrates, soluble potash and other plant foods
through fermentation. We saw many instances where these discarded
brick were being used, both in Shantung and Chihli provinces, and it
was common in walking through the streets of country villages to see
piles of them, evidently recently removed.

The fuel grown on the farms consists of the stems of all
agricultural crops which are to any extent woody, unless they can be
put to some better use. Rice straw, cotton stems pulled by the roots
after the seed has been gathered, the stems of windsor beans, those
of rape and the millets, all pulled by the roots, and many other
kinds, are brought to the market tied in bundles in the manner seen
in Figs. 74, 75 and 76. These fuels are used for domestic purposes
and for the burning of lime, brick, roofing tile and earthenware as
well as in the manufacture of oil, tea, bean-curd and many other
processes. In the home, when the meals are cooked with these light
bulky fuels, it is the duty of some one, often one of the children,
to sit on the floor and feed the fire with one hand while with the
other a bellows is worked to secure sufficient draft. The
manufacture of cotton seed oil and cotton seed cake is one of the
common family industries in China, and in one of these homes we saw
rice hulls and rice straw being used as fuel. In the large low,
one-story, tile-roofed building serving as store, warehouse, factory
and dwelling, a family of four generations were at work, the
grandfather supervising in the mill and the grandmother leading in
the home and store where the cotton seed oil was being. retailed for
22 cents per pound and the cotton seed cake at 33 cents, gold, per
hundredweight. Back of the store and living rooms, in the mill
compartment, three blindfolded water buffalo, each working a granite
mill, were crushing and grinding the cotton seed. Three other
buffalo, for relay service, were lying at rest or eating, awaiting
their turn at the ten-hour working day. Two of the mills were
horizontal granite burrs more than four feet in diameter, the upper
one revolving once with each circuit made by the cow. The third mill
was a pair of massive granite rollers, each five feet in diameter
and two feet thick, joined on a very short horizontal axle which
revolved on a circular stone plate about a vertical axis once with
each circuit of the buffalo. Two men tended the three mills. After
the cotton seed had been twice passed through the mills it was
steamed to render the oil fluid and more readily expressed. The
steamer consisted of two covered wooden hoops not unlike that seen
in Fig. 77, provided with screen bottoms, and in these the meal was
placed over openings in the top of an iron kettle of boiling water
from which the steam was forced through the charge of meal. Each
charge was weighed in a scoop balanced on the arm of a bamboo scale,
thus securing a uniform weight for the cakes.

On the ground in front of the furnace sat a boy of twelve years
steadily feeding rice chaff into the fire with his left hand at the
rate of about thirty charges per minute, while with his right hand,
and in perfect rhythm, he drew back and forth the long plunger of a
rectangular box bellows, maintaining a forced draft for the fire. At
intervals the man who was bringing fuel fed into the furnace a
bundle of rice straw, thus giving the boy's left arm a moment's
respite. When the steaming has rendered the oil sufficiently fluid
the meal is transferred, hot, to ten-inch hoops two inches deep,
made of braided bamboo strands, and is deftly tramped with the bare
feet, while hot, the operator steadying himself by a pair of hand
bars. After a stack of sixteen hoops, divided by a slight sifting of
chaff or short straw to separate the cakes, had been completed these
were taken to one of four pressmen, who were kept busy in expressing
the oil.

The presses consisted of two parallel timbers framed together, long
enough to receive the sixteen hoops on edge above a gap between
them. These cheeses of meal are subjected to an enormous pressure
secured by means of three parallel lines of wedges forced against
the follower each by an iron-bound master wedge, driven home with a
heavy beetle weighing some twenty-five or thirty pounds. The lines
of wedges were tightened in succession, the loosened line receiving
an additional wedge to take up the slack after drawing back the
master wedge, which was then driven home. To keep good the supply of
wedges which are often crushed under the pressure a second boy,
older than the one at the furnace, was working on the floor, shaping
new ones, the broken wedges and the chips going to the furnace for
fuel.

By this very simple, readily constructed and inexpensive mechanism
enormous pressures were secured and when the operator had obtained
the desired compression he lighted his pipe and sat down to smoke
until the oil ceased dripping into the pit sunk in the floor beneath
the press. In this interval the next series of cakes went to another
press and the work thus kept up during the day.

Six hundred and forty cakes was the average daily output of this
family of eight men and two boys, with their six water buffalo. The
cotton seed cakes were being sold as feed, and a near-by Chinese
dairyman was using them for his herd of forty water buffalo, seen in
Fig. 78, producing milk for the foreign trade in Shanghai. This herd
of forty cows one of which was an albino, was giving an average of
but 200 catty of milk per day, or at the rate of six and two-thirds
pounds per head! The cows have extremely small udders but the milk
is very rich, as indicated by an analysis made in the office of the
Shanghai Board of Health and obtained through the kindness of Dr.
Arthur Stanley. The milk showed a specific gravity of 1.028 and
contained 20.1 per cent total solids; 7.5 per cent fat; 4.2 per cent
milk sugar and .8 per cent ash. In the family of Rev. W. H. Hudson,
of the Southern Presbyterian Mission, Kashing, whose very gracious
hospitality we enjoyed on two different occasions, the butter made
from the milk of two of these cows, one of which, with her calf, is
seen in Fig. 79, was used on the family table. It was as white as
lard or cottolene but the texture and flavor were normal and far
better than the Danish and New Zealand products served at the
hotels.

The milk produced at the Chinese dairy in Shanghai was being sold in
bottles holding two pounds, at the rate of one dollar a bottle, or
43 cents, gold. This seems high and there may have been
misunderstanding on the part of my interpreter but his answer to my
question was that the milk was being sold at one Shanghai dollar per
bottle holding one and a half catty, which, interpreted, is the
value given above.

But fuel from the stems of cultivated plants which are in part
otherwise useful, is not sufficient to meet the needs of country and
village, notwithstanding the intense economies practiced. Large
areas of hill and mountain land are made to contribute their share,
as we have seen in the south of China, where pine boughs were being
used for firing the lime and cement kilns. At Tsingtao we saw the
pine bough fuel on the backs of mules, Fig. 80, coming from the
hills in Shantung province. Similar fuels were being used in Korea
and we have photographs of large pine bough fuel stacks, taken in
Japan at Funabashi, east from Tokyo.

The hill and mountain lands, wherever accessible to the densely
peopled plains, have long been cut over and as regularly has
afforestation been encouraged and deliberately secured even through
the transplanting of nursery stock grown expressly for that purpose.
We had read so much regarding the reckless destruction of forests in
China and Japan and had seen so few old forest trees except where
these had been protected about temples, graves or houses, that when
Rev. R. A. Haden, of the Elizabeth Blake hospital, near Soochow
insisted that the Chinese were deliberate foresters and that they
regularly grow trees for fuel, transplanting them when necessary to
secure a close and early stand, after the area had been cleared, we
were so much surprised that he generously volunteered to accompany
us westward on a two days journey into the hill country where the
practice could be seen.

A family owning a houseboat and living upon it was engaged for the
journey. This family consisted of a recently widowed father, his two
sons, newly married, and a helper. They were to transport us and
provide sleeping quarters for myself, Mr. Haden and a cook for the
consideration of $3.00, Mexican, per day and to continue the journey
through the night, leaving the day for observation in the hills.

The recent funeral had cost the father $100 and the wedding of the
two sons $50 each, while the remodeling of the houseboat to meet the
needs of the new family relations cost still another $100. To meet
these expenses it had been necessary to borrow the full amount,
$300. On $100 the father was paying 20 per cent interest; on $50 he
was compelled to pay 50 per cent interest. The balance he had
borrowed from friends without interest but with the understanding
that he would return the favor should occasion be required.

Rev. A. E. Evans informed us that it is a common practice in China
for neighbors to help one another in times of great financial
stress. This is one of the methods:

A neighbor may need 8000 cash. He prepares a feast and sends
invitations to a hundred friends. They know there has been no death
in his family and that there is no wedding, still it is understood
that he is in need of money. The feast is prepared at a small
expense. The invited guests come, each bringing eighty cash as a
present. The recipient is expected to keep a careful record of
contributing friends and to repay the sum. Another method is like
this: For some reason a man needs to borrow 20,000 cash. He proposes
to twenty of his friends that they organize a club to raise this
sum. If the friends agree each pays 1000 cash to the organizing
member. The balance of the club draw lots as to which member shall
be number two, three, four, five, etc., designating the order in
which payments shall be made. The man borrowing the money is then
under obligation to see that these payments are met in full at the
times agreed upon. Not infrequently a small rate of interest is
charged.

Rates of interest are very high in China, especially on small sums
where securities are not the best. Mr. Evans informs me that two per
cent per month is low and thirty per cent per annum is very commonly
collected. Such obligations are often never met but they do not
outlaw and may descend from father to son.

The boat cost $292.40 in U. S. currency; the yearly earning was
$107.50 to $120.40. The funeral cost $43 and $43 more was required
for the wedding of the two sons. They were receiving for the
services of six people $1.29 per day. An engagement for two weeks or
a month could have been made for materially lower rates and their
average daily earning, on the basis of three hundred days service in
the year, and the $120.40 total earning, would be only 40.13 cents,
less than seven cents each, hence their trip with us was two of
their banner days. Foreigners in Shanghai and other cities
frequently engage such houseboat service for two weeks or a month of
travel on the canals and rivers, finding it a very enjoyable as well
as inexpensive way of having a picnic outing.

On reaching the hill lands the next morning there were such scenes
as shown in Fig. 82, where the strips of tree growth, varying from
two to ten years, stretched directly up the slope, often in strong
contrast on account of the straight boundaries and different ages of
the timber. Some of these long narrow holdings were less than two
rods wide and on one of these only recently cut, up which we walked
for considerable distance, the young pine were springing up in
goodly numbers. As many as eighteen young trees were counted on a
width of six feet across the strip of thirty feet wide. On this area
everything had been recently cut clean. Even stumps and the large
roots were dug and saved for fuel.

In Fig. 83 are seen bundles of fuel from such a strip, just brought
into the village, the boughs retaining the leaves although the fuel
had been dried. The roots, too, are tied in with the limbs so that
everything is saved. On our walk to the hills we passed many people
bringing their loads of fuel swinging from carrying poles on their
shoulders. Inquiries regarding the afforestation of these strips of
hillside showed that the extensive digging necessitated by the
recovery of the roots usually caused new trees to spring up quickly
as volunteers from scattered seed and from the roots, so that
planting was not generally required. Talking with a group of people
as to where we could see some of the trees used for replanting the
hillsides, a lad of seven years was first to understand and
volunteered to conduct us to a planting. This he did and was
overjoyed on receipt of a trifle for his services. One of these
little pine nurseries is seen in Fig. 84, many being planted in
suitable places through the woods. The lad led us to two such
locations with whose whereabouts he was evidently very familiar,
although they were considerable distance from the path and far from
home. These small trees are used in filling in places where the
volunteer growth has not been sufficiently close. A strong
herbaceous growth usually springs up quickly on these newly cleared
lands and this too is cut for fuel or for use in making compost or
as green manure.

The grass which grows on the grave lands, if not fed off, is also
cut and saved for fuel. We saw several instances of this outside of
Shanghai, one where a mother with her daughter, provided with rake,
sickle, basket and bag, were gathering the dry stubble and grass of
the previous season, from the grave lands where there was less than
could be found on our closely mowed meadows. In Fig. 85 may be seen
a man who has just returned with such a load, and in his hand is the
typical rake of the Far East, made by simply bending bamboo splints,
claw-shape, and securing them as seen in the engraving.

In the Shantung province, in Chihli and in Manchuria, millet stems,
especially those of the great kaoliang or sorghum, are extensively
used for fuel and for building as well as for screens, fences and
matting. At Mukden the kaoliang was selling as fuel at $2.70 to
$3.00, Mexican, for a 100-bundle load of stalks, weighing seven
catty to the bundle. The yield per acre of kaoliang fuel amounts to
5600 pounds and the stalks are eight to twelve feet long, so that
when carried on the backs of mules or horses the animals are nearly
hidden by the load. The price paid for plant stem fuel from
agricultural crops, in different parts of China and Japan, ranged
from $1.30 to $2.85, U. S. currency, per ton. The price of
anthracite coal at Nanking was $7.76 per ton. Taking the weight of
dry oak wood at 3500 pounds per cord, the plant stem fuel, for equal
weight, was selling at $2.28 to $5.00.

Large amounts of wood are converted into charcoal in these countries
and sent to market baled in rough matting or in basketwork cases
woven from small brush and holding two to two and a half bushels.
When such wood is not converted into charcoal it is sawed into one
or two-foot lengths, split and marketed tied in bundles, as seen in
Fig. 77.

Along the Mukden-Antung railway in Manchuria fuel was also being
shipped in four-foot lengths, in the form of cordwood. In Korea
cattle were provided with a peculiar saddle for carrying wood in
four-foot sticks laid blanket-fashion over the animal, extending far
down on their sides. Thus was it brought from the hills to the
railway station. This wood, as in Manchuria, was cut from small
trees. In Korea, as in most parts of China where we visited, the
tree growth over the hills was generally scattering and thin on the
ground wherever there was not individual ownership in small
holdings. Under and among the scattering pine there were oak in many
cases, but these were always small, evidently not more than two or
three years standing, and appearing to have been repeatedly cut
back. It was in Korea that we saw so many instances of young leafy
oak boughs brought to the rice fields and used as green manure.

There was abundant evidence of periodic cutting between Mukden and
Antung in Manchuria; between Wiju and Fusan in Korea; and throughout
most of our journey in Japan; from Nagasaki to Moji and from
Shimonoseki to Yokohama. In all of these countries afforestation
takes place quickly and the cuttings on private holdings are made
once in ten, twenty or twenty-five years. When the wood is sold to
those coming for it the takers pay at the rate of 40 sen per one
horse load of forty kan, or 330 pounds, such as is seen in Fig. 87.
Director Ono, of the Akashi Experiment station, informed us that
such fuel loads in that prefecture, where the wood is cut once in
ten years, bring returns amounting to about $40 per acre for the
ten-year crop. This land was worth $40 per acre but when they are
suitable for orange groves they sell for $600 per acre. Mushroom
culture is extensively practiced under the shade of some of these
wooded areas, yielding under favorable conditions at the rate of
$100 per acre.

The forest covered area in Japan exclusive of Formosa and Karafuto,
amounts to a total of 54,196,728 acres, less than twenty millions of
which are in private holdings, the balance belonging to the state
and to the Imperial Crown.

In all of these countries there has been an extensive general use of
materials other than wood for building purposes and very many of the
substitutes for lumber are products grown on the cultivated fields.
The use of rice straw for roofing, as seen in the Hakone village,
Fig. 8, is very general throughout the rice growing districts, and
even the sides of houses may be similarly thatched, as was observed
in the Canton delta region, such a construction being warm for
winter and cool for summer. The life of these thatched roofs,
however, is short and they must be renewed as often as every three
to five years but the old straw is highly prized as fertilizer for
the fields on which it is grown, or it may serve as fuel, the ashes
only going to the fields.

Burned clay tile, especially for the cities and public buildings,
are very extensively used for roofing, clay being abundant and near
at hand. In Chihli and in Manchuria millet and sorghum stems, used
alone or plastered, as in Fig. 88, with a mud mortar, sometimes
mixed with lime, cover the roofs of vast numbers of the dwellings
outside the larger cities.

At Chiao Tou in Manchuria we saw the building of the thatched millet
roofs and the use of kaoliang stems as lumber. Rafters were set in
the usual way and covered with a layer about two inches thick of the
long kaoliang stems stripped of their leaves and tops. These were
tied together and to the rafters with twine, thus forming a sort of
matting. A layer of thin clay mortar was then spread over the
surface and well trowelled until it began to show on the under side.
Over this was applied a thatch of small millet stems bound in
bundles eight inches thick, cut square across the butts to eighteen
inches in length. They were dipped in water and laid in courses
after the manner of shingles but the butts of the stems are driven
forward to a slope which obliterates the shoulder, making the
courses invisible. In the better houses this thatching may be
plastered with earth mortar or with an earth-lime mortar, which is
less liable to wash in heavy rain.

The walls of the house we saw building were also sided with the
long, large kaoliang stems. An ordinary frame with posts and girts
about three feet apart had been erected, on sills and with plates
carrying the roof. Standing vertically against the girts and tied to
them, forming a close layer, were the kaoliang stems. These were
plastered outside and in with a layer of thin earth mortar. A
similar layer of stems, set up on the inside of the girts and
similarly plastered, formed the inner face of the wall of the house,
leaving dead air spaces between the girts.

Brick made from earth are very extensively used for house building,
chaff and short straw being used as a binding material, the brick
being simply dried in the sun, as seen in Fig. 89. A house in the
process of building, where the brick were being used, is seen in
Fig. 90. The foundation of the dwelling, it will be observed, was
laid with well-formed hard-burned brick, these being necessary to
prevent capillary moisture from the ground being drawn up and soften
the earth brick, making the wall unsafe.

Several kilns for burning brick, built of clay and earth, were
passed in our journey up the Pei ho, and stacked about them,
covering an area of more than eight hundred feet back from the river
were bundles of the kaoliang stems to serve as fuel in the kilns.

The extensive use of the unburned brick is necessitated by the
difficulty of obtaining fuel, and various methods are adopted to
reduce the number of burned brick required in construction. One of
these devices is shown in Fig. 79, where the city wall surrounding
Kashing is constructed of alternate courses of four layers of burned
brick separated by layers of simple earth concrete.

In addition to the multiple-function, farm-gown crops used for food,
fuel and building material, there is a large acreage devoted to the
growing of textile and fiber products and enormous quantities of
these are produced annually. In Japan, where some fifty millions of
people are chiefly fed on the produce of little more than 21,000
square miles of cultivated land, there was grown in 1906 more than
75,500,000 pounds of cotton, hemp, flax and China grass textile
stock, occupying 76,700 acres of the cultivated land. On 141,000
other acres there grew 115,000,000 pounds of paper mulberry and
Mitsumata, materials used in the manufacture of paper. From still
another 14,000 acres were taken 92,000,000 pounds of matting stuff,
while more than 957,000 acres were occupied by mulberry trees for
the feeding of silkworms, yielding to Japan 22,389,798 pounds of
silk. Here are more than 300,000,000 pounds of fiber and textile
stuff taken from 1860 square miles of the cultivated land, cutting
down the food producing area to 19,263 square miles and this area is
made still smaller by devoting 123,000 acres to tea, these producing
in 1906 58,900,000 pounds, worth nearly five million dollars. Nor do
these statements express the full measure of the producing power of
the 21,321 square miles of cultivated land, for, in addition to the
food and other materials named, there were also made $2,365,000
worth of braid from straw and wood shavings; $6,000,000 worth of
rice straw bags, packing cases and matting; and $1,085,000 worth of
wares from bamboo, willow and vine. As illustrating the intense home
industry of these people we may consider the fact that the 5,453,309
households of farmers in Japan produced in 1906, in their homes as
subsidiary work, $20,527,000 worth of manufactured articles. If
correspondingly exact statistical data were available from China and
Korea a similarity full utilization of cultural possibilities would
be revealed there.

This marvelous heritage of economy, industry and thrift, bred of the
stress of centuries, must not be permitted to lose virility through
contact with western wasteful practices, now exalted to seeming
virtues through the dazzling brilliancy of mechanical achievements.
More and more must labor be dignified in all homes alike, and
economy, industry and thrift become inherited impulses compelling
and satisfying.

Cheap, rapid, long distance transportation, already well started in
these countries, will bring with it a fuller utilization of the
large stores of coal and mineral wealth and of the enormous
available water power, and as a result there will come some
temporary lessening of the stress for fuel and with better forest
management some relief along the lines of building materials. But
the time is not a century distant when, throughout the world, a
fuller, better development must take place along the lines of these
most far-reaching and fundamental practices so long and so
effectively followed by the Mongolian races in China, Korea and
Japan. When the enormous water-power of these countries has been
harnessed and brought into the foot-hills and down upon the margins
of the valleys and plains in the form of electric current, let it,
if possible, be in a large measure so distributed as to become
available in the country village homes to lighten the burden and
lessen the human drudgery and yet increase the efficiency of the
human effort now so well bestowed upon subsidiary manufactures under
the guidance and initiative of the home, where there may be room to
breathe and for children to come up to manhood and womanhood in the
best conditions possible, rather than in enormous congested
factories.






VIII

TRAMPS AFIELD





On March 31st we took the 8 A. M. train on the Shanghai-Nanking
railway for Kunshan, situated thirty-two miles west from Shanghai,
to spend the day walking in the fields. The fare, second class, was
eighty cents, Mexican. A third class ticket would have been forty
cents and a first class, $1.60, practically two cents, one cent and
half a cent, our currency, per mile. The second class fare to
Nanking, a distance of 193 miles, was $1.72, U. S. currency, or a
little less than one cent per mile. While the car seats were not
upholstered, the service was good. Meals were served on the train in
either foreign or Chinese style, and tea, coffee or hot water to
drink. Hot, wet face cloths were regularly passed and many Chinese
daily newspapers were sold on the train, a traveler often buying
two.

In the vicinity of Kunshan a large area of farm land had been
acquired by the French catholic mission at a purchase price of $40,
Mexican, per mow, or at the rate of $103.20 per acre. This they
rented to the Chinese.

It was here that we first saw, at close range, the details of using
canal mud as a fertilizer, so extensively applied in China. Walking
through the fields we came upon the scene in the middle section of
Fig. 92 where, close on the right was such a reservoir as seen in
Fig. 58. Men were in it, dipping up the mud which had accumulated
over its bottom, pouring it on the bank in a field of windsor beans,
and the thin mud was then over two feet deep at that side and
flowing into the beans where it had already spread two rods, burying
the plants as the engraving shows. When sufficiently dry to be
readily handled this would be spread among the beans as we found it
being done in another field, shown in the upper section of the
illustration. Here four men were distributing such mud, which had
dried, between the rows, not to fertilize the beans, but for a
succeeding crop of cotton soon to be planted between the rows,
before they were harvested. The owner of this piece of land, with
whom we talked and who was superintending the work, stated that his
usual yield of these beans was three hundred catty per mow and that
they sold them green, shelled, at two cents, Mexican, per catty. At
this price and yield his return would be $15.48, gold, per acre. If
there was need of nitrogen and organic matter in the soil the vines
would be pulled green, after picking the beans, and composted with
the wet mud. If not so needed the dried stems would be tied in
bundles and sold as fuel or used at home, the ashes being returned
to the fields. The windsor beans are thus an early crop grown for
fertilizer, fuel and food.

This farmer was paying his laborers one hundred cash per day and
providing their meals, which he estimated worth two hundred cash
more, making twelve cents, gold, for a ten-hour day. Judging from
what we saw and from the amount of mud carried per load, we
estimated the men would distribute not less than eighty-four loads
of eighty pounds each per day, an average distance of five hundred
feet, making the cost 3.57 cents, gold, per ton for distribution.

The lower section of Fig. 92 shows another instance where mud was
being used on a narrow strip bordering the path along which we
walked, the amount there seen having been brought more than four
hundred feet, by one man before 10 A. M. on the morning the
photograph was taken. He was getting it from the bottom of a canal
ten feet deep, laid bare by the out-going tide. Already he had
brought more than a ton to his field.

The carrying baskets used for this work were in the form of huge
dustpans suspended from the carrying poles by two cords attached to
the side rims, and steadied by the hand grasping a handle provided
in the back for this purpose and for emptying the baskets by
tipping. With this construction the earth was readily raked upon the
basket and very easily emptied from it by simply raising the hands
when the destination was reached. No arrangement could be more
simple, expeditious or inexpensive for this man with his small
holding. In this simple manner has nearly all of the earth been
moved in digging the miles of canal and in building the long sea
walls. In Shanghai the mud carried through the storm sewers into
Soochow creek we saw being removed in the same manner during the
intervals when the tide was out.

In still another field, seen in Fig. 93, the upper portion shows
where canal mud had been applied at a rate exceeding seventy tons
per acre, and we were told that such dressings may be repeated as
often as every two years though usually at longer intervals, if
other and cheaper fertilizers could be obtained. In the lower
portion of the same illustration may be seen the section of canal
from which this mud was taken up the three earthen stairways built
of the mud itself and permitted to dry before using. Many such lines
of stairway were seen during our trips along the canals, only
recently made or in the process of building to be in readiness when
the time for applying the mud should arrive. To facilitate
collecting the mud from the shallow canals temporary dams may be
thrown across them at two places and the water between either
scooped or pumped out, laying the bottom bare, as is often done also
for fishing. The earth of the large grave mound seen across a canal
in the center background of the upper portion of the engraving had
been collected in a similar manner.

In the Chekiang province canal mud is extensively used in the
mulberry orchards as a surface dressing. We have referred to this
practice in southern China, and Fig. 94 is a view taken south of
Kashing early in April. The boat anchored in front of the mulberry
orchard is the home of a family coming from a distance, seeking
employment during the season for picking mulberry leaves to feed
silkworms. We were much surprised, on looking back at the boat after
closing the camera, to see the head of the family standing erect in
the center, having shoved back a section of the matting roof.

The dressing of mud applied to this field formed a loose layer more
than two inches deep and when compacted by the rains which would
follow would add not less than a full inch of soil over the entire
orchard, and the weight per acre could not be less than 120 tons.

Another equally, or even more, laborious practice followed by the
Chinese farmers in this province is the periodic exchange of soil
between mulberry orchards and the rice fields, their experience
being that soil long used in the mulberry orchards improves the
rice, while soil from the rice fields is very helpful when applied
to the mulberry orchards. We saw many instances, when traveling by
boat-train between Shanghai, Kashing and Hangchow, of soil being
carried from rice fields and either stacked on the banks or dropped
into the canal. Such soil was oftenest taken from narrow trenches
leading through the fields, laying them off in beds. It is our
judgment that the soil thrown into the canals undergoes important
changes, perhaps through the absorption of soluble plant food
substances such as lime, phosphoric acid and potash withdrawn from
the water, or through some growth or fermentation, which, in the
judgment of the farmer, makes the large labor involved in this
procedure worth while. The stacking of soil along the banks was
probably in preparation for its removal by boat to some of the
mulberry orchards.

It is clearly recognized by the farmers that mud collected from
those sections of the canal leading through country villages, such
as that seen in Fig. 10, is both inherently more fertile and in
better physical condition than that collected in the open country.
They attribute this difference to the effect of the village washing
in the canal, where soap is extensively used. The storm waters of
the city doubtless carry some fertilizing material also, although
sewage, as such, never finds its way into the canals. The washing
would be very likely to have a decided flocculating effect and so
render this material more friable when applied to the field.

One very important advantage which comes to the fields when heavily
dressed with such mud is that resulting from the addition of lime
which has become incorporated with the silts through their
flocculation and precipitation, and that which is added in the form
of snail shells abounding in the canals. The amount of these may be
realized from the large numbers contained in the mud recently thrown
out, as seen in the upper section of Fig. 95, where the pebbly
appearance of the surface is caused by snail shells. In the lower
section of the same illustration the white spots are snail shells
exposed in the soil of a recently spaded field. The shells are by no
means as numerous generally as here seen but yet sufficient to
maintain the supply of lime.

Several species of these snails are collected in quantities and used
as food. Piles containing bushels of the empty shells were seen
along the canals outside the villages. The snails are cooked in the
shell and often sold by measure to be eaten from the hand, as we buy
roasted peanuts or popcorn. When a purchase is made the vender clips
the spiral point from each shell with a pair of small shears. This
admits air and permits the snail to be readily removed by suction
when the lips are applied to the shell. In the canals there are also
large numbers of fresh water eel, shrimp and crabs as well as fish,
all of which are collected and used for human food. It is common,
when walking through the canal country, to come upon groups of
gleaners busy in the bottoms of the shallow agricultural canals,
gathering anything which may serve as food, even including small
bulbs or the fleshy roots of edible aquatic plants. To facilitate
the collection of such food materials sections of the canal are
often drained in the manner already described, so that gleaning may
be done by hand, wading in the mud. Families living in houseboats
make a business of fishing for shrimp. They trail behind the
houseboat one or two other boats carrying hundreds of shrimp traps
cleverly constructed in such manner that when they are trailed along
the bottom and disturb the shrimps they dart into the holes in the
trap, mistaking them for safe hiding places.

On the streets, especially during festival days, one may see young
people and others in social intercourse, busying their fingers and
their teeth eating cooked snails or often watermelon seeds, which
are extensively sold and thus eaten. This custom we saw first in the
streets of a city south of Kashing on the line of the new railway
between Hangchow and Shanghai. The first passenger train over the
line had been run the day before our visit, which was a festival day
and throngs of people were visiting the nine-story pagoda standing
on a high hill a mile outside the city limits. The day was one of
great surprises to these people who had never before seen a
passenger train, and my own person appeared to be a great curiosity
to many. No boy ever scrutinized the face of a caged chimpanzee
closer, with purer curiosity, or with less consideration for his
feelings than did a woman of fifty scrutinize mine, standing close
in front, not two feet distant, even bending forward as I sat upon a
bench writing at the railway station. People would pass their hands
along my coat sleeve to judge the cloth, and a boy felt of my shoes.
Walking through the street we passed many groups gathered about
tables and upon seats, visiting or in business conference, their
fingers occupied with watermelon seeds or with packages of cooked
snails. Along the pathway leading to the pagoda beggars had
distributed themselves, one in a place, at intervals of two or three
hundred feet, asking alms, most of them infirm with age or in some
other way physically disabled. We saw but one who appeared capable
of earning a living.

Travel between Shanghai and Hangchow at this time was heavy. Three
companies were running trains, of six or more houseboats, each towed
by a steam launch, and these were daily crowded with passengers. Our
train left Shanghai at 4:30 P. M., reaching Hangchow at 5:30 P. M.
the following day, covering a distance along the canal of something
more than 117 miles. We paid $5.16, gold, for the exclusive use of a
first-cabin, five-berth stateroom for myself and interpreter. It
occupied the full width of the boat, lacking about fourteen inches
of footway, and could be entered from either side down a flight of
five steps. The berths were flat, naked wooden shelves thirty inches
wide, separated by a partition headboard six inches high and without
railing in front. Each traveler provided his own bedding. A small
table upon which meals were served, a mirror on one side and a lamp
on the other, set in an opening in the partition, permitting it to
serve two staterooms, completed the furnishings. The roof of the
staterooms was covered with an awning and divided crosswise into two
tiers of berths, each thirty inches wide, by board partitions six
inches high. In these sections passengers spread their beds,
sleeping heads together, separated only by a headboard six inches
high. The awning was only sufficiently high to permit passengers to
sit erect. Ventilation was ample but privacy was nil. Curtains could
be dropped around the sides in stormy weather.

Meals were served to each passenger wherever he might be. Dinner
consisted of hot steamed rice brought in very heavy porcelain bowls
set inside a covered, wet, steaming hot wooden case. With the rice
were tiny dishes, butterchip size, of green clover, nicely cooked
and seasoned; of cooked bean curd served with shredded bamboo
sprouts; of tiny pork strips with bean curd; of small bits of liver
with bamboo sprouts; of greens, and hot water for tea. If the
appetite is good one may have a second helping of rice and as much
hot water for tea as desired. There was no table linen, no napkins
and everything but the tea had to be negotiated with chop sticks,
or, these failing, with the fingers. When the meal was finished the
table was cleared and water, hot if desired, was brought for your
hand basin, which with tea, teacup and bedding, constitute part of
the traveler's outfit. At frequent intervals, up to ten P. M., a
crier walked about the deck with hot water for those who might
desire an extra cup of tea, and again in the early morning.

At this season of the year Chinese incubators were being run to
their full capacity and it was our good fortune to visit one of
these, escorted by Rev. R. A. Haden, who also acted as interpreter.
The art of incubation is very old and very extensively practiced in
China. An interior view of one of these establishments is shown in
Fig. 96, where the family were hatching the eggs of hens, ducks and
geese, purchasing the eggs and selling the young as hatched. As in
the case of so many trades in China, this family was the last
generation of a long line whose lives had been spent in the same
work. We entered through their store, opening on the street of the
narrow village seen in Fig. 10. In the store the eggs were purchased
and the chicks were sold, this work being in charge of the women of
the family. It was in the extreme rear of the home that thirty
incubators were installed, all doing duty and each having a capacity
of 1,200 hens' eggs. Four of these may be seen in the illustration
and one of the baskets which, when two-thirds filled with eggs, is
set inside of each incubator.

Each incubator consists of a large earthenware jar having a door cut
in one side through which live charcoal may be introduced and the
fire partly smothered under a layer of ashes, this serving as the
source of heat. The jar is thoroughly insulated, cased in basketwork
and provided with a cover, as seen in the illustration. Inside the
outer jar rests a second of nearly the same size, as one teacup may
in another. Into this is lowered the large basket with its 600 hens'
eggs, 400 ducks' eggs or 175 geese' eggs, as the case may be. Thirty
of these incubators were arranged in two parallel rows of fifteen
each. Immediately above each row, and utilizing the warmth of the
air rising from them, was a continuous line of finishing hatchers
and brooders in the form of woven shallow trays with sides warmly
padded with cotton and with the tops covered with sets of quilts of
different thickness.

After a basket of hens' eggs has been incubated four days it is
removed and the eggs examined by lighting, to remove those which are
infertile before they have been rendered unsalable. The infertile
eggs go to the store and the basket is returned to the incubator.
Ducks' eggs are similarly examined after two days and again after
five days incubation; and geese' eggs after six days and again after
fourteen days. Through these precautions practically all loss from
infertile eggs is avoided and from 95 to 98 per cent of the fertile
eggs are hatched, the infertile eggs ranging from 5 to 25 per cent.

After the fourth day in the incubator all eggs are turned five times
in twenty-four hours. Hens' eggs are kept in the lower incubator
eleven days; ducks' eggs thirteen days, and geese' eggs sixteen
days, after which they are transferred to the trays. Throughout the
incubation period the most careful watch and control is kept over
the temperature. No thermometer is used but the operator raises the
lid or quilt, removes an egg, pressing the large end into the eye
socket. In this way a large contact is made where the skin is
sensitive, nearly constant in temperature, but little below blood
heat and from which the air is excluded for the time. Long practice
permits them thus to judge small differences of temperature
expeditiously and with great accuracy; and they maintain different
temperatures during different stages of the incubation. The men
sleep in the room and some one is on duty continuously, making the
rounds of the incubators and brooders, examining and regulating each
according to its individual needs, through the management of the
doors or the shifting of the quilts over the eggs in the brooder
trays where the chicks leave the eggs and remain until they go to
the store. In the finishing trays the eggs form rather more than one
continuous layer but the second layer does not cover more than a
fifth or a quarter of the area. Hens' eggs are in these trays ten
days, ducks' and geese' eggs, fourteen days.

After the chickens have been hatched sufficiently long to require
feeding they are ready for market and are then sorted according to
sex and placed in separate shallow woven trays thirty inches in
diameter. The sorting is done rapidly and accurately through the
sense of touch, the operator recognizing the sex by gently pinching
the anus. Four trays of young chickens were in the store fronting on
the street as we entered and several women were making purchases,
taking five to a dozen each. Dr. Haden informed me that nearly every
family in the cities, and in the country villages raise a few, but
only a few, chickens and it is a common sight to see grown chickens
walking about the narrow streets, in and out of the open stores,
dodging the feet of the occupants and passers-by. At the time of our
visit this family was paying at the rate of ten cents, Mexican, for
nine hens' and eight ducks' eggs, and were selling their largest
strong chickens at three cents each. These figures, translated into
our currency, make the purchase price for eggs nearly 48 cents, and
the selling price for the young chicks $1.29, per hundred, or
thirteen eggs for six cents and seven chickens for nine cents.

It is difficult even to conceive, not to say measure, the vast
import of this solution of how to maintain, in the millions of
homes, a constantly accessible supply of absolutely fresh and
thoroughly sanitary animal food in the form of meat and eggs. The
great density of population in these countries makes the problem of
supplying eggs to the people very different from that in the United
States. Our 250,600,000 fowl in 1900 was at the rate of three to
each person but in Japan, with her 16,500,000 fowl, she had in 1906
but one for every three people. Her number per square mile of
cultivated land however was 825, while in the United States, in
1900, the number of fowls per square mile of improved farm land was
but 387. To give to Japan three fowls to each person there would
needs be an average of about nine to each acre of her cultivated
land, whereas in the United States there were in 1900 nearly two
acres of improved farm land for each fowl. We have no statistics
regarding the number of fowl in China or the number of eggs produced
but the total is very large and she exports to Japan. The large boat
load of eggs seen in Fig. 97 had just arrived from the country,
coming into Shanghai in one of her canals.

Besides applying canal mud directly to the fields in the ways
described there are other very extensive practices of composting it
with organic matter of one or another kind and of then using the
compost on the fields. The next three illustrations show some of the
steps and something of the tremendous labor of body, willingly and
cheerfully incurred, and something of the forethought practiced,
that homes may be maintained and that grandparents, parents, wives
and children need neither starve nor beg. We had reached a place
seen in Fig. 98, where eight bearers were moving winter compost to a
recently excavated pit in an adjoining field shown in Fig. 99.

Four months before the camera fixed the activity shown, men had
brought waste from the stables of Shanghai fifteen miles by water,
depositing it upon the canal bank between layers of thin mud dipped
from the canal, and left it to ferment. The eight men were removing
this compost to the pit seen in Fig. 99, then nearly filled. Near by
in the same field was a second pit seen in Fig. 100, excavated three
feet deep and rimmed about with the earth removed, making it two
feet deeper.

After these pits had been filled the clover which was in blossom
beyond the pits would be cut and stacked upon them to a height of
five to eight feet and this also saturated, layer by layer, with mud
brought from the canal, and allowed to ferment twenty to thirty days
until the juices set free had been absorbed by the winter compost
beneath, helping to carry the ripening of that still further, and
until the time had arrived for fitting the ground for the next crop.
This organic matter, fermented with the canal mud, would then be
distributed by the men over the field, carried a third time on their
shoulders, notwithstanding its weight was many tons.

This manure had been collected, loaded and carried fifteen miles by
water; it had been unloaded upon the bank and saturated with canal
mud; the field had been fitted for clover the previous fall and
seeded; the pits had been dug in the fields; the winter compost had
been carried and placed in the pits; the clover was to be cut,
carried by the men on their shoulders, stacked layer by layer and
saturated with mud dipped from the canal; the whole would later be
distributed over the field and finally the earth removed from the
pits would be returned to them, that the service of no ground upon
which a crop might grow should be lost.

Such are the tasks to which Chinese farmers hold themselves, because
they are convinced desired results will follow, because their
holdings are so small and their families so large. These practices
are so extensive in China and so fundamental in the part they play
in the maintenance of high productive power in their soils that we
made special effort to follow them through different phases. In Fig.
101 we saw the preparation being made to build one of the clover
compost stacks saturated with canal mud. On the left the thin mud
had been dipped from the canal; way-farers in the center were
crossing the foot-bridge of the country by-way; and beyond rises the
conical thatch to shelter the water buffalo when pumping for
irrigating the rice crop to be fed with this plant food in
preparation. On the right were two large piles of green clover
freshly cut and a woman of the family at one of them was spreading
it to receive the mud, while the men-folk were coming from the field
with more clover on their carrying poles. We came upon this scene
just before the dinner hour and after the workers had left another
photograph was taken at closer range and from a different side,
giving the view seen in Fig. 102. The mud had been removed some days
and become too stiff to spread, so water was being brought from the
canal in the pails at the right for reducing its consistency to that
of a thin porridge, permitting it to more completely smear and
saturate the clover. The stack grew, layer by layer, each saturated
with the mud, tramped solid with the bare feet, trousers rolled
high. Provision had been made here for building four other stacks.

Further along we came upon the scene in Fig. 103 where the building
of the stack of compost and the gathering of the mud from the canal
were simultaneous. On one side of the canal the son, using a
clam-shell form of dipper made of basket-work, which could be opened
and shut with a pair of bamboo handles, had nearly filled the middle
section of his boat with the thin ooze, while on the other side,
against the stack which was building, the mother was emptying a
similar boat, using a large dipper, also provided with a bamboo
handle. The man on the stack is a good scale for judging its size.

We came next upon a finished stack on the bank of another canal,
shown in Fig. 104, where our umbrella was set to serve as a scale.
This stack measured ten by ten feet on the ground, was six feet high
and must have contained more than twenty tons of the green compost.
At the same place, two other stacks had been started, each about
fourteen by fourteen feet, and foundations were laid for six others,
nine in all.

During twenty or more days this green nitrogenous organic matter is
permitted to lie fermenting in contact with the fine soil particles
of the ooze with which it had been charged. This is a remarkable
practice in that it is a very old, intensive application of an
important fundamental principle only recently understood and added
to the science of agriculture, namely, the power of organic matter,
decaying rapidly in contact with soil, to liberate from it soluble
plant food; and so it would be a great mistake to say that these
laborious practices are the result of ignorance, of a lack of
capacity for accurate thinking or of power to grasp and utilize. If
the agricultural lands of the United States are ever called upon to
feed even 1200 millions of people, a number proportionately less
than one-half that being fed in Japan today, very different
practices from those we are now following will have been adopted. We
can believe they will require less human bodily effort and be more
efficient. But the knowledge which can make them so is not yet in
the possession of our farmers, much less the conviction that plant
feeding and more persistent and better directed soil management are
necessary to such yields as will then be required.

Later, just before the time for transplanting rice, we returned to
the same district to observe the manner of applying this compost to
the field, and Fig. 105 is prepared from photographs taken then,
illustrating the activities of one family, as seen during the
morning of May 28th. Their home was in a near-by village and their
holding was divided into four nearly rectangular paddies, graded to
water level, separated by raised rims, and having an area of nearly
two acres. Three of these little fields are partly shown in the
illustration, and the fourth in Fig. 160. In the background of the
upper section of Fig. 105, and under the thatched shelter, was a
native Chinese cow, blindfolded and hitched to the power-wheel of a
large wooden-chain pump, lifting water from the canal and flooding
the field in the foreground, to soften the soil for plowing. Riding
on the power-wheel was a girl of some twelve years, another of seven
and a baby. They were there for entertainment and to see that the
cow kept at work. The ground had been sufficiently softened so that
the father had begun plowing, the cow sinking to her knees as she
walked. In the same paddy, but shown in the section below, a boy was
spreading the clover compost with his hands, taking care that it was
finely divided and evenly scattered. He had been once around before
the plowing began. This compost had been brought from a stack by the
side of a canal, and two other men were busy still bringing the
material to one of the other paddies, one of whom, with his baskets
on the carrying pole appears in the third section. Between these two
paddies was the one seen at the bottom of the illustration, which
had matured a crop of rape that had been pulled and was lying in
swaths ready to be moved. Two other men were busy here, gathering
the rape into large bundles and carrying it to the village home,
where the women were threshing out the seed, taking care not to
break the stems which, after threshing, were tied into bundles for
fuel. The seed would be ground and from it an oil expressed, while
the cake would be used as a fertilizer.

This crop of rape is remarkable for the way it fits into the
economies of these people. It is a near relative of mustard and
cabbage; it grows rapidly during the cooler portions of the season,
the spring crop ripening before the planting of rice and cotton; its
young shoots and leaves are succulent, nutritious, readily digested
and extensively used as human food, boiled and eaten fresh, or
salted for winter use, to be served with rice; the mature stems,
being woody, make good fuel; and it bears a heavy crop of seed, rich
in oil, which has been extensively used for lights and in cooking,
while the rape seed cake is highly prized as a manure and very
extensively so used.

In the early spring the country is luxuriantly green with the large
acreage of rape, later changing to a sea of most brilliant yellow
and finally to an ashy grey when the leaves fall and the stems and
pods ripen. Like the dairy cow, rape produces a fat, in the ratio of
about forty pounds of oil to a hundred pounds of seed, which may be
eaten, burned or sold without materially robbing the soil of its
fertility if the cake and the ashes from the stems are returned to
the fields, the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen of which the oil is
almost wholly composed coming from the atmosphere rather than from
the soil.

In Japan rape is grown as a second crop on both the upland and paddy
fields, and in 1906 she produced more than 5,547,000 bushels of the
seed; $1,845,000 worth of rape seed cake, importing enough more to
equal a total value of $2,575,000, all of which was used as a
fertilizer, the oil being exported. The yield of seed per acre in
Japan ranges between thirteen and sixteen bushels, and the farmer
whose field was photographed estimated that his returns from the
crop would be at the rate of 640 pounds of seed per acre, worth
$6.19, and 8,000 pounds of stems worth as fuel $5.16 per acre.






IX

THE UTILIZATION OF WASTE





One of the most remarkable agricultural practices adopted by any
civilized people is the centuries-long and well nigh universal
conservation and utilization of all human waste in China, Korea and
Japan, turning it to marvelous account in the maintenance of soil
fertility and in the production of food. To understand this
evolution it must be recognized that mineral fertilizers so
extensively employed in modern western agriculture, like the
extensive use of mineral coal, had been a physical impossibility to
all people alike until within very recent years. With this fact must
be associated the very long unbroken life of these nations and the
vast numbers their farmers have been compelled to feed.

When we reflect upon the depleted fertility of our own older farm
lands, comparatively few of which have seen a century's service, and
upon the enormous quantity of mineral fertilizers which are being
applied annually to them in order to secure paying yields, it
becomes evident that the time is here when profound consideration
should be given to the practices the Mongolian race has maintained
through many centuries, which permit it to be said of China that
one-sixth of an acre of good land is ample for the maintenance of
one person, and which are feeding an average of three people per
acre of farm land in the three southernmost of the four main islands
of Japan.

From the analyses of mixed human excreta made by Wolff in Europe and
by Kellner in Japan it appears that, as an average, these carry in
every 2000 pounds 12.7 pounds of nitrogen, 4 pounds of potassium and
1.7 pounds of phosphorus. On this basis and that of Carpenter, who
estimates the average amount of excreta per day for the adult at 40
ounces, the average annual production per million of adult
population is 5,794,300 pounds of nitrogen; 1,825,000 pounds of
potassium, and 775,600 pounds of phosphorus carried in 456,250 tons
of excreta. The figures which Hall cites in Fertilizers and Manures,
would make these amounts 7,940,000 pounds of nitrogen; 3,070,500
pounds of potassium, and 1,965,600 pounds of phosphorus, but the
figures he takes and calls high averages give 12,000,000 of
nitrogen; 4,151,000 pounds of potassium, and 3,057,600 pounds of
phosphorus.

In 1908 the International Concessions of the city of Shanghai sold
to one Chinese contractor for $31,000, gold, the privilege of
collecting 78,000 tons of human waste, under stipulated regulations,
and of removing it to the country for sale to farmers. The flotilla
of boats seen in Fig. 106 is one of several engaged daily in
Shanghai throughout the year in this service.

Dr. Kawaguchi, of the National Department of Agriculture and
Commerce, taking his data from their records, informed us that the
human manure saved and applied to the fields of Japan in 1908
amounted to 23,850,295 tons, which is an average of 1.75 tons per
acre of their 21,321 square miles of cultivated land in their four
main islands.

On the basis of the data of Wolff, Kellner and Carpenter, or of
Hall, the people of the United States and of Europe are pouring into
the sea, lakes or rivers and into the underground waters from
5,794,300 to 12,000,000 pounds of nitrogen; 1,881,900 to 4,151,000
pounds of potassium, and 777,200 to 3,057,600 pounds of phosphorus
per million of adult population annually, and this waste we esteem
one of the great achievements of our civilization. In the Far East,
for more than thirty centuries, these enormous wastes have been
religiously saved and today the four hundred million of adult
population send back to their fields annually 150,000 tons of
phosphorus; 376,000 tons of potassium, and 1,158,000 tons of
nitrogen comprised in a gross weight exceeding 182 million tons,
gathered from every home, from the country villages and from the
great cities like Hankow-Wuchang-Hanyang with its 1,770,000 people
swarming on a land area delimited by a radius of four miles.

Man is the most extravagant accelerator of waste the world has ever
endured. His withering blight has fallen upon every living thing
within his reach, himself not excepted; and his besom of destruction
in the uncontrolled hands of a generation has swept into the sea
soil fertility which only centuries of life could accumulate, and
yet this fertility is the substratum of all that is living. It must
be recognized that the phosphate deposits which we are beginning to
return to our fields are but measures of fertility lost from older
soils, and indices of processes still in progress. The rivers of
North America are estimated to carry to the sea more than 500 tons
of phosphorus with each cubic mile of water. To such loss modern
civilization is adding that of hydraulic sewage disposal through
which the waste of five hundred millions of people might be more
than 194,300 tons of phosphorus annually, which could not be
replaced by 1,295,000 tons of rock phosphate, 75 per cent pure. The
Mongolian races, with a population now approaching the figure named;
occupying an area little more than one-half that of the United
States, tilling less than 800,000 square miles of land, and much of
this during twenty, thirty or perhaps forty centuries; unable to
avail themselves of mineral fertilizers, could not survive and
tolerate such waste. Compelled to solve the problem of avoiding such
wastes, and exercising the faculty which is characteristic of the
race, they "cast down their buckets where they were", as

*A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly
vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal,
"Water, water; we die of thirst!" The answer from the friendly
vessel at once came back, "Cast down your bucket where you are." A
second time the signal, "Water, water; Send us water!" ran up from
the distressed vessel, and was answered, "Cast down your bucket
where you are." And a third and fourth signal for water was
answered, "Cast down your bucket where you are." The captain of the
distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his
bucket, and it came up full of fresh sparkling water from the mouth
of the Amazon river. *Booker T. Washington, Atlanta address.

Not even in great cities like Canton, built in the meshes of
tideswept rivers and canals; like Hankow on the banks of one of the
largest rivers in the world; nor yet in modern Shanghai, Yokohama or
Tokyo, is such waste permitted. To them such a practice has meant
race suicide and they have resisted the temptation so long that it
has ceased to exist.

Dr. Arthur Stanley, Health officer of the city of Shanghai, in his
annual report for 1899, considering this subject as a municipal
problem, wrote:

"Regarding the bearing on the sanitation of Shanghai of the
relationship between Eastern and Western hygiene, it may be said,
that if prolonged national life is indicative of sound sanitation,
the Chinese are a race worthy of study by all who concern themselves
with Public Health. Even without the returns of a Registrar-General
it is evident that in China the birth rate must very considerably
exceed the death rate, and have done so in an average way during the
three or four thousand years that the Chinese nation has existed.
Chinese hygiene, when compared with medieval English, appears to
advantage. The main problem of sanitation is to cleanse the dwelling
day by day, and if this can be done at a profit so much the better.
While the ultra-civilized Western elaborates destructors for burning
garbage at a financial loss and turns sewage into the sea, the
Chinaman uses both for manure. He wastes nothing while the sacred
duty of agriculture is uppermost in his mind. And in reality recent
bacterial work has shown that faecal matter and house refuse are
best destroyed by returning them to clean soil, where natural
purification takes place. The question of destroying garbage can, I
think, under present conditions in Shanghai, be answered in a
decided negative. While to adopt the water-carriage system for
sewage and turn it into the river, whence the water supply is
derived, would be an act of sanitary suicide. It is best, therefore,
to make use of what is good in Chinese hygiene, which demands
respect, being, as it is, the product of an evolution extending from
more than a thousand years before the Christian era."

The storage of such waste in China is largely in stoneware
receptacles such as are seen in Fig. 109, which are hard-burned,
glazed terra-cotta urns, having capacities ranging from 500 to 1000
pounds. Japan more often uses sheltered cement-lined pits such as
are seen in Fig. 110.

In the three countries the carrying to the fields is oftenest in
some form of pail, as seen in Fig. 111, a pair of which are borne
swinging from the carrying pole. In applying the liquid to the field
or garden the long handle dipper is used, seen in Fig. 112.

We are beginning to husband with some economy the waste from our
domestic animals but in this we do not approach that of China, Korea
and Japan. People in China regularly search for and collect
droppings along the country and caravan roads. Repeatedly, when
walking through city streets, we observed such materials quickly and
apparently eagerly gathered, to be carefully stored under conditions
which ensure small loss from either leaching or unfavorable
fermentation. In some mulberry orchards visited the earth had been
carefully hoed back about the trunks of trees to a depth of three or
four inches from a circle having a diameter of six to eight feet,
and upon these areas were placed the droppings of silkworms, the
moulted skins, together with the bits of leaves and stem left after
feeding. Some disposition of such waste must be made. They return at
once to the orchard all but the silk produced from the leaves;
unnecessary loss is thus avoided and the material enters at once the
service of forcing the next crop of leaves.

On the farm of Mrs. Wu, near Kashing, while studying the operation
of two irrigation pumps driven by two cows, lifting water to flood
her twenty-five acres of rice field preparatory to transplanting, we
were surprised to observe that one of the duties of the lad who had
charge of the animals was to use a six-quart wooden dipper with a
bamboo handle six feet long to collect all excreta, before they fell
upon the ground, and transfer them to a receptacle provided for the
purpose. There came a flash of resentment that such a task was set
for the lad, for we were only beginning to realize to what lengths
the practice of economy may go, but there was nothing irksome
suggested in the boy's face. He performed the duty as a matter of
course and as we thought it through there was no reason why it
should have been otherwise. In fact, the only right course was being
taken. Conditions would have been worse if the collection had not
been made. It made possible more rice. Character of substantial
quality was building in the lad which meant thrift in the growing
man and continued life for the nation.

We have adverted to the very small number of flies observed anywhere
in the course of our travel, but its significance we did not realize
until near the end of our stay. Indeed, for some reason, flies were
more in evidence during the first two days on the steamship, out
from Yokohama on our return trip to America, than at any time before
on our journey. It is to be expected that the eternal vigilance
which seizes every waste, once it has become such, putting it in
places of usefulness, must contribute much toward the destruction of
breeding places, and it may be these nations have been mindful of
the wholesomeness of their practice and that many phases of the
evolution of their waste disposal system have been dictated by and
held fast to through a clear conception of sanitary needs.

Much intelligence and the highest skill are exhibited by these
old-world farmers in the use of their wastes. In Fig. 113 is one of
many examples which might be cited. The man walking down the row
with his manure pails swinging from his shoulders informed us on his
return that in his household there were twenty to be fed; that from
this garden of half an acre of land he usually sold a product
bringing in $400, Mexican,--$172, gold. The crop was cucumbers in
groups of two rows thirty inches apart and twenty-four inches
between the groups. The plants were eight to ten inches apart in the
row. He had just marketed the last of a crop of greens which
occupied the space between the rows of cucumbers seen under the
strong, durable, light and very readily removable trellises. On May
28 the vines were beginning to run, so not a minute had been lost in
the change of crop. On the contrary this man had added a month to
his growing season by over-lapping his crops, and the trellises
enabled him to feed more plants of this type than there was room for
vines on the ground. With ingenuity and much labor he had made his
half acre for cucumbers equivalent to more than two. He had removed
the vines entirely from the ground; had provided a travel space two
feet wide, down which he was walking, and he had made it possible to
work about the roots of every plant for the purpose of hoeing and
feeding. Four acres of cucumbers handled by American field methods
would not yield more than this man's one, and he grows besides two
other crops the same season.

The difference is not so much in activity of muscle as it is in
alertness and efficiency of the grey matter of the brain. He sees
and treats each plant individually, he loosens the ground so that
his liquid manure drops immediately beneath the surface within reach
of the active roots. If the rainfall has been scanty and the soil is
dry he may use ten of water to two of night soil, not to supply
water but to make certain sufficiently deep penetration. If the
weather is rainy and the soil over wet, the food is applied more
concentrated, not to lighten the burden but to avoid waste by
leaching and over saturation. While ever crowding growth he never
overfeeds. Forethought, after-thought and the mind focused on the
work in hand are characteristic of these people. We do not recall to
have seen a man smoking while at work. They enjoy smoking, but
prefer to do this also with the attention undivided and thus get
more for their money.

On another date earlier in May we were walking in the fields without
an interpreter. For half an hour we stood watching an old gardener
fitting the soil with his spading hoe in the manner seen in Fig. 26,
where the graves of his ancestors occupy a part of the land.
Angleworms were extremely numerous, as large around as an ordinary
lead pencil and, when not extended, two-thirds as long, decidedly
greenish in color. Nearly every stroke of the spade exposed two to
five of these worms but so far as we observed, and we watched the
man closely, pulverizing the soil, he neither injured nor left
uncovered a single worm. While he seemed to make no effort to avoid
injuring them or to cover them with earth, and while we could not
talk with him, we are convinced that his action was continually
guarded against injuring the worms.

They certainly were subsoiling his garden deeply and making possible
a freer circulation of air far below the surface. Their great
abundance proved a high content of organic matter present in the
soil and, as the worms ate their way through it, passing the soil
through their bodies, the yearly volume of work done by them was
very great. In the fields flooded preparatory to fitting them for
rice these worms are forced to the surface in enormous numbers and
large flocks of ducks are taken to such fields to feed upon them.

In another field a crop of barley was nearing maturity. An adjacent
strip of land was to be fitted and planted. The leaning barley heads
were in the way. Not one must be lost and every inch of ground must
be put to use. The grain along the margin, for a breadth of sixteen
inches, had been gathered into handfuls and skillfully tied, each
with an unpulled barley stem, without breaking the straw, thus
permitting even the grains in that head to fill and be gathered with
the rest, while the tying set all straws well aslant, out of the
way, and permitted the last inch of naked ground to be fitted
without injuring the grain.

In still another instance a man was growing Irish potatoes to market
when yet small. He had enriched his soil; he would apply water if
the rains were not timely and sufficient, and had fed the plants. He
had planted in rows only twelve to fourteen inches apart with a hill
every eight inches in the row. The vines stood strong, straight,
fourteen inches high and as even as a trimmed hedge. The leaves and
stems were turgid, the deepest green and as prime and glossy as a
prize steer. So close were the plants that there was leaf surface to
intercept the sunshine falling on every square inch of the patch.
There were no potato beetles and we saw no signs of injury but the
gardener was scanning the patch with the eye of a robin. He spied
the slightest first drooping of leaves in a stem; went after the
difficulty and brought and placed in our hand a cutworm, a young
tuber the size of a marble and a stem cut half off, which he was
willing to sacrifice because of our evident interest. But the two
friends who had met were held apart by the babel of tongues.

Nothing is costing the world more; has made so many enemies, and has
so much hindered the forming of friendships as the inability to
fully understand; hence the dove that brings world peace must fly on
the wings of a common language, and the bright star in the east is
world commerce, rising on rapidly developing railway and steamship
lines, heralded and directed by electric communication. With world
commerce must come mutual confidence and friendship requiring a full
understanding and therefore a common tongue. Then world peace will
be permanently assured. It is coming inevitably and faster than we
think. Once this desired end is seriously sought, the carrying of
three generations of children through the public schools where the
world language is taught together with the mother tongue, and the
passing of the parents and grandparents, would effect the change.

The important point regarding these Far East people, to which
attention should be directed, is that effective thinking, clear and
strong, prevails among the farmers who have fed and are still
feeding the dense populations from the products of their limited
areas. This is further indicated in the universal and extensive use
of plant ashes derived from fuel grown upon cultivated fields and
upon the adjacent hill and mountain lands.

We were unable to secure exact data regarding the amount of fuel
burned annually in these countries, and of ashes used as fertilizer,
but a cord of dry oak wood weighs about 3500 pounds, and the weight
of fuel used in the home and in manufactures must exceed that of two
cords per household. Japan has an average of 5.563 people per
family. If we allow but 1300 pounds of fuel per capita, Japan's
consumption would be 31,200,000 tons. In view of the fact that a
very large share of the fuel used in these countries is either
agricultural plant stems, with an average ash content of 5 per cent,
or the twigs and even leaves of trees, as in the case of pine bough
fuel, 4.5 per cent of ash may be taken as a fair estimate. On this
basis, and with a content of phosphorus equal to .5 per cent, and of
potassium equal to 5 per cent, the fuel ash for Japan would amount
to 1,404,000 tons annually, carrying 7020 tons of phosphorus and
70,200 tons of potassium, together with more than 400,000 tons of
limestone, which is returned annually to less than 21,321 square
miles of cultivated land.

In China, with her more than four hundred millions of people, a
similar rate of fuel consumption would make the phosphorus and
potassium returned to her fields more than eight times the amounts
computed for Japan. On the basis of these statements Japan's annual
saving of phosphorus from the waste of her fuel would be equivalent
to more than 46,800 tons of rock phosphate having a purity of 75 per
cent, or in the neighborhood of seven pounds per acre. If this
amount, even with the potash and limestone added, appears like a
trifling addition of fertility it is important for Americans to
remember that even if this is so, these people have felt compelled
to make the saving.

In the matter of returning soluble potassium to the cultivated
fields Japan would be applying with her ashes the equivalent of no
less than 156,600 tons of pure potassium sulphate, equal to 23
pounds per acre; while the lime carbonate so applied annually would
be some 62 pounds per acre.

In addition to the forest lands, which have long been made to
contribute plant food to the cultivated fields through fuel ashes,
there are large areas which contribute green manure and compost
material. These are chiefly hill lands, aggregating some twenty per
cent of the cultivated fields, which bear mostly herbaceous growth.
Some 2,552,741 acres of these lands may be cut over three times each
season, yielding, in 1903, an average of 7980 pounds per acre. The
first cutting of this hill herbage is mainly used on the rice fields
as green manure, it being tramped into the mud between the rows
after the manner seen in Fig. 114.

This man had been with basket and sickle to gather green herbage
wherever he could and had brought it to his rice paddy. The day in
July was extremely sultry. We came upon him wading in the water half
way to his knees, carefully laying the herbage he had gathered
between alternate rows of his rice, one handful in a place, with
tips overlapping. This done he took the attitude seen in the
illustration and, gathering the materials into a compact bunch,
pressed it beneath the surface with his foot. The two hands smoothed
the soft mud over the grass and righted the disturbed spears of rice
in the two adjacent hills. Thus, foot following foot, one bare
length ahead, the succeeding bunches of herbage were submerged until
the last had been reached, following between alternate rows only a
foot apart, there being a hill every nine to ten inches in the row
and the hands grasping and being drawn over every one in the paddy.

He was renting the land, paying therefor forty kan of rice per tan,
and his usual yield was eighty kan. This is forty-four bushels of
sixty pounds per acre. In unfavorable seasons his yield might be
less but still his rent would be forty kan per tan unless it was
clear that he had done all that could reasonably be expected of him
in securing the crop. It is difficult for Americans to understand
how it is possible for the will of man, even when spurred by the
love of home and family, to hold flesh to tasks like these.

The second and third cuttings of herbage from the genya lands in
Japan are used for the preparation of compost applied on the
dry-land fields in the fall or in the spring of the following
season. Some of these lands are pastured, but approximately
10,185,500 tons of green herbage grown and gathered from the hills
contributes much of its organic matter and all of its ash to enrich
the cultivated fields. Such wild growth areas in Japan are the
commons of the near by villages, to which the people are freely
admitted for the purpose of cutting the herbage. A fixed time may be
set for cutting and a limit placed upon the amount which may be
carried away, which is done in the manner seen in Fig. 115. It is
well recognized by the people that this constant cutting and removal
of growth from the hill lands, with no return, depletes the soils
and reduces the amount of green herbage they are able to secure.

Through the kindness of Dr. Daikuhara of the Imperial Agricultural
Experiment Station at Tokyo we are able to give the average
composition of the green leaves and young stems of five of the most
common wild species of plants cut for green manure in June. In each
1000 pounds the amount of water is 562.18 pounds; of organic matter,
382.68 pounds; of ash, 55.14 pounds; nitrogen, 4.78 pounds;
potassium, 2.407 pounds, and phosphorus, .34 pound. On the basis of
this composition and an aggregate yield of 10,185,500 tons, there
would be annually applied to the cultivated fields 3463 tons of
phosphorus and 24,516 tons of potassium derived from the genya
lands.

In addition to this the run-off from both the mountain and the genya
lands is largely used upon the rice fields, more than sixteen inches
of water being applied annually to them in some prefectures. If such
waters have the composition of river waters in North America, twelve
inches of water applied to the rice fields of the three main islands
would contribute no less than 1200 tons of phosphorus and 19,000
tons of potassium annually.

Dr. Kawaguchi, of the National Department of Agriculture and
Commerce, informed us that in 1908 Japanese farmers prepared and
applied to their fields 22,812,787 tons of compost manufactured from
the wastes of cattle, horses, swine and poultry, combined with
herbage, straw and other similar wastes and with soil, sod or mud
from ditches and canals. The amount of this compost is sufficient to
apply 1.78 tons per acre of cultivated land of the southern three
main islands.

From data obtained at the Nara Experiment Station, the composition
of compost as there prepared shows it to contain, in each 2000
pounds, 550 pounds of organic matter; 15.6 pounds of nitrogen; 8.3
pounds of potassium, and 5.24 pounds of phosphorus. On this basis
22,800,000 tons of compost will carry 59,700 tons of phosphorus and
94,600 tons of potassium. The construction of compost houses is
illustrated in Fig. 116, reproduced from a large circular sent to
farmers from the Nara Experiment Station, and an exterior of one at
the Nara Station is given in Fig. 117.

This compost house is designed to serve two and a half acres. Its
floor is twelve by eighteen feet, rendered watertight by a mixture
of clay, lime and sand. The walls are of earth, one foot thick, and
the roof is thatched with straw. Its capacity is sixteen to twenty
tons, having a cash value of 60 yen, or $30. In preparing the stack,
materials are brought daily and, spread over one side of the compost
floor until the pile has attained a height of five feet. After one
foot in depth has been laid and firmed, 1.2 inches of soil or mud is
spread over the surface and the process repeated until full height
has been attained. Water is added sufficient to keep the whole
saturated and to maintain the temperature below that of the body.
After the compost stacks have been completed they are permitted to
stand five weeks in summer, seven weeks in winter, when they are
forked over and transferred to the opposite side of the house.

If we state in round numbers the total nitrogen, phosphorus and
potassium thus far enumerated which Japanese farmers apply or return
annually to their twenty or twenty-one thousand square miles of
cultivated fields, the case stands 385,214 tons of nitrogen, 91,656
tons of phosphorus and 255,778 tons of potassium. These values are
only approximations and do not include the large volume and variety
of fertilizers prepared from fish, which have long been used.
Neither do they include the very large amount of nitrogen derived
directly from the atmosphere through their long, extensive and
persistent cultivation of soy beans and other legumes. Indeed, from
1903 to 1906 the average area of paddy field upon which was grown a
second crop of green manure in the form of some legume was 6.8 per
cent of the total area of such fields aggregating 11,000 square
miles. In 1906 over 18 per cent of the upland fields also produced
some leguminous crop, these fields aggregating between 9,000 and
10,000 square miles.

While the values which have been given above, expressing the sum
total of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium applied annually to the
cultivated fields of Japan may be somewhat too high for some of the
sources named, there is little doubt that Japanese farmers apply to
their fields more of these three plant food elements annually than
has been computed. The amounts which have been given are sufficient
to provide annually, for each acre of the 21,321 square miles of
cultivated land, an application of not less than 56 pounds of
nitrogen, 13 pounds of phosphorus and 37 pounds of potassium. Or, if
we omit the large northern island of Hokkaido, still new in its
agriculture and lacking the intensive practices of the older farm
land, the quantities are sufficient for a mean application of 60, 14
and 40 pounds respectively of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium per
acre, and yet the maturing of 1000 pounds of wheat crop, covering
grain and straw as water-free substance, removes from the soil but
13.9 pounds of nitrogen, 2.3 pounds of phosphorus and 8.4 pounds of
potassium, from which it may be computed that the 60 pounds of
nitrogen added is sufficient for a crop yielding 31 bushels of
wheat; the phosphorus is sufficient for a crop of 44 bushels, and
the potassium for a crop of 35 bushels per acre. Dr. Hopkins, in his
recent valuable work on "Soil Fertility and Permanent Agriculture"
gives, on page 154, a table from which we abstract the following
data:


 APPROXIMATE AMOUNTS OF NITROGEN, PHOSPHORUS AND POTASSIUM REMOVABLE
                         PER ACRE ANNUALLY BY
                                   Nitrogen,  Phosphorus,  Potassium,
                                    pounds.     pounds.      pounds.
 100 bush. crop of corn              148          23           71
 100 bush. crop of oats               97          16           68
  50 bush. crop of wheat              96          16           58
  25 bush. crop of soy beans         159          21           73
 100 bush. crop of rice              155          18           95
   3 ton crop of timothy hay          72           9           71
   4 ton crop of clover hay          160          20          120
   3 ton crop of cow pea hay         130          14           98
   8 ton crop of alfalfa hay         400          36          192
7000 lb. crop of cotton              168          29.4         82
 400 bush. crop of potatoes           84          17.3        120
  20 ton crop of sugar beets         100          18          157
Annually applied in Japan, more than  60          14           40


We have inserted in this table, for comparison, the crop of rice,
and have increased the crop of potatoes from three hundred bushels
to four hundred bushels per acre, because such a yield, like all of
those named, is quite practicable under good management and
favorable seasons, notwithstanding the fact that much smaller yields
are generally attained through lack of sufficient plant food or
water. From this table, assuming that a crop of matured grain
contains 11 per cent of water and the straw 15 per cent, while
potatoes contain 79 per cent and beets 87 per cent, the amounts of
the three plant food elements removable annually by 1000 pounds of
crop have been calculated and stated in the next table.


  APPROXIMATE AMOUNTS OF NITROGEN, PHOSPHORUS AND POTASSIUM
  REMOVABLE ANNUALLY PER 1,0000 POUNDS OF DRY CROP SUBSTANCE
                       Nitrogen,  Phosphorus,   Potassium,
                        pounds.     pounds.       pounds.
               Cereals.
Wheat                   13.873      2.312         8.382
Oats                    13.666      2.254         9.580
Corn                    13.719      2.149         6.676
               Legumes.
Soy beans               30.807      4.070        14.147
Cow peas                25.490      2.745        19.216
Clover                  23.529      2.941        17.647
Alfalfa                 29.411      2.647        14.118
               Roots.
Beets                   19.213      3.462        30.192
Potatoes                15.556      3.210        22.222
               Grass.
Timothy                 14.117      1.765        13.922
Rice                     9.949      1.129         6.089


From the amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium applied
annually to the cultivated fields of Japan and from the data in
these two tables it may be readily seen that these people are now
and probably long have been applying quite as much of these three
plant food elements to their fields with each planting as are
removed with the crop, and if this is true in Japan it must also be
true in China. Moreover there is nothing in American agricultural
practice which indicates that we shall not ultimately be compelled
to do likewise.






X

IN THE SHANTUNG PROVINCE





On May 15th we left Shanghai by one of the coastwise steamers for
Tsingtao, some three hundred miles farther north, in the Shantung
Province, our object being to keep in touch with methods of tillage
and fertilization, corresponding phases of which would occur later
in the season there.

The Shantung province is in the latitude of North Carolina and
Kentucky, or lies between that of San Francisco and Los Angeles. It
has an area of nearly 56,000 square miles, about that of Wisconsin.
Less than one-half of this area is cultivated land yet it is at the
present time supporting a population exceeding 38,000,000 of people.
New York state has today less than ten millions and more than half
of these are in New York city.

It was in this province that Confucius was born 2461 years ago, and
that Mencius, his disciple, lived. Here, too, seventeen hundred
years before Confucius' time, after one of the great floods of the
Yellow river, 2297 B. C., and more than 4100 years ago, the Great Yu
was appointed "Superintendent of Public Works" and entrusted with
draining off the flood waters and canalizing the rivers.

Here also was the beginning of the Boxer uprising. Tsingtao sits at
the entrance of Kiaochow Bay. Following the war of Japan with China
this was seized by Germany, November 14, 1897, nominally to
indemnify for the murder of two German missionaries which had
occurred in Shantung, and March 6th, 1898, this bay, to the high
water line, its islands and a "Sphere of Influence" extending thirty
miles in all directions from the boundary, together with Tsingtao,
was leased to Germany for ninety-nine years. Russia demanded and
secured a lease of Port Arthur at the same time. Great Britain
obtained a similar lease of Weihaiwei in Shantung, while to France
Kwangchow-wan in southern China, was leased. But the "encroachments"
of European powers did not stop with these leases and during the
latter part of 1898 the "Policy of Spheres of Influence" culminated
in the international rivalry for railway concessions and mining.
These greatly alarmed China and uprisings broke out very naturally
first in Shantung, among the people nearest of kin to the founders
of the Empire. As might have been expected of a patriotic, even
though naturally peaceful people, they determined to defend their
country against such encroachments and the Boxer troubles followed.

Tsingtao has a deep, commodious harbor always free from ice and
Germany is constructing here very extensive and substantial harbor
improvements which will be of lasting benefit to the province and
the Empire. A pier four miles in length encloses the inner wharf,
and a second wharf is nearing completion. Germany is also
maintaining a meteorological observatory here and has established a
large, comprehensive Forest Garden, under excellent management,
which is showing remarkable developments for so short a time.

Our steamer entered the harbor during the night and, on going
ashore, we soon found that only Chinese and German were generally
spoken; but through the kind assistance of Rev. W. H. Scott, of the
American Presbyterian Mission, an interpreter promised to call at my
hotel in the evening, although he failed to appear. The afternoon
was spent at the Forest Garden and on the reforestation tract, which
are under the supervision of Mr. Haas. The Forest Garden covers two
hundred and seventy acres and the reforestation tract three thousand
acres more. In the garden a great variety of forest and fruit trees
and small fruits are being tried out with high promise of the most
valuable results.

It was in the steep hills about Tsingtao that we first saw at close
range serious soil erosion in China; and the returning of forest
growth on hills nearly devoid of soil was here remarkable, in view
of the long dry seasons which prevail from November to June, and
Fig. 118 shows how destitute of soil the crests of granite hills may
become and yet how the coming back of the forest growth may hasten
as soon as it is no longer cut away. The rock going into decay,
where this view was taken, is an extremely coarse crystalline
granite, as may be seen in contrast with the watch, and it is
falling into decay at a marvelous rate. Disintegration has
penetrated the rock far below the surface and the large crystals are
held together with but little more tenacity than prevails in a bed
of gravel. Moisture and even roots penetrate it deeply and readily
and the crystals fall apart with thrusts of the knife blade, the
rock crumbling with the greatest freedom. Roadways have been
extensively carved along the sides of the hills with the aid of only
pick and shovel. Close examination of the rock shows that layers of
sediment exist between the crystal faces, either washed down by
percolating rain or formed through decomposition of the crystals in
place. The next illustration, Fig. 119, shows how large the growth
on such soils may be, and in Fig. 120 the vegetation and forest
growth are seen coming back, closely covering just such soil
surfaces and rock structure as are indicated in Figs. 118 and 119.

These views are taken on the reforestation tract at Tsingtao but
most of the growth is volunteer, standing now protected by the
German government in their effort to see what may be possible under
careful supervision.

The loads of pine bough fuel represented in Fig. 80 were gathered
from such hills and from such forest growth as are here represented,
but on lands more distant from the city. But Tsingtao, with its
forty thousand Chinese, and Kiaochow across the bay, with its one
hundred and twenty thousand more, and other villages dotting the
narrow plains, maintain a very great demand for such growth on the
hill lands. The wonder is that forest growth has persisted at all
and has contributed so much in the way of fuel.

Growing in the Forest Garden was a most beautiful wild yellow rose,
native to Shantung, being used for landscape effect in the parking,
and it ought to be widely introduced into other countries wherever
it will thrive. It was growing as heavy borders and massive clumps
six to eight feet high, giving a most wonderful effect, with its
brilliant, dense cloud of the richest yellow bloom. The blossoms are
single, fully as large as the Rosa rugosa, with the tips of the
petals shading into the most dainty light straw yellow, while the
center is a deep orange, the contrast being sufficient to show in
the photograph from which Fig. 121 was prepared. Another beautiful
and striking feature of this rose is the clustering of the blossoms
in one-sided wreath-like sprays, sometimes twelve to eighteen inches
long, the flowers standing close enough to even overlap.

The interpreter engaged for us failed to appear as per agreement so
the next morning we took the early train for Tsinan to obtain a
general view of the country and to note the places most favorable as
points for field study. We had resolved also to make an effort to
secure an interpreter through the American Presbyterian College at
Tsinan. Leaving Tsingtao, the train skirts around the Kiaochow bay
for a distance of nearly fifty miles, where we pass the city of the
same name with its population of 120,000, which had an import and
export trade in 1905 valued at over $24,000,000. At Sochen we passed
through a coal mining district where coal was being brought to the
cars in baskets carried by men. The coal on the loaded open cars was
sprinkled with whitewash, serving as a seal to safe-guard against
stealing during transit, making it so that none could be removed
without the fact being revealed by breaking the seal. This practice
is general in China and is applied to many commodities handled in
bulk. We saw baskets of milled rice carried by coolies sealed with a
pattern laid over the surface by sprinkling some colored powder upon
it. Cut stone, corded for the market, was whitewashed in the same
manner as the coal.

As we were approaching Weihsien, another city of 100,000 people, we
identified one of the deeply depressed, centuries-old roadways, worn
eight to ten feet deep, by chancing to see half a dozen teams
passing along it as the train crossed. We had passed several and
were puzzling to account for such peculiar erosion. The teams gave
the explanation and thus connected our earlier reading with the
concrete. Along these deep-cut roadways caravans may pass, winding
through the fields, entirely unobserved unless one chances to be
close along the line or the movement is discovered by clouds of
dust, one of the methods that has produced them, and we would not be
surprised if gathering manure from them has played a large part
also.

Weihsien is near one of the great commercial highways of China and
in the center of one of the coal mining regions of the province.
Still further along towards Tsinan we passed Tsingchowfu, another of
the large cities of the province, with 150,000 population. All day
we rode through fields of wheat, always planted in rows, and in
hills in the row east of Kaumi, but in single or double continuous
drills westward from here to Tsinan. Thousands of wells used for
irrigation, of the type seen in Fig. 123, were passed during the
day, many of them recently dug to supply water for the barley
suffering from the severe drought which was threatening the crop at
the time.

It was 6:30 P. M. before our train pulled into the station at
Tsinan; 7:30 when we had finished supper and engaged a ricksha to
take us to the American Presbyterian College in quest of an
interpreter. We could not speak Chinese, the ricksha boy could
neither speak nor understand a word of English, but the hotel
proprietor had instructed him where to go. We plunged into the
narrow streets of a great Chinese city, the boy running wherever he
could, walking where he must on account of the density of the crowds
or the roughness of the stone paving. We had turned many corners,
crossed bridges and passed through tunneled archways in sections of
the massive city walls, until it was getting dusk and the ricksha
man purchased and lighted a lantern. We were to reach the college in
thirty minutes but had been out a full hour. A little later the boy
drew up to and held conference with a policeman. The curious of the
street gathered about and it dawned upon us that we were lost in the
night in the narrow streets of a Chinese city of a hundred thousand
people. To go further would be useless for the gates of the mission
compound would be locked. We could only indicate by motions our
desire to return, but these were not understood. On the train a
thoughtful, kindly old German had recognized a stranger in a foreign
land and volunteered useful information, cutting from his daily
paper an advertisement describing a good hotel. This gave the name
of the hotel in German, English and in Chinese characters. We handed
this to the policeman, pointing to the name of the hotel, indicating
by motions the desire to return, but apparently he was unable to
read in either language and seemed to think we were assuming to
direct the way to the college. A man and boy in the crowd apparently
volunteered to act as escort for us. The throng parted and we left
them, turned more corners into more unlighted narrow alleyways, one
of which was too difficult to permit us to ride. The escorts, if
such they were, finally left us, but the dark alley led on until it
terminated at the blank face, probably of some other portion of the
massive city wall we had thrice threaded through lighted tunnels.
Here the ricksha boy stopped and turned about but the light from his
lantern was too feeble to permit reading the workings of his mind
through his face, and our tongues were both utterly useless in this
emergency, so we motioned for him to turn back and by some route we
reached the hotel at 11 P. M.

We abandoned the effort to visit the college, for the purpose of
securing an interpreter, and took the early train back to Tsingtao,
reaching there in time to secure the very satisfactory service of
Mr. Chu Wei Yung, through the further kind offices of Mr. Scott. We
had been twice over the road between the two cities, obtaining a
general idea of the country and of the crops and field operations at
this season. The next morning we took an early train to Tsangkau and
were ready to walk through the fields and to talk with the last
generations of more than forty unbroken centuries of farmers who,
with brain and brawn, have successfully and continuously sustained
large families on small areas without impoverishing their soil. The
next illustration is from a photograph taken in one of these fields.
We astonished the old farmer by asking the privilege of holding his
plow through one round in his little field, but he granted the
privilege readily. Our furrow was not as well turned as his, nor as
well as we could have done with a two-handled Oliver or John Deere,
but it was better than the old man had expected and won his respect.

This plow had a good steel point, as a separate, blunt, V-shaped
piece, and a moldboard of cast steel with a good twist which turned
the soil well. The standard and sole were of wood and at the end of
the beam was a block for gauging the depth of furrow. The cost of
this plow, to the farmer, was $2.15, gold, and when the day's work
is done it is taken home on the shoulders, even though the distance
may be a mile or more, and carefully housed. Chinese history states
that the plow was invented by Shennung, who lived 2737-2697 B. C.
and "taught the art of agriculture and the medical use of herbs". He
is honored as the "God of Agriculture and Medicine."

Through my interpreter we learned that there were twelve in this
man's family, which he maintained on fifteen mow of land, or 2.5
acres, together with his team, consisting of a cow and small donkey,
besides feeding two pigs. This is at the rate of 192 people, 16
cows, 16 donkeys and 32 pigs on a forty-acre farm; and of a
population density equivalent to 3072 people, 256 cows, 256 donkeys
and 512 swine per square mile of cultivated field.

On another small holding we talked with the farmer standing at the
well in Fig. 27, where he was irrigating a little piece of barley 30
feet wide and 138 feet long. He owned and was cultivating but one
and two-thirds acres of land and yet there were ten in his family
and he kept one donkey and usually one pig. Here is a maintenance
capacity at the rate of 240 people, 24 donkeys and 24 pigs on a
forty-acre farm; and a population density of 3840 people, 384
donkeys and 384 pigs per square mile. His usual annual sales in good
seasons were equivalent in value to $73, gold.

In both of these cases the crops grown were wheat, barley, large and
small millet, sweet potatoes and soy beans or peanuts. Much straw
braid is manufactured in the province by the women and children in
their homes, and the cargo of the steamer on which we returned to
Shanghai consisted almost entirely of shelled peanuts in gunny sacks
and huge bales of straw braid destined for the manufacture of hats
in Europe and America.

Shantung has only moderate rainfall, little more than 24 inches
annually, and this fact has played an important part in determining
the agricultural practices of these very old people. In Fig. 123 is
a closer view than Fig. 27 of the farmer watering his little field
of barley. The well had just been dug over eight feet deep,
expressly and solely to water this one piece of grain once, after
which it would be filled and the ground planted.

The season had been unusually dry, as had been the one before, and
the people were fearing famine. Only 2.44 inches of rain had fallen
at Tsingtao between the end of the preceding October and our visit,
May 21st, and hundreds of such temporary wells had been or were
being dug all along both sides of the two hundred and fifty miles of
railway, and nearly all to be filled when the crop on the ground was
irrigated, to release the land for one to follow. The homes are in
villages a mile or more apart and often the holdings or rentals are
scattered, separated by considerable distances, hence easy
portability is the key-note in the construction of this irrigating
outfit. The bucket is very light, simply a woven basket waterproofed
with a paste of bean flour. The windlass turns like a long spool on
a single pin and the standard is a tripod with removable legs. Some
wells we saw were sixteen or twenty feet deep and in these the water
was raised by a cow walking straight away at the end of a rope.

The amount and distribution of rainfall in this province, as
indicated by the mean of ten years' records at Tsingtao, obtained at
the German Meteorological Observatory through the courtesy of Dr. B.
Meyermanns, are given in the table in which the rainfall of Madison,
Wisconsin, is inserted for comparison.


    Mean monthly rainfall. Mean rainfall In 10 days.
         Tsingtao, Madison, Tsingtao,  Madison,
          Inches.   Inches.  Inches.   Inches.
January    .394     1.56      .131      .520
February   .240     1.50      .080      .500
March      .892     2.12      .297      .707
April     1.240     2.62      .413      .840
May       1.636     3.62      .545     1.207
June      2.702     4.10      .901     1.866
July      6.637     3.90     2.212     1.300
August    5.157     3.21     1.719     1.070
September 2.448     3.15      .816     1.050
October   2.258     2.42      .753      .807
November   .398     1.78      .132      .593
December   .682     1.77      .227      .590
         ------------
Total    24.682    31.65


While Shantung receives less than 25 inches of rain during the year,
against Wisconsin's more than 31 inches, the rainfall during June,
July and August in Shantung is nearly 14.5 inches, while Wisconsin
receives but 11.2 inches. This greater summer rainfall, with
persistent fertilization and intense management, in a warm latitude,
are some of the elements permitting Shantung today to feed
38,247,900 people from an area equal to that upon which Wisconsin is
yet feeding but 2,333,860. Must American agriculture ultimately feed
sixteen people where it is now feeding but one? If so,
correspondingly more intense and effective practices must follow,
and we can neither know too well nor too early what these Old World
people have been driven to do; how they have succeeded, and how we
and they may improve upon their practices and lighten the human
burdens by more fully utilizing physical forces and mechanical
appliances.

As we passed on to other fields we found a mother and daughter
transplanting sweet potatoes on carefully fitted ridges of nearly
air-dry soil in a little field, the remnant of a table on a deeply
eroded hillside, Fig. 124. The husband was bringing water for
moistening the soil from a deep ravine a quarter of a mile distant,
carrying it on his shoulder in two buckets, Fig. 125, across an
intervening gulch. He had excavated four holes at intervals up the
gulch and from these, with a broken gourd dipper mended with
stitches, he filled his pails, bailing in succession from one to the
other in regular rotation.

The daughter was transplanting. Holding the slip with its tip
between thumb and fingers, a strong forward stroke plowed a furrow
in the mellow, dry soil; then, with a backward movement and a
downward thrust, planted the slip, firmed the soil about it, leaving
a depression in which the mother poured about a pint of water from
another gourd dipper. After this water had soaked away, dry earth
was drawn about the slip and firmed and looser earth drawn over
this, the only tools being the naked hands and dipper.

The father and mother were dressed in coarse garb but the daughter
was neatly clad, with delicate hands decorated with rings and a
bracelet. Neither of the women had bound feet. There were ten in his
family; and on adjacent similar areas they had small patches of
wheat nearly ready for the harvest, all planted in hills, hoed, and
in astonishingly vigorous condition considering the extreme drought
which prevailed. The potatoes were being planted under these extreme
conditions in anticipation of the rainy season which then was fully
due. The summer before had been one of unusual drought, and famine
was threatened. The government had recently issued an edict that no
sheep should be sold from the province, fearing they might be needed
for food. An old woman in one of the villages came out, as we walked
through, and inquired of my interpreter if we had come to make it
rain. Such was the stress under which we found these people.

One of the large farmers, owning ten acres, stated that his usual
yield of wheat in good season was 160 catty per mow, equivalent to
21.3 bushels per acre. He was expecting the current season not more
than one half this amount. As a fertilizer he used a prepared earth
compost which we shall describe later, mixing it with the grain and
sowing in the hills with the seed, applying about 5333 pounds per
acre, which he valued, in our currency, at $8.60, or $3.22 per ton.
A pile of such prepared compost is seen in Fig. 126, ready to be
transferred to the field. The views show with what cleanliness the
yard is kept and with what care all animal waste is saved. The cow
and donkey are the work team, such as was being used by the plowman
referred to in Fig. 122. The mounds in the background of the lower
view are graves; the fence behind the animals is made from the stems
of the large millet, kaoliang, while that at the right of the donkey
is made of earth, both indicative of the scarcity of lumber. The
buildings, too, are thatched and their walls are of earth plastered
with an earthen mortar worked up with chaff.

In another field a man plowing and fertilizing for sweet potatoes
had brought to the field and laid down in piles the finely
pulverized dry compost. The father was plowing; his son of sixteen
years was following and scattering, from a basket, the pulverized
dry compost in the bottom of the furrow. The next furrow covered the
fertilizer, four turned together forming a ridge upon which the
potatoes were to be planted after a second and older son had
smoothed and fitted the crest with a heavy hand rake. The fertilizer
was thus applied directly beneath the row, at the rate of 7400
pounds per acre, valued at $7.15, our currency, or $1.93 per ton.

We were astonished at the moist condition of the soil turned, which
was such as to pack in the hand notwithstanding the extreme drought
prevailing and the fact that standing water in the ground was more
than eight feet below the surface. The field had been without crop
and cultivated. To the question, "What yield of sweet potatoes do
you expect from this piece of land?" he replied, "About 4000 catty,"
which is 440 bushels of 56 pounds per acre. The usual market price
was stated to be $1.00, Mexican, per one hundred catty, making the
gross value of the crop $79.49, gold, per acre. His land was valued
at $60, Mexican, per mow, or $154.80 per acre, gold.

My interpreter informed me that the average well-to-do farmers in
this part of Shantung own from fifteen to twenty mow of land and
this amount is quite ample to provide for eight people. Such farmers
usually keep two cows, two donkeys and eight or ten pigs. The less
well-to-do or small farmers own two to five mow and act as
superintendents for the larger farmers. Taking the largest holding,
of twenty mow per family of eight people, as a basis, the density
per square mile would be 1536 people, and an area of farm land equal
to the state of Wisconsin would have 86,000,000 people; 21,500,000
cows; 21,500,000 donkeys and 86,000,000 swine. These observations
apply to one of the most productive sections of the province, but
very large areas of land in the province are not cultivable and the
last census showed the total population nearly one-half of this
amount. It is clear, therefore, that either very effective
agricultural methods are practiced or else extreme economy is
exercised. Both are true.

On this day in the fields our interpreter procured his dinner at a
farm house, bringing us four boiled eggs, for which he paid at the
rate of 8.3 cents of our money, but his dinner was probably included
in the price. The next table gives the prices for some articles
obtained by inquiry at the Tsingtao market, May 23rd, 1909, reduced
to our currency.


                                   Cents
Old potatoes, per lb                2.18
New potatoes, per lb                2.87
Salted turnip, per lb                .86
Onions, per lb                      4.10
Radishes, bunch of 10               1.29
String beans, per lb               11.46
Cucumbers, per lb                   5.78
Pears, per lb                       5.73
Apricots, per lb                    8.60
Pork, fresh, per lb                10.33
Fish, per lb                        5.73
Eggs, per dozen                     5.16


The only items which are low compared with our own prices are salted
turnips, radishes and eggs. Most of the articles listed were out of
season for the locality and were imported for the foreigners,
turnips, radishes, pork, fish and eggs being the exceptions. Prof.
Ross informs us that he found eggs selling in Shensi at four for one
cent of our money.

Our interpreter asked a compensation of one dollar, Mexican, or 43
cents, U. S. currency, per day, he furnishing his own meals. The
usual wage for farm labor here was $8.60, per year, with board and
lodging. We have referred to the wages paid by missionaries for
domestic service. As servants the Chinese are considered efficient,
faithful and trustworthy. It was the custom of Mr. and Mrs. League
to intrust them with the purse for marketing, feeling that they
could be depended upon for the closest bargaining. Commonly, when
instructed to procure a certain article, if they found the price one
or two cash higher than usual they would select a cheaper
substitute. If questioned as to why instructions were not followed
the reply would be "Too high, no can afford."

Mrs. League recited her experience with her cook regarding his use
of our kitchen appliances. After fitting the kitchen with a modern
range and cooking utensils, and working with him to familiarize him
with their use, she was surprised, on going into the kitchen a few
days later, to find that the old Chinese stove had been set on the
range and the cooking being done with the usual Chinese furniture.
When asked why he was not using the stove his reply was "Take too
much fire." Nothing jars on the nerves of these people more than
incurring of needless expense, extravagance in any form, or poor
judgment in making purchases.

Daily we became more and more impressed by the evidence of the
intense and incessant stress imposed by the dense populations of
centuries, and how, under it, the laws of heredity have wrought upon
the people, affecting constitution, habits and character. Even the
cattle and sheep have not escaped its irresistible power. Many times
in this province we saw men herding flocks of twenty to thirty sheep
along the narrow unfenced pathways winding through the fields, and
on the grave lands. The prevailing drought had left very little
green to be had from these places and yet sheep were literally
brushing their sides against fresh green wheat and barley, never
molesting them. Time and again the flocks were stampeded into the
grain by an approaching train, but immediately they returned to
their places without taking a nibble. The voice of the shepherd and
an occasional well aimed lump of earth only being required to bring
them back to their uninviting pastures.

In Kiangsu and Chekiang provinces a line of half a dozen white goats
were often seen feeding single file along the pathways, held by a
cord like a string of beads, sometimes led by a child. Here, too,
one of the most common sights was the water buffalo grazing
unattended among the fields along the paths and canal banks, with
crops all about, One of the most memorable shocks came to us in
Chekiang, China, when we had fallen into a revery while gazing at
the shifting landscape from the doorway of our low-down Chinese
houseboat. Something in the sky and the vegetation along the canal
bank had recalled the scenes of boyhood days and it seemed, as we
looked aslant up the bank with its fringe of grass, that we were
gliding along Whitewater creek through familiar meadows and that
standing up would bring the old home in sight. That instant there
glided into view, framed in the doorway and projected high against
the tinted sky above the setting sun, a giant water buffalo standing
motionless as a statue on the summit of a huge grave mound, lifted
fully ten feet above the field. But in a flash this was replaced by
a companion scene, and with all its beautiful setting, which had
been as suddenly fixed on the memory fourteen years before in the
far away Trossachs when our coach, hurriedly rounding a sharp turn
in the hills, suddenly exposed a wild ox of Scotland similarly
thrust against the sky from a small but isolated rocky summit, and
then, outspeeding the wireless, recollection crossed two oceans and
an intervening continent, bringing us back to China before a speed
of five miles, per hour could move the first picture across the
narrow doorway.

It was through the fields about Tsangkow that the stalwart
freighters referred to, Fig. 32, passed us on one of the paths
leading from Kiaochow through unnumbered country villages, already
eleven miles on their way with their wheelbarrows loaded with
matches made in Japan. Many of the wheelbarrow men seen in Shanghai
and other cities are from Shantung families, away for employment,
expecting to return. During the harvest season, too, many of these
people go west and north into Manchuria seeking employment,
returning to their homes in winter. Alexander Hosie, in his book on
Manchuria, states that from Chefoo alone more than 20,000 Chinese
laborers cross to Newchwang every spring by steamer, others finding
their way there by junks or other means, so that after the harvest
season 8,000 more return by steamer to Chefoo than left that way in
the spring, from which he concludes that Shantung annually supplies
Manchuria with agricultural labor to the extent of 30,000 men.

About the average condition of wheat in Shantung during this dry
season, and nearing maturity, is seen in Fig. 127, standing rather
more than three feet high, as indicated by our umbrella between the
rows. Beyond the wheat and to the right, grave mounds serrate the
sky line, no hills being in sight, for we were in the broad plain
built up from the sea between the two mountain islands forming the
highlands of Shantung.

On May 22nd we were in the fields north of Kiaochow, some sixty
miles by rail west from Tsingtao, but within the neutral zone
extending thirty miles back from the high water line of the bay of
the same name. Here the Germans had built a broad macadam road after
the best European type but over it were passing the vehicles of
forty centuries seen in Figs. 128 and 129. It is doubtful if the
resistance to travel experienced by these men on the better road was
enough less than that on the old paths they had left to convince
them that the cost of construction and maintenance would be worth
while until vehicles and the price of labor change. It may appear
strange that with a nation of so many millions and with so long a
history, roads have persisted as little more than beaten foot-paths;
but modern methods of transportation have remained physical
impossibilities to every people until the science of the last
century opened the way. Throughout their history the burdens of
these people have been carried largely on foot, mostly on the feet
of men, and of single men wherever the load could be advantageously
divided. Animals have been supplemental burden bearers but, as with
the men, they have carried the load directly on their own feet, the
mode least disturbed by inequalities of road surface.

For adaptability to the worst road conditions no vehicle equals the
wheelbarrow, progressing by one wheel and two feet. No vehicle is
used more in China, if the carrying pole is excepted, and no
wheelbarrow in the world permits so high an efficiency of human
power as the Chinese, as must be clear from Figs. 32 and 61, where
nearly the whole load is balanced on the axle of a high, massive
wheel with broad tire. A shoulder band from the handles of the
barrow relieves the strain on the hands and, when the load or the
road is heavy, men or animals may aid in drawing, or even, when the
wind is favorable, it is not unusual to hoist a sail to gain
propelling power. It is only in northern China, and then in the more
level portions, where there are few or no canals, that carts have
been extensively used, but are more difficult to manage on bad
roads. Most of the heavy carts, especially those in Manchuria, seen
in Fig. 203, have the wheels framed rigidly to the axle which
revolves with them, the bearing being in the bed of the cart. But
new carts of modern type are being introduced.

In the extent of development and utilization of inland waterways no
people have approached the Chinese. In the matter of land
transportation they have clearly followed the line of least
resistance for individual initiative, so characteristic of
industrial China.

There are Government courier or postal roads which connect Peking
with the most distant parts of the Empire, some twenty-one being
usually enumerated. These, as far as practicable, take the shortest
course, are often cut into the mountain sides and even pass through
tunnels. In the plains regions these roads may be sixty to
seventy-five feet wide, paved and occasionally bordered by rows of
trees. In some cases, too, signal towers are erected at intervals of
three miles and there are inns along the way, relay posts and
stations for soldiers.

We have spoken of planting grain in rows and in hills in the row. In
Fig. 130 is a field with the rows planted in pairs, the members
being 16 inches apart, and together occupying 30 inches. The space
between each pair is also 30 inches, making five feet in all. This
makes frequent hoeing practicable, which is begun early in the
spring and is repeated after every rain. It also makes it possible
to feed the plants when they can utilize food to the best advantage
and to repeat the feeding if desirable. Besides, the ground in the
wider space may be fitted, fertilized and another crop planted
before the first is removed. The hills alternate in the rows and are
24 to 26 inches from center to center.

The planting may be done by hand or with a drill such as that in
Fig. 131, ingenious in the simple mechanism which permits planting
in hills. The husbandman had just returned from the field with the
drill on his shoulder when we met at the door of his village home,
where he explained to us the construction and operation of the drill
and permitted the photograph to be taken, but turning his face
aside, not wishing to represent a specific character, in the view.
In the drill there was a heavy leaden weight swinging free from a
point above the space between the openings leading to the respective
drill feet. When planting, the operator rocks the drill from side to
side, causing the weight to hang first over one and then over the
other opening, thus securing alternation of hills in each pair of
rows.

Counting the heads of wheat in the hill in a number of fields showed
them ranging between 20 and 100, the distance between the rows and
between the hills as stated above. There were always a larger number
of stalks per hill where the water capacity of the soil was large,
where the ground water was near the surface, and where the soil was
evidently of good quality. This may have been partly the result of
stooling but we have little doubt that judgment was exercised in
planting, sowing less seed on the lighter soils where less moisture
was available. In the piece just referred to, in the illustration,
an average hill contained 46 stalks and the number of kernels in a
head varied between 20 and 30. Taking Richardson's estimate of
12,000 kernels of wheat to the pound, this field would yield about
twelve bushels of wheat per acre this unusually dry season. Our
interpreter, whose parents lived near Kaomi, four stations further
west, stated that in 1901, one of their best seasons, farmers there
secured yields as high as 875 catty per legal mow, which is at the
rate of 116 bushels per acre. Such a yield on small areas highly
fertilized and carefully tilled, when the rainfall is ample or where
irrigation is practiced, is quite possible and in the Kiangsu
province we observed individual small fields which would certainly
approach close to this figure.

Further along in our journey of the day we came upon a field where
three, one of them a boy of fourteen years, were hoeing and thinning
millet and maize. In China, during the hot weather, the only garment
worn by the men in the field, was their trousers, and the boy had
found these unnecessary, although he slipped into them while we were
talking with his father. The usual yield of maize was set at 420 to
480 catty per mow, and that of millet at 600 catty, or 60 to 68.5
bushels of maize and 96 bushels of millet, of fifty pounds, per
acre, and the usual price would make the gross earnings $23.48 to
$26.83 per acre for the maize, and $30.96, gold, for the millet.

It was evident when walking through these fields that the fall-sowed
grain was standing the drought far better than the barley planted in
the spring, quite likely because of the deeper and stronger
development of root system made possible by the longer period of
growth, and partly because the wheat had made much of its growth
utilizing water that had fallen before the barley was planted and
which would have been lost from the soil through percolation and
surface evaporation. Farmers here are very particular to hoe their
grain, beginning in the early spring, and always after rains,
thoroughly appreciating the efficiency of earth mulches. Their hoe,
seen in Fig. 132, is peculiarly well adapted to its purpose, the
broad blade being so hung that it draws nearly parallel with the
surface, cutting shallow and permitting the soil to drop practically
upon the place from which it was loosened. These hoes are made in
three parts; a wooden handle, a long, strong and heavy iron socket
shank, and a blade of steel. The blade is detachable and different
forms and sizes of blades may be used on the same shank. The
mulch-producing blades may have a cutting edge thirteen inches long
and a width of nine inches.

At short intervals on either hand, along the two hundred and fifty
miles of railway between Tsingtao and Tsinan, were observed many
piles of earth compost distributed in the fields. One of these piles
is seen in Fig. 133. They were sometimes on unplanted fields, in
other cases they occurred among the growing crops soon to be
harvested, or where another crop was to be planted between the rows
of one already on the ground. Some of these piles were six feet
high. All were built in cubical form with flat top and carefully
plastered with a layer of earth mortar which sometimes cracked on
drying, as seen in the illustration. The purpose of this careful
shaping and plastering we did not learn although our interpreter
stated it was to prevent the compost from being appropriated for use
on adjacent fields. Such a finish would have the effect of a seal,
showing if the pile had been disturbed, but we suspect other
advantages are sought by the treatment, which involves so large an
amount of labor.

The amount of this earth compost prepared and used annually in
Shantung is large, as indicated by the cases cited, where more than
five thousand pounds, in one instance, and seven thousand pounds in
another, were applied per acre for one crop. When two or more crops
are grown the same year on the same ground, each is fertilized,
hence from three to six or more tons may be applied to each
cultivated acre. The methods of preparing compost and of fertilizing
in Kiangsu, Chekiang and Kwangtung provinces have been described. In
this part of Shantung, in Chihli and north in Manchuria as far as
Mukden, the methods are materially different and if possible even
more laborious, but clearly rational and effective. Here nearly if
not all fertilizer compost is prepared in the villages and carried
to the fields, however distant these may be.

Rev. T. J. League very kindly accompanied us to Chengyang on the
railway, from which we walked some two miles, back to a prosperous
rural village to see their methods of preparing this compost
fertilizer. It was toward the close of the afternoon before we
reached the village, and from all directions husbandmen were
returning from the fields, some with hoes, some with plows, some
with drills over their shoulders and others leading donkeys or
cattle, and similar customs obtain in Japan, as seen in Fig. 134.
These were mostly the younger men. When we reached the village
streets the older men, all bareheaded, as were those returning from
the fields, and usually with their queues tied about the crown, were
visiting, enjoying their pipes of tobacco.

Opium is no longer used openly in China, unless it be permitted to
some well along in years with the habit confirmed, and the growing
of the poppy is prohibited. The penalties for violating the law are
heavy and enforcement is said to be rigid and effective. For the
first violation a fine is imposed. If convicted of a second
violation the fine is heavier with imprisonment added to help the
victim acquire self control, and a third conviction may bring the
death penalty. The eradication of the opium scourge must prove a
great blessing to China. But with the passing of this most
formidable evil, for whose infliction upon China England was largely
responsible, it is a great misfortune that through the pitiless
efforts of the British-American Tobacco Company her people are
rapidly becoming addicted to the western tobacco habit, selfish
beyond excuse, filthy beyond measure, and unsanitary in its
polluting and oxygen-destroying effect upon the air all are
compelled to breathe. It has already become a greater and more
inexcusable burden upon mankind than opium ever was.

China, with her already overtaxed fields, can ill afford to give
over an acre to the cultivation of this crop and she should prohibit
the growing of tobacco as she has that of the poppy. Let her take
the wise step now when she readily may, for all civilized nations
will ultimately be compelled to adopt such a measure. The United
States in 1902 had more than a million acres growing tobacco, and
harvested 821,000,000 pounds of leaf. This leaf depleted those soils
to the extent of more than twenty eight million pounds of nitrogen,
twenty-nine million pounds of potassium and nearly two and a half
million pounds of phosphorus, all so irrecoverably lost that even
China, with her remarkable skill in saving and her infinite patience
with little things, could not recover them for her soils. On a like
area of field might as readily be grown twenty million bushels of
wheat and if the twelve hundred million pounds of grain were all
exported it would deplete the soil less than the tobacco crop in
everything but phosphorus, and in this about the same. Used at home,
China would return it all to one or another field. The home
consumption of tobacco in the United States averaged seven pounds
per capita in 1902. A like consumption for China's four hundred
millions would call for 2800 million pounds of leaf. If she grew it
on her fields two million acres would not suffice. Her soils would
be proportionately depleted and she would be short forty million
bushels of wheat; but if China continues to import her tobacco the
vast sum expended can neither fertilize her fields nor feed, clothe
or educate her people, yet a like sum expended in the importation of
wheat would feed her hungry and enrich her soils.

In the matter of conservation of national resources here is one of
the greatest opportunities open to all civilized nations. What might
not be done in the United States with a fund of $57,000,000
annually, the market price of the raw tobacco leaf, and the land,
the labor and the capital expended in getting the product to the men
who puff, breathe and perspire the noxious product into the air
everyone must breathe, and who bespatter the streets, sidewalks, the
floor of every public place and conveyance, and befoul the million
spittoons, smoking rooms and smoking cars, all unnecessary and
should be uncalled for, but whose installation and up-keep the
non-user as well as the user is forced to pay, and this in a country
of, for and by the people. This costly, filthy, selfish tobacco
habit should be outgrown. Let it begin in every new home, where the
mother helps the father in refusing to set the example, and let its
indulgence be absolutely prohibited to everyone while in public
school and to all in educational institutions.

Mr. League had been given a letter of introduction to one of the
leading farmers of the village and it chanced that as we reached the
entrance way to big home we were met by his son, just returning from
the fields with his drill on his shoulder, and it is he standing in
the illustration, Fig. 131, holding the letter of introduction in
his hand. After we had taken this photograph and another one looking
down the narrow street from the same point, we were led to the small
open court of the home, perhaps forty by eighty feet, upon which all
doors of the one-storied structures opened. It was dry and bare of
everything green, but a row of very tall handsome trees, close
relatives of our cottonwood, with trunks thirty feet to the limbs,
looked down into the court over the roofs of the low thatched
houses. Here we met the father and grandfather of the man with the
drill, so that, with the boy carrying the baby in his arms, who had
met his father in the street gateway, there were four generations of
males at our conference. There were women and girls in the household
but custom requires them to remain in retirement on such occasions.

A low narrow four-legged bench, not unlike our carpenter's sawhorse,
five feet long, was brought into the court as a seat, which our host
and we occupied in common. We had been similarly received at the
home of Mrs. Wu in Chekiang province. On our right was the open
doorway to the kitchen in which stood, erect and straight, the tall
spare figure of the patriarch of the household, his eyes still
shining black but with hair and long thin straggling beard a uniform
dull ashen gray. No Chinese hair, it seems, ever becomes white with
age. He seemed to have assumed the duties of cook for while we were
there be lighted the fire in the kitchen and was busy, but was
always the final oracle on any matter of difference of opinion
between the younger men regarding answers to questions. Two sleeping
apartments adjoining the kitchen, through whose wide kang beds the
waste heat from the cooking was conveyed, as described on page 142,
completed this side of the court. On our left was the main street
completely shut off by a solid earth wall as high as the eaves of
the house, while in front of us, adjoining the street, was the
manure midden, a compost pit six feet deep and some eight feet
square. A low opening in the street wall permitted the pit to be
emptied and to receive earth and stubble or refuse from the fields
for composting, Against the pit and without partition, but cut off
from the court, was the home of the pigs, both under a common roof
continuous with a closed structure joining with the sleeping
apartments, while behind us and along the alley-way by which we had
entered were other dwelling and storage compartments. Thus was the
large family of four generations provided with a peculiarly private
open court where they could work and come out for sun and air, both,
from our standards, too meagerly provided in the houses.

We had come to learn more of the methods of fertilizing practiced by
these people. The manure midden was before us and the piles of earth
brought in from the fields, for use in the process, were stacked in
the street, where we had photographed them at the entrance, as seen
in Fig. 135. There a father, with his pipe, and two boys stand at
the extreme left; beyond them is a large pile of earth brought into
the village and carefully stacked in the narrow street; on the other
side of the street, at the corner of the first building, is a pile
of partly fermented compost thrown from a pit behind the walls.
Further along in the street, on the same side, is a second large
stack of soil where two boys are standing at either end and another
little boy was in a near-by doorway. In front of the tree, on the
left side of the street, stands a third boy, near him a small donkey
and still another boy. Beyond this boy stands a third large stack of
soil, while still beyond and across the way is another pile partly
composted. Notwithstanding the cattle in the preceding illustration,
the donkey, the men, the boys, the three long high stacks of soil
and the two piles of compost, the ten rods of narrow street
possessed a width of available travelway and a cleanliness which
would appear impossible. Each farmer's household had its stack of
soil in the street, and in walking through the village we passed
dozens of men turning and mixing the soil and compost, preparing it
for the field.

The compost pit in front of where we sat was two-thirds filled. In
it had been placed all of the manure and waste of the household and
street, all stubble and waste roughage from the field, all ashes not
to be applied directly and some of the soil stacked in the street.
Sufficient water was added at intervals to keep the contents
completely saturated and nearly submerged, the object being to
control the character of fermentation taking place.

The capacity of these compost pits is determined by the amount of
land served, and the period of composting is made as long as
possible, the aim being to have the fiber of all organic material
completely broken down, the result being a product of the
consistency of mortar.

When it is near the time for applying the compost to the field, or
of feeding it to the crop, the fermented product is removed in
waterproof carrying baskets to the floor of the court, to the yard,
such as seen in Fig. 126, or to the street, where it is spread to
dry, to be mixed with fresh soil, more ashes, and repeatedly turned
and stirred to bring about complete aeration and to hasten the
processes of nitrification. During all of these treatments, whether
in the compost pit or on the nitrification floor, the fermenting
organic matter in contact with the soil is converting plant food
elements into soluble plant food substances in the form of
potassium, calcium and magnesium nitrates and soluble phosphates of
one or another form, perhaps of the same bases and possibly others
of organic type. If there is time and favorable temperature and
moisture conditions for these fermentations to take place in the
soil of the field before the crop will need it, the compost may be
carried direct from the pit to the field and spread broadcast, to be
plowed under. Otherwise the material is worked and reworked, with
more water added if necessary, until it becomes a rich complete
fertilizer, allowed to become dry and then finely pulverized,
sometimes using stone rollers drawn over it by cattle, the donkey or
by hand. The large numbers of stacks of compost seen in the fields
between Tsingtao and Tsinan were of this type and thus laboriously
prepared in the villages and then transported to the fields, stacked
and plastered to be ready for use at next planting.

In the early days of European history, before modern chemistry had
provided the cheaper and more expeditious method of producing
potassium nitrate for the manufacture of gunpowder and fireworks,
much land and effort were devoted to niter-farming which was no
other than a specific application of this most ancient Chinese
practice and probably imported from China. While it was not until
1877 to 1879 that men of science came to know that the processes of
nitrification, so indispensable to agriculture, are due to germ
life, in simple justice to the plain farmers of the world, to those
who through all the ages from Adam down, living close to Nature and
working through her and with her, have fed the world, it should be
recognized that there have been those among them who have grasped
such essential, vital truths and have kept them alive in the
practices of their day. And so we find it recorded in history as far
back as 1686 that Judge Samuel Lewell copied upon the cover of his
journal a practical man's recipe for making saltpeter beds, in which
it was directed, among other things, that there should be added to
it "mother of petre", meaning, in Judge Lewell's understanding,
simply soil from an old niter bed, but in the mind of the man who
applied the maternity prefix,--mother,--it must have meant a vital
germ contained in the soil, carried with it, capable of reproducing
its kind and of perpetuating its characteristic work, belonging to
the same category with the old, familiar, homely germ, "mother" of
vinegar. So, too, with the old cheesemaker who grasped the
conception which led to the long time practice of washing the walls
of a new cheese factory with water from an old factory of the same
type, he must have been led by analogies of experience with things
seen to realize that he was here dealing with a vital factor.
Hundreds, of course, have practiced empyrically, but some one
preceded with the essential thought and we feel it is small credit
to men of our time who, after ten or twenty years of technical
training, having their attention directed to a something to be seen,
and armed with compound microscopes which permit them to see with
the physical eye the "mother of petre", arrogate to themselves the
discovery of a great truth. Much more modest would it be and much
more in the spirit of giving credit where credit is due to admit
that, after long doubting the existence of such an entity, we have
succeeded in confirming in fullness the truth of a great discovery
which belongs to an unnamed genius of the past, or perhaps to a
hundred of them who, working with life's processes and familiar with
them through long intimate association, saw in these invisible
processes analogies that revealed to them the essential truth in
such fullness as to enable them to build upon it an unfailing
practice.

There is another practice followed by the Chinese, connected with
the formation of nitrates in soils, which again emphasizes the
national trait of saving and turning to use any and every thing
worth while. Our attention was called to this practice by Rev. A. E.
Evans of Shunking, Szechwan province. It rests upon the tendency of
the earth floors of dwellings to become heavily charged with calcium
nitrate through the natural processes of nitrification. Calcium
nitrate being deliquescent absorbs moisture sufficiently to dissolve
and make the floor wet and sticky. Dr. Evans' attention was drawn to
the wet floor in his own house, which be at first ascribed to
insufficient ventilation, but which be was unable to remedy by
improving that. The father of one of his assistants, whose business
consisted in purchasing the soil of such floors for producing
potassium nitrate, used so much in China in the manufacture of
fireworks and gunpowder, explained his difficulty and suggested the
remedy.

This man goes from house to house through the village, purchasing
the soil of floors which have thus become overcharged. He procures a
sample, tests it and announces what he will pay for the surface two,
three or four inches, the price sometimes being as high as fifty
cents for the privilege of removing the top layer of the floor,
which the proprietors must replace. He leaches the soil removed, to
recover the calcium nitrate, and then pours the leachings through
plant ashes containing potassium carbonate, for the purpose of
transforming the calcium nitrate into the potassium nitrate or
saltpeter. Dr. Evans learned that during the four months preceding
our interview this man had produced sufficient potassium nitrate to
bring his sales up to $80, Mexican. It was necessary for him to make
a two-days journey to market his product. In addition he paid a
license fee of 80 cents per month. He must purchase his fuel ashes
and hire the services of two men.

When the nitrates which accumulate in the floors of dwellings are
not collected for this purpose the soil goes to the fields to be
used directly as a fertilizer, or it may be worked into compost. In
the course of time the earth used in the village walls and even in
the construction of the houses may disintegrate so as to require
removal, but in all such cases, as with the earth brick used in the
kangs, the value of the soil has improved for composting and is
generally so used. This improvement of the soil will not appear
strange when it is stated that such materials are usually from the
subsoil, whose physical condition would improve when exposed to the
weather, converting it in fact into an uncropped virgin soil.

We were unable to secure definite data as to the chemical
composition of these composts and cannot say what amounts of
available plant food the Shantung farmers are annually returning to
their fields. There can be little doubt, however, that the amounts
are quite equal to those removed by the crops. The soils appeared
well supplied with organic matter and the color of the foliage and
the general aspect of crops indicated good feeding.

The family with whom we talked in the village place their usual
yields of wheat at 420 catty of grain and 1000 catty of straw per
mow,--their mow was four-thirds of the legal standard mow--the grain
being worth 35 strings of cash and the straw 12 to 14 strings, a
string of cash being 40 cents, Mexican, at this time. Their yields
of beans were such as to give them a return of 30 strings of cash
for the grain and 8 to 10 strings for the straw. Small millet
usually yielded 450 catty of grain, worth 25 strings of cash, per
mow, and 800 catty of straw worth 10 to 11 strings of cash; while
the yields of large millet they placed at 400 catty per mow, worth
25 strings of cash, and 1000 catty of straw worth 12 to 14 strings
of cash. Stating these amounts in bushels per acre and in our
currency, the yield of wheat was 42 bushels of grain and 6000 pounds
of straw per acre, having a cash value of $27.09 for the grain and
$10.06 for the straw. The soy bean crop follows the wheat, giving an
additional return of $23.22 for the beans and $6.97 for the straw,
making the gross earning for the two crops $67.34 per acre. The
yield of small millet was 54 bushels of seed and 4800 pounds of
straw per acre, worth $27.09 and $8.12 for seed and straw
respectively, while the kaoliang or large millet gave a yield of 48
bushels of grain and 6000 pounds of stalks per acre, worth $19.35
for the grain, and $10.06 for the straw.

A crop of wheat like the one stated, if no part of the plant food
contained in the grain or straw were returned to the field, would
deplete the soil to the extent of about 90 pounds of nitrogen, 15
pounds of phosphorus and 65 pounds of potassium; and the crop of soy
beans, if it also were entirely removed, would reduce these three
plant food elements in the soil to the extent of about 240 pounds of
nitrogen, 33 pounds of phosphorus and 102 pounds of potassium, on
the basis of 45 bushels of beans and 5400 pounds of stems and leaves
per acre, assuming that the beans added no nitrogen to the soil,
which is of course not true. This household of farmers, therefore,
in order to have maintained this producing power in their soil, have
been compelled to return to it annually, in one form or another, not
less than 48 pounds of phosphorus and 167 pounds of potassium per
acre. The 330 pounds of nitrogen they would have to return in the
form of organic matter or accumulate it from the atmosphere, through
the instrumentality of their soy bean crop or some other legume. It
has already been stated that they do add more than 5000 to 7000
pounds of dry compost, which, repeated for a second crop, would make
an annual application of five to seven tons of dry compost per acre
annually. They do use, in addition to this compost, large amounts of
bean and peanut cake, which carry all of the plant food elements
derived from the soil which are contained in the beans and the
peanuts. If the vines are fed, or if the stems of the beaus are
burned for fuel, most of the plant food elements in these will be
returned to the field, and they have doubtless learned how to
completely restore the plant food elements removed by their crops,
and persistently do so.

The roads made by the Germans in the vicinity of Tsingtao enabled us
to travel by ricksha into the adjoining country, and on one such
trip we visited a village mill for grinding soy beans and peanuts in
the manufacture of oil, and Fig. 136 shows the stone roller, four
feet in diameter and two feet thick, which is revolved about a
vertical axis on a circular stone plate, drawn by a donkey, crushing
the kernels partly by its weight and partly by a twisting motion,
for the arm upon which the roller revolves is very short. After the
meal had been ground the oil was expressed in essentially the same
way as that described for the cotton seed, but the bean and peanut
cakes are made much larger than the cotton seed cakes, about
eighteen inches in diameter and three to four inches thick. Two of
these cakes are seen in Fig. 137, standing on edge outside the mill
in an orderly clean court. It is in this form that bean cake is
exported in large quantities to different parts of China, and to
Japan in recent years, for use as fertilizer, and very recently it
is being shipped to Europe for both stock food and fertilizer.

Nowhere in this province, nor further north, did we see the large
terra cotta, receptacles so extensively used in the south for
storing human excreta. In these dryer climates some method of
desiccation is practiced and we found the gardeners in the vicinity
of Tsingtao with quantities of the fertilizer stacked under matting
shelters in the desiccated condition, this being finely pulverized
in one or another way before it was applied. The next illustration,
Fig. 138, shows one of these piles being fitted for the garden, its
thatched shelter standing behind the grandfather of a household. His
grandson was carrying the prepared fertilizer to the garden area
seen in Fig. 139, where the father was working it into the soil. The
greatest pains is taken, both in reducing the product to a fine
powder and in spreading and incorporating it with the soil, for one
of their maxims of soil management is to make each square foot of
field or garden the equal of every other in its power to produce. In
this manner each little holding is made to yield the highest returns
possible under the conditions the husbandman is able to control.

From one portion of the area being fitted, a crop of artemisia had
been harvested, giving a gross return at the rate of $73.19 per
acre, and from another leeks had been taken, bringing a gross return
of $43.86 per acre. Chinese celery was the crop for which the ground
was being fitted.

The application of soil as a fertilizer to the fields of China,
whether derived from the subsoil or from the silts and organic
matter of canals and rivers, must have played an important part in
the permanency of agriculture in the Far East, for all such
additions have been positive accretions to the effective soil,
increasing its depth and carrying to it all plant food elements. If
not more than one-half of the weight of compost applied to the
fields of Shantung is highly fertilized soil, the rates of
application observed would, in a thousand years, add more than two
million pounds per acre, and this represents about the volume of
soil we turn with the plow in our ordinary tillage operations, and
this amount of good soil may carry more than 6000 pounds of
nitrogen, 2000 pounds of phosphorus and more than 60,000 pounds of
potassium.

When we left our hotel by ricksha for the steamer, returning to
Shanghai, we soon observed a boy of thirteen or fourteen years
apparently following, sometimes a little ahead, sometimes behind,
usually keeping the sidewalk but slackening his pace whenever the
ricksha man came to a walk. It was a full mile to the wharf. The boy
evidently knew the sailing schedule and judged by the valise in
front, that we were to take the out-going steamer and that he might
possibly earn two cents, Mexican, the usual fee for taking a valise
aboard the steamer. Twenty men at the wharf might be waiting for the
job, but he was taking the chance with the mile down and back thrown
in, and all for less than one cent in our currency, equivalent at
the time to about twenty "cash". As we neared the steamer the lad
closed up behind but strong and eager men were watching. Twice he
was roughly thrust aside and before the ricksha stopped a man of
stalwart frame seized the valise and, had we not observed the boy
thus unobtrusively entering the competition, he would have had only
his trouble for his pains. Thus intense was the struggle here for
existence and thus did a mere lad put himself effectively into it.
True to breeding and example he had spared no labor to win and was
surprised but grateful to receive more than he had expected.






XI

ORIENTALS CROWD BOTH TIME AND SPACE





Time is a function of every life process, as it is of every
physical, chemical and mental reaction, and the husbandman is
compelled to shape his operations so as to conform with the time
requirements of his crops. The oriental farmer is a time economizer
beyond any other. He utilizes the first and last minute and all that
are between. The foreigner accuses the Chinaman of being always
"long on time", never in a fret, never in a hurry. And why should he
be when he leads time by the forelock, and uses all there is?

The customs and practices of these Farthest East people regarding
their manufacture of fertilizers in the form of earth composts for
their fields, and their use of altered subsoils which have served in
their kangs, village walls and dwellings, are all instances where
they profoundly shorten the time required in the field to affect the
necessary chemical, physical and biological reactions which produce
from them plant food substances. Not only do they thus increase
their time assets, but they add, in effect, to their land area by
producing these changes outside their fields, at the same time
giving their crops the immediately active soil products.

Their compost practices have been of the greatest consequence to
them, both in their extremely wet, rice-culture methods, and in
their "dry-farming" practices, where the soil moisture is too scanty
during long periods to permit rapid fermentation under field
conditions. Western agriculturalists have not sufficiently
appreciated the fact that the most rapid growth of plant food
substances in the soil cannot occur at the same time and place with
the most rapid crop increase, because both processes draw upon the
available soil moisture, soil air and soluble potassium, calcium,
phosphorus and nitrogen compounds. Whether this fundamental
principle of practical agriculture is written in their literature or
not it is most indelibly fixed in their practice. If we and they can
perpetuate the essentials of this practice at a large saving of
human effort, or perpetually secure the final result in some more
expeditious and less laborious way, most important progress will
have been made.

When we went north to the Shantung province the Kiangsu and Chekiang
farmers were engaged in another of their time saving practices, also
involving a large amount of human labor. This was the planting of
cotton in wheat fields before the wheat was quite ready to harvest.
In the sections of these two provinces which we visited most of the
wheat and barley were sowed broadcast on narrow raised lands, some
five feet wide, with furrows between, after the manner seen in Fig.
140, showing a reservoir in the immediate foreground, on whose bank
is installed one of the four-man foot-power irrigation pumps in use
to flood the nursery rice bed close by on the right. The narrow
lands of broadcasted wheat extend back from the reservoir toward the
farmsteads which dot the landscape, and on the left stands one of
the pump shelters near the canal bank.

To save time, or lengthen the growing season of the cotton which was
to follow, this seed was sown broadcast among the grain on the
surface, some ten to fifteen days before the wheat would be
harvested. To cover the seed the soil in the furrows between the
beds had been spaded loose to a depth of four or five inches, finely
pulverized, and then with a spade was evenly scattered over the bed,
letting it sift down among the grain, covering the seed. This loose
earth, so applied, acts as a mulch to conserve the capillary
moisture, permitting the soil to become sufficiently damp to
germinate the seed before the wheat is harvested. The next
illustration, Fig. 141, is a closer view with our interpreter
standing in another field of wheat in which cotton was being sowed
April 22nd in the manner described, and yet the stand of grain was
very close and shoulder high, making it not an easy task either to
sow the seed or to scatter sufficient soil to cover it.

When we had returned from Shantung this piece of grain had been
harvested, giving a yield of 95.6 bushels of wheat and 3.5 tons of
straw per acre, computed from the statement of the owner that 400
catty of grain and 500 catty of straw had been taken from the beds
measuring 4050 square feet. On the morning of May 29th the
photograph for Fig. 142 was taken, showing the same area after the
wheat had been harvested and the cotton was up, the young plants
showing slightly through the short stubble. These beds had already
been once treated with liquid fertilizer. A little later the plants
would be hoed and thinned to a stand of about one plant per each
square foot of surface. There were thirty-seven days between the
taking of the two photographs, and certainly thirty days had been
added to the cotton crop by this method of planting, over what would
have been available if the grain had been first harvested and the
field fitted before planting, It will be observed that the cotton
follows the wheat without plowing, but the soil was deep, naturally
open, and a layer of nearly two inches of loose earth had been
placed over the seed at the time of planting. Besides, the ground
would be deeply worked with the two or four tined hoe, at the time
of thinning.

Starting cotton in the wheat in the manner described is but a
special case of a general practice widely in vogue. The growing of
multiple crops is the rule throughout these countries wherever the
climate permits. Sometimes as many as three crops occupy the same
field in recurrent rows, but of different dates of planting and in
different stages of maturity. Reference has been made to the
overlapping and alternation of cucumbers with greens. The general
practice of planting nearly all crops in rows lends itself readily
to systems of multiple cropping, and these to the fullest possible
utilization of every minute of the growing season and of the time of
the family in caring for the crops. In the field, Fig. 143, a crop
of winter wheat was nearing maturity, a crop of windsor beans was
about two-thirds grown, and cotton had just been planted, April
22nd. This field had been thrown into ridges some five feet wide
with a twelve inch furrow between them. Two rows of wheat eight
inches wide, planted two feet between centers occupied the crest of
the ridge, leaving a strip sixteen inches wide, seen in the upper
section, (1) for tillage, (2) then fertilization and (3) finally the
row of cotton planted just before the wheat was harvested. Against
the furrow on each side was a row of windsor beans, seen in the
lower view, hiding the furrow, which was matured some time after the
wheat was harvested and before the cotton was very large. A late
fall crop sometimes follows the windsor beans after a period of
tillage and fertilization, making four in one year. With such a
succession fertilization for each crop, and an abundance of soil
moisture are required to give the largest returns from the soil.

In another plan winter wheat or barley may grow side by side with a
green crop, such as the "Chinese clover" (Medicago denticulata,
Willd.) for soil fertilizer, as was the case in Fig. 144, to be
turned under and fertilize for a crop of cotton planted in rows on
either side of a crop of barley. After the barley had been harvested
the ground it occupied would be tilled and further fertilized, and
when the cotton was nearing maturity a crop of rape might be grown,
from which "salted cabbage" would be prepared for winter use.

Multiple crops are grown as far north in Chihli as Tientsin and
Peking, these being oftenest wheat, maize, large and small millet
and soy beans, and this, too, where the soil is less fertile and
where the annual rainfall is only about twenty-five inches, the
rainy season beginning in late June or early July, and Fig. 145
shows one of these fields as it appeared June 14th, where two rows
of wheat and two of large millet were planted in alternating pairs,
the rows being about twenty-eight inches apart. The wheat was ready
to harvest but the straw was unusually short because growing on a
light sandy loam in a season of exceptional drought, but little more
than two inches of rain having fallen after January 1st of that
year.

The piles of pulverized dry-earth compost seen between the rows had
been brought for use on the ground occupied by the wheat when that
was removed. The wheat would be pulled, tied in bundles, taken to
the village and the roots cut off, for making compost, as in Fig.
146, which shows the family engaged in cutting the roots from the
small bundles of wheat, using a long straight knife blade, fixed at
one end, and thrust downward upon the bundle with lever pressure.
These roots, if not used as fuel, would be transferred to the
compost pit in the enclosure seen in Fig. 147, whose walls were
built of earth brick. Here, with any other waste litter, manure or
ashes, they would be permitted to decay under water until the fiber
had been destroyed, thus permitting it to be incorporated with soil
and applied to the fields, rich in soluble plant food and in a
condition which would not interfere with the capillary movement of
soil moisture, the work going on outside the field where the changes
could occur unimpeded and without interfering with the growth of
crops on the ground.

In this system of combined intertillage and multiple cropping the
oriental farmer thus takes advantage of whatever good may result
from rotation or succession of crops, whether these be physical,
vito-chemical or biological. If plants are mutually helpful through
close association of their root systems in the soil, as some believe
may be the case, this growing of different species in close
juxtaposition would seem to provide the opportunity, but the other
advantages which have been pointed out are so evident and so
important that they, rather than this, have doubtless led to the
practice of growing different crops in close recurrent rows.






XII

RICE CULTURE IN THE ORIENT





The basal food crop of the people of China, Korea and Japan is rice,
and the mean consumption in Japan, for the five years ending 1906,
per capita and per annum, was 302 pounds. Of Japan's 175,428 square
miles she devoted, in 1906, 12,856 to the rice crop. Her average
yield of water rice on 12,534 square miles exceeded 33 bushels per
acre, and the dry land rice averaged 18 bushels per acre on 321
square miles. In the Hokkaido, as far north as northern Illinois,
Japan harvested 1,780,000 bushels of water rice from 53,000 acres.

In Szechwan province, China, Consul-General Hosie places the yield
of water rice on the plains land at 44 bushels per acre, and that of
the dry land rice at 22 bushels. Data given us in China show an
average yield of 42 bushels of water rice per acre, while the
average yield of wheat was 25 bushels per acre, the normal yield in
Japan being about 17 bushels.

If the rice eaten per capita in China proper and Korea is equal to
that in Japan the annual consumption for the three nations, using
the round number 300 pounds per capita per annum, would be:


             Population.    Consumption.
   China     410,000,000    61,500,000 tons
   Korea      12,000,000     1,800,000 tons
   Japan      53,000,000     7,950 000 tons
               -----------------------
   Total     475,000,000    71,250,000 tons


If the ratio of irrigated to dry land rice in Korea and China proper
is the same as that in Japan, and if the mean yield of rice per acre
in these countries were forty bushels for the water rice and twenty
bushels for the dry land rice, the acreage required to give this
production would be:


                         Area.
              Water rice,     Dry land rice,
               sq. miles.       sq. miles.
In China        78,073            4,004
In Korea         2,285              117
In Japan        12,534              321
               -------           ------
Sum             92,892            4,442
Total           97,334


Our observations along the four hundred miles of railway in Korea
between Antung, Seoul and Fusan, suggest that the land under rice in
this country must be more rather than less than that computed, and
the square miles of canalized land in China, as indicated on pages
97 to 102, would indicate an acreage of rice for her quite as large
as estimated.

In the three main islands of Japan more than fifty per cent of the
cultivated land produces a crop of water rice each year and 7.96 per
cent of the entire land area of the Empire, omitting far-north
Karafuto. In Formosa and in southern China large areas produce two
crops each year. At the large mean yield used in the computation the
estimated acreage of rice in China proper amounts to 5.93 per cent
of her total area and this is 7433 square miles greater than the
acreage of wheat in the United States in 1907. Our yield of wheat,
however, was but 19,000,000 tons, while China's output of rice was
certainly double and probably three times this amount from nearly
the same acreage of land; and notwithstanding this large production
per acre, more than fifty per cent, possibly as high as seventy-five
per cent, of the same land matures at least one other crop the same
year, and much of this may be wheat or barley, both chiefly consumed
as human food.

Had the Mongolian races spread to and developed in North America
instead of, or as well as, in eastern Asia, there might have been a
Grand Canal, something as suggested in Fig. 148, from the Rio Grande
to the mouth of the Ohio river and from the Mississippi to
Chesapeake Bay, constituting more than two thousand miles of inland
water-way, serving commerce, holding up and redistributing both the
run-off water and the wasting fertility of soil erosion, spreading
them over 200,000 square miles of thoroughly canalized coastal
plains, so many of which are now impoverished lands, made so by the
intolerable waste of a vaunted civilization. And who shall venture
to enumerate the increase in the tonnage of sugar, bales of cotton,
sacks of rice, boxes of oranges, baskets of peaches, and in the
trainloads of cabbage, tomatoes and celery such husbanding would
make possible through all time; or number the increased millions
these could feed and clothe? We may prohibit the exportation of our
phosphorus, grind our limestone, and apply them to our fields, but
this alone is only temporizing with the future. The more we produce,
the more numerous our millions, the faster must present practices
speed the waste to the sea, from whence neither money nor prayer can
call them back.

If the United States is to endure; if we shall project our history
even through four or five thousand years as the Mongolian nations
have done, and if that history shall be written in continuous peace,
free from periods of wide-spread famine or pestilence, this nation
must orient itself; it must square its practices with a conservation
of resources which can make endurance possible. Intensifying
cultural methods but intensifies the digestion, assimilation and
exhaustion of the surface soil, from which life springs. Multiple
cropping, closer stands on the ground and stronger growth, all mean
the transpiration of much more water per acre through the crops, and
this can only be rendered possible through a redistribution of the
run-off and the adoption of irrigation practices in humid climates
where water exists in abundance. Sooner or later we must adopt a
national policy which shall more completely conserve our water
resources, utilizing them not only for power and transportation, but
primarily for the maintenance of soil fertility and greater crop
production through supplemental irrigation, and all these great
national interests should be considered collectively, broadly, and
with a view to the fullest and best possible coordination. China,
Korea and Japan long ago struck the keynote of permanent agriculture
but the time has now come when they can and will make great
improvements, and it remains for us and other nations to profit by
their experience, to adopt and adapt what is good in their practice
and help in a world movement for the introduction of new and
improved methods.

In selecting rice as their staple crop; in developing and
maintaining their systems of combined irrigation and drainage,
notwithstanding they have a large summer rainfall; in their systems
of multiple cropping; in their extensive and persistent use of
legumes; in their rotations for green manure to maintain the humus
of their soils and for composting; and in the almost religious
fidelity with which they have returned to their fields every form of
waste which can replace plant food removed by the crops, these
nations have demonstrated a grasp of essentials and of fundamental
principles which may well cause western nations to pause and
reflect.

While this country need not and could not now adopt their laborious
methods of rice culture, and while, let us hope, those who come
after us may never be compelled to do so, it is nevertheless quite
worth while to study, for the sake of the principles involved, the
practices they have been led to adopt.

Great as is the acreage of land in rice in these countries but
little, relatively, is of the dry land type, and the fields upon
which most of the rice grows have all been graded to a water level
and surrounded by low, narrow raised rims, such as may be seen in
Fig. 149 and in Fig. 150, where three men are at work on their
foot-power pump, flooding fields preparatory to transplanting the
rice. If the country was not level then the slopes have been graded
into horizontal terraces varying in size according to the steepness
of the areas in which they were cut. We saw these often no larger
than the floor of a small room, and Professor Ross informed me that
he walked past those in the interior of China no larger than a
dining table and that he saw one bearing its crop of rice,
surrounded by its rim and holding water, yet barely larger than a
good napkin. The average area of the paddy field in Japan is
officially reported at 1.14 se, or an area of but 31 by 40 feet.
Excluding Hokkaido, Formosa and Karafuto, fifty-three per cent of
the irrigated rice lands in Japan are in allotments smaller than
one-eighth of an acre, and seventy-four per cent of other cultivated
lands are held in areas less than one-fourth of an acre, and each of
these may be further subdivided. The next two illustrations, Figs.
151 and 152, give a good idea both of the small size of the rice
fields and of the terracing which has been done to secure the water
level basins. The house standing near the center of Fig. 151 is a
good scale for judging both the size of the paddies and the slope of
the valley. The distance between the rows of rice is scarcely one
foot, hence counting these in the foreground may serve as another
measure. There are more than twenty little fields shown in this
engraving in front of the house and reaching but half way to it, and
the house was less than five hundred feet from the camera.

There are more than eleven thousand square miles of fields thus
graded in the three main islands of Japan, each provided with rims,
with water supply and drainage channels, all carefully kept in the
best of repair. The more level areas, too, in each of the three
countries, have been similarly thrown into water level basins,
comparatively few of which cover large areas, because nearly always
the holdings are small. All of the earth excavated from the canals
and drainage channels has been leveled over the fields unless needed
for levees or dikes, so that the original labor of construction,
added to that of maintenance, makes a total far beyond our
comprehension and nearly all of it is the product of human effort.

The laying out and shaping of so many fields into these level basins
brings to the three nations an enormous aggregate annual asset, a
large proportion of which western nations are not yet utilizing. The
greatest gain comes from the unfailing higher yields made possible
by providing an abundance of water through which more plant food can
be utilized, thus providing higher average yields. The waters used,
coming as they do largely from the uncultivated hills and mountain
lands, carrying both dissolved and suspended matters, make positive
annual additions of dissolved limestone and plant food elements to
the fields which in the aggregate have been very large, through the
persistent repetitions which have prevailed for centuries. If the
yearly application of such water to the rice fields is but sixteen
inches, and this has the average composition quoted by Merrill for
rivers of North America, taking into account neither suspended
matter nor the absorption of potassium and phosphorus by it, each
ten thousand square miles would receive, dissolved in the water,
substances containing some 1,400 tons of phosphorus; 23,000 tons of
potassium; 27,000 tons of nitrogen; and 48,000 tons of sulphur. In
addition, there are brought to the fields some 216,000 tons of
dissolved organic matter and a still larger weight of dissolved
limestone, so necessary in neutralizing the acidity of soils,
amounting to 1,221,000 tons; and such savings have been maintained
in China, Korea and Japan on more than five, and possibly more than
nine, times the ten thousand square miles, through centuries. The
phosphorus thus turned upon ninety thousand square miles would
aggregate nearly thirteen million tons in a thousand years, which is
less than the time the practice has been maintained, and is more
phosphorus than would be carried in the entire rock phosphate thus
far mined in the United States, were it all seventy-five per cent
pure.

The canalization of fifty thousand square miles of our Gulf and
Atlantic coastal plain, and the utilization on the fields of the
silts and organic matter, together with the water, would mean
turning to account a vast tonnage of plant food which is now wasting
into the sea, and a correspondingly great increase of crop yield.
There ought, and it would seem there must some time be provided a
way for sending to the sandy plains of Florida, and to the sandy
lands between there and the Mississippi, large volumes of the rich
silt and organic matter from this and other rivers, aside from that
which should be applied systematically to building above flood plain
the lands of the delta which are subject to overflow or are too low
to permit adequate drainage.

It may appear to some that the application of such large volumes of
water to fields, especially in countries of heavy rainfall, must
result in great loss of plant food through leaching and surface
drainage. But under the remarkable practices of these three nations
this is certainly not the case and it is highly important that our
people should understand and appreciate the principles which
underlie the practices they have almost uniformly adopted on the
areas devoted to rice irrigation. In the first place, their paddy
fields are under-drained so that most of the water either leaves the
soil through the crop, by surface evaporation, or it percolates
through the subsoil into shallow drains. When water is passed
directly from one rice paddy to another it is usually permitted some
time after fertilization, when both soil and crop have had time to
appropriate or fix the soluble plant food substances. Besides this,
water is not turned upon the fields until the time for transplanting
the rice, when the plants are already provided with a strong root
system and are capable of at once appropriating any soluble plant
food which may develop about their roots or be carried downward over
them.

Although the drains are of the surface type and but eighteen inches
to three feet in depth, they are sufficiently numerous and close so
that, although the soil is continuously nearly filled with water,
there is a steady percolation of the fresh, fully aerated water
carrying an abundance of oxygen into the soil to meet the needs of
the roots, so that watermelons, egg plants, musk melons and taro are
grown in the rotations on the small paddies among the irrigated rice
after the manner seen in the illustrations. In Fig. 153 each double
row of egg plants is separated from the next by a narrow shallow
trench which connects with a head drain and in which water was
standing within fourteen inches of the surface. The same was true in
the case of the watermelons seen in Fig. 154, where the vines are
growing on a thick layer of straw mulch which holds them from the
moist soil and acts to conserve water by diminishing evaporation
and, through decay from the summer rains and leaching, serves as
fertilizer for the crop. In Fig. 155 the view is along a pathway
separating two head ditches between areas in watermelons and taro,
carrying the drainage waters from the several furrows into the main
ditches. Although the soil appeared wet the plants were vigorous and
healthy, seeming in no way to suffer from insufficient drainage.

These people have, therefore, given effective attention to the
matter of drainage as well as irrigation and are looking after
possible losses of plant food, as well as ways of supplying it. It
is not alone where rice is grown that cultural methods are made to
conserve soluble plant food and to reduce its loss from the field,
for very often, where flooding is not practiced, small fields and
beds, made quite level, are surrounded by low raised borders which
permit not only the whole of any rain to be retained upon the field
when so desired, but it is completely distributed over it, thus
causing the whole soil to be uniformly charged with moisture and
preventing washing from one portion of the field to another. Such
provisions are shown in Figs. 133 and 138.

Extensive as is the acreage of irrigated rice in China, Korea and
Japan, nearly every spear is transplanted; the largest and best crop
possible, rather than the least labor and trouble, as is so often
the case with us, determining their methods and practices. We first
saw the fitting of the rice nursery beds at Canton and again near
Kashing in Chekiang province on the farm of Mrs. Wu, whose homestead
is seen in Fig. 156. She had come with her husband from Ningpo after
the ravages of the Taiping rebellion had swept from two provinces
alone twenty millions of people and settled on a small area of then
vacated land. As they prospered they added to their holding by
purchase until about twenty-five acres were acquired, an area about
ten times that possessed by the usual prosperous family in China.
The widow was managing her place, one of her sons, although married,
being still in school, the daughter-in-law living with her
mother-in-law and helping in the home. Her field help during the
summer consisted of seven laborers and she kept four cows for the
plowing and pumping of water for irrigation. The wages of the men
were at the rate of $24, Mexican, for five summer months, together
with their meals which were four each day. The cash outlay for the
seven men was thus $14.45 of our currency per month. Ten years
before, such labor had been $30 per year, as compared with $50 at
the time of our visit, or $12.90 and $21.50 of our currency,
respectively.

Her usual yields of rice were two piculs per mow, or twenty-six and
two-thirds bushels per acre, and a wheat crop yielding half this
amount, or some other, was taken from part of the land the same
season, one fertilization answering for the two crops. She stated
that her annual expense for fertilizers purchased was usually about
$60, or $25.80 of our currency. The homestead of Mrs. Wu, Fig. 156,
consists of a compound in the form of a large quadrangle surrounding
a court closed on the south by a solid wall eight feet high. The
structure is of earth brick with the roof thatched with rice straw.

Our first visit here was April 19th. The nursery rice beds had been
planted four days, sowing seed at the rate of twenty bushels per
acre. The soil had been very carefully prepared and highly
fertilized, the last treatment being a dressing of plant ashes so
incompletely burned as to leave the surface coal black. The seed,
scattered directly upon the surface, almost completely covered it
and had been gently beaten barely into the dressing of ashes, using
a wide, flat-bottom basket for the purpose. Each evening, if the
night was likely to be cool, water was pumped over the bed, to be
withdrawn the next day, if warm and sunny, permitting the warmth to
be absorbed by the black surface, and a fresh supply of air to be
drawn into the soil.

Nearly a month later, May 14th, a second visit was made to this farm
and one of the nursery beds of rice, as it then appeared, is seen in
Fig. 159, the plants being about eight inches high and nearing the
stage for transplanting. The field beyond the bed had already been
partly flooded and plowed, turning under "Chinese clover" to ferment
as green manure, preparatory for the rice transplanting. On the
opposite side of the bed and in front of the residence, Fig. 156,
flooding was in progress in the furrows between the ridges formed
after the previous crop of rice was harvested and upon which the
crop of clover for green manure was grown. Immediately at one end of
the two series of nursery beds, one of which is seen in Fig. 159,
was the pumping plant seen in Fig. 157, under a thatched shelter,
with its two pumps installed at the end of a water channel leading
from the canal. One of these wooden pump powers, with the
blindfolded cow attached, is reproduced in Fig. 158 and just beyond
the animal's head may be seen the long handle dipper to which
reference has been made, used for collecting excreta.

More than a month is saved for maturing and harvesting winter and
early spring crops, or in fitting the fields for rice, by this
planting in nursery beds. The irrigation period for most of the land
is cut short a like amount, saving in both water and time. It is
cheaper and easier to highly fertilize and prepare a small area for
the nursery, while at the same time much stronger and more uniform
plants are secured than would be possible by sowing in the field.
The labor of weeding and caring for the plants in the nursery is far
less than would be required in the field. It would be practically
impossible to fit the entire rice areas as early in the season as
the nursery beds are fitted, for the green manure is not yet grown
and time is required for composting or for decaying, if plowed under
directly. The rice plants in the nursery are carried to a stage when
they are strong feeders and when set into the newly prepared,
fertilized, clean soil of the field they are ready to feed strongly
under these most favorable conditions Both time and strength of
plant are thus gained and these people are following what would
appear to be the best possible practices under their condition of
small holdings and dense population.

With our broad fields, our machinery and few people, their system
appears to us crude and impossible, but cut our holdings to the size
of theirs and the same stroke makes our machinery, even our plows,
still more impossible, and so the more one studies the environment
of these people, thus far unavoidable, their numbers, what they have
done and are doing, against what odds they have succeeded, the more
difficult it becomes to see what course might have been better.

How full with work is the month which precedes the transplanting of
rice has been pointed out,--the making of the compost fertilizer;
harvesting the wheat, rape and beans; distributing the compost over
the fields, and their flooding and plowing. In Fig. 160 one of these
fields is seen plowed, smoothed and nearly ready for the plants. The
turned soil had been thoroughly pulverized, leveled and worked to
the consistency of mortar, on the larger fields with one or another
sort of harrow, as seen in Figs. 160 and 161. This thorough puddling
of the soil permits the plants to be quickly set and provides
conditions which ensure immediate perfect contact for the roots.

When the fields are ready women repair to the nurseries with their
low four-legged bamboo stools, to pull the rice plants, carefully
rinsing the soil from the roots, and then tie them into bundles of a
size easily handled in transplanting, which are then distributed in
the fields.

The work of transplanting may be done by groups of families changing
work, a considerable number of them laboring together after the
manner seen in Fig. 163, made from four snap shots taken from the
same point at intervals of fifteen minutes. Long cords were
stretched in the rice field six feet apart and each of the seven men
was setting six rows of rice one foot apart, six to eight plants in
a hill, and the hills eight or nine inches apart in the row. The,
bundle was held in one hand and deftly, with the other, the desired
number of plants were selected with the fingers at the roots,
separated from the rest and, with a single thrust, set in place in
the row. There was no packing of earth about the roots, each hill
being set with a single motion, which followed one another in quick
succession, completing one cross row of six hills after another. The
men move backward across the field, completing one entire section,
tossing the unused plants into the unset field. Then reset the lines
to cover another section. We were told that the usual day's work of
transplanting, for a man under these conditions, after the field is
fitted and the plants are brought to him, is two mow or one-third of
an acre. The seven men in this group would thus set two and a third
acres per day and, at the wage Mrs. Wu was paying, the cash outlay,
if the help was hired, would be nearly 21 cents per acre. This is
more cheaply than we are able to set cabbage and tobacco plants with
our best machine methods. In Japan, as seen in Figs. 164 and 165,
the women participate in the work of setting the plants more than in
China.

After the rice has been transplanted its care, unlike that of our
wheat crop, does not cease. It must be hoed, fertilized and watered.
To facilitate the watering all fields have been leveled, canals,
ditches and drains provided, and to aid in fertilizing and hoeing,
the setting has been in rows and in hills in the row.

The first working of the rice fields after the transplanting, as we
saw it in Japan, consisted in spading between the hills with a
four-tined hoe, apparently more for loosening the soil and aeration
than for killing weeds. After this treatment the field was gone over
again in the manner seen in Fig. 166, where the man is using his
bare hands to smooth and level the stirred soil, taking care to
eradicate every weed, burying them beneath the mud, and to
straighten each hill of rice as it is passed. Sometimes the fingers
are armed with bamboo claws to facilitate the weeding. Machinery in
the form of revolving hand cultivators is recently coming into use
in Japan, and two men using these are seen in Fig. 14. In these
cultivators the teeth are mounted on an axle so as to revolve as the
cultivator is pushed along the row.

Fertilization for the rice crop receives the greatest attention
everywhere by these three nations and in no direction more than in
maintaining the store of organic matter in the soil. The pink
clover, to which reference has been made, Figs. 99 and 100, is
extensively sowed after a crop of rice is harvested in the fall and
comes into full bloom, ready to cut for compost or to turn under
directly when the rice fields are plowed. Eighteen to twenty tons of
this green clover are produced per acre, and in Japan this is
usually applied to about three acres, the stubble and roots serving
for the field producing the clover, thus giving a dressing of six to
seven tons of green manure per acre, carrying not less than 37
pounds of potassium; 5 pounds of phosphorus, and 58 pounds of
nitrogen.

Where the families are large and the holdings small, so they cannot
spare room to grow the green manure crop, it is gathered on the
mountain, weed and hill lands, or it may be cut in the canals. On
our boat trip west from Soochow the last of May, many boats were
passed carrying tons of the long green ribbon-like grass, cut and
gathered from the bottom of the canal. To cut this grass men were
working to their armpits in the water of the canal, using a
crescent-shaped knife mounted like an anchor from the end of a
16-foot bamboo handle. This was shoved forward along the bottom of
the canal and then drawn backward, cutting the grass, which rose to
the surface where it was gathered upon the boats. Or material for
green manure may be cut on grave, mountain or hill lands, as
described under Fig. 115.

The straw of rice and other grain and the stems of any plant not
usable as fuel may also be worked into the mud of rice fields, as
may the chaff which is often scattered upon the water after the rice
is transplanted, as in Fig. 168.

Reference has been made to the utilization of waste of various kinds
in these countries to maintain the productive power of their soils,
but it is worth while, in the interests of western nations, as
helping them to realize the ultimate necessity of such economies, to
state again, in more explicit terms, what Japan is doing. Dr.
Kawaguchi, of the National Department of Agriculture and Commerce,
taking his data from their records, informed me that Japan produced,
in 1908, and applied to her fields, 23,850,295 tons of human manure;
22,812,787 tons of compost; and she imported 753,074 tons of
commercial fertilizers, 7000 of which were phosphates in one form or
another. In addition to these she must have applied not less than
1,404,000 tons of fuel ashes and 10,185,500 tons of green manure
products grown on her hill and weed lands, and all of these applied
to less than 14,000,000 acres of cultivated field, and it should be
emphasized that this is done because as yet they have found no
better way of permanently maintaining a fertility capable of feeding
her millions.

Besides fertilizing, transplanting and weeding the rice crop there
is the enormous task of irrigation to be maintained until the rice
is nearly matured. Much of the water used is lifted by animal power
and a large share of this is human. Fig. 169 shows two Chinese men
in their cool, capacious, nowhere-touching summer trousers flinging
water with the swinging basket, and it is surprising the amount of
water which may be raised three to four feet by this means. The
portable spool windlass, in Figs. 27 and 123, has been described,
and Fig. 170 shows the quadrangular, cone-shaped bucket and sweep
extensively used in Chihli. This man was supplying water sufficient
for the irrigation of half an acre, per day, lifting the water eight
feet.

The form of pump most used in China and the foot-power for working
it are seen in Fig. 171. Three men working a similar pump are seen
in Fig. 150, a closer view of three men working the foot-power may
be seen in Fig. 42 and still another stands adjacent to a series of
flooded fields in Fig. 172. Where this view was taken the old farmer
informed us that two men, with this pump, lifting water three feet,
were able to cover two mow of land with three inches of water in two
hours. This is at the rate of 2.5 acre-inches of water per ten hours
per man, and for 12 to 15 cents, our currency, thus making sixteen
acre-inches, or the season's supply of water, cost 77 to 96 cents,
where coolie labor is hired and fed. Such is the efficiency of human
power applied to the Chinese pump, measured in American currency.

This pump is simply an open box trough in which travels a wooden
chain carrying a series of loosely fitting boards which raise the
water from the canal, discharging it into the field. The size of the
trough and of the buckets are varied to suit the power applied and
the amount of water to be lifted. Crude as it appears there is
nothing in western manufacture that can compete with it in first
cost, maintenance or efficiency for Chinese conditions and nothing
is more characteristic of all these people than their efficient,
simple appliances of all kinds, which they have reduced to the
lowest terms in every feature of construction and cost. The greatest
results are accomplished by the simplest means. If a canal must be
bridged and it is too wide to be covered by a single span, the
Chinese engineer may erect it at some convenient place and turn the
canal under it when completed. This we saw in the case of a new
railroad bridge near Sungkiang. The bridge was completed and the
water had just been turned under it and was being compelled to make
its own excavation. Great expense had been saved while traffic on
the canal had not been obstructed.

In the foot-power wheel of Japan all gearing is eliminated and the
man walks the paddles themselves, as seen in Fig. 173. Some of these
wheels are ten feet in diameter, depending upon the height the water
must be lifted.

Irrigation by animal power is extensively practiced in each of the
three countries, employing mostly the type of power wheel shown in
Fig. 158. The next illustration, Fig. 174, shows the most common
type of shelter seen in Chekiang and Kiangsu provinces, which are
there very numerous. We counted as many as forty such shelters in a
semi-circle of half a mile radius. They provide comfort for the
animals during both sunshine and rain, for under no conditions must
the water be permitted to run low on the rice fields, and everywhere
their domestic animals receive kind, thoughtful treatment.

In the less level sections, where streams have sufficient fall,
current wheels are in common use, carrying buckets near their
circumference arranged so as to fill when passing through the water,
and to empty after reaching the highest level into a receptacle
provided with a conduit which leads the water to the field. In
Szechwan province some of these current wheels are so large and
gracefully constructed as to strongly suggest Ferris wheels. A view
of one of these we are permitted to present in Fig. 175, through the
kindness of Rollin T. Chamberlin who took the photograph from which
the engraving was prepared. This wheel which was some forty feet in
diameter, was working when the snap shot was taken, raising the
water and pouring it into the horizontal trough seen near the top of
the wheel, carried at the summit of a pair of heavy poles standing
on the far side of the wheel. From this trough, leading away to the
left above the sky line, is the long pipe, consisting of bamboo
stems joined together, for conveying the water to the fields.

When the harvest time has come, notwithstanding the large acreage of
grain, yielding hundreds of millions of bushels, the small, widely
scattered holdings and the surface of the fields render all of our
machine methods quite impossible. Even our grain cradle, which
preceded the reaper, would not do, and the great task is still met
with the old-time sickle, as seen in Fig. 176, cutting the rice hill
by hill, as it was transplanted.

Previous to the time for cutting, after the seed is well matured,
the water is drawn off and the land permitted to dry and harden. The
rainy season is not yet over and much care must be exercised in
curing the crop. The bundles may be shocked in rows along the
margins of the paddies, as seen in Fig. 176, or they may be
suspended, heads down, from bamboo poles as seen in Fig. 177.

The threshing is accomplished by drawing the heads of the rice
through the teeth of a metal comb mounted as seen at the right in
Fig. 178, near the lower corner, behind the basket, where a man and
woman are occupied in winnowing the dust and chaff from the grain by
means of a large double fan. Fanning mills built on the principle of
those used by our farmers and closely resembling them have long been
used in both China and Japan. After the rice is threshed the grain
must be hulled before it can serve as food, and the oldest and
simplest method of polishing used by the Japanese is seen in, Fig.
179, where the friction of the grain upon itself does the polishing.
A quantity of rice is poured into the receptacle when, with heavy
blows, the long-headed plunger is driven into the mass of rice, thus
forcing the kernels to slide over one another until, by their
abrasion, the desired result is secured. The same method of
polishing, on a larger scale, is accomplished where the plungers are
worked by the weight of the body, a series of men stepping upon
lever handles of weighted plungers, raising them and allowing them
to fall under the force of the weight attached. Recently, however,
mills worked by gasoline engines are in operation for both hulling
and polishing, in Japan.

The many uses to which rice straw is put in the economies of these
people make it almost as important as the rice itself. As food and
bedding for cattle and horses; as thatching material for dwellings
and other shelters; as fuel; as a mulch; as a source of organic
matter in the soil, and as a fertilizer, it represents a money value
which is very large. Besides these ultimate uses the rice straw is
extensively employed in the manufacture of articles used in enormous
quantities. It is estimated that not less than 188,700,000 bags such
as are seen in Figs. 180 and 181, worth $3,110,000 are made annually
from the rice straw in Japan, for handling 346,150,000 bushels of
cereals and 28,190,000 bushels of beans; and besides these, great
numbers of bags are employed in transporting fish and other prepared
manures.

In the prefecture of Hyogo, with 596 square miles of farm land, as
compared with Rhode Island's 712 square miles, Hyogo farmers
produced in 1906, on 265,040 acres, 10,584,000 bushels of rice worth
$16,191,400, securing an average yield of almost forty bushels per
acre and a gross return of $61 for the grain alone. In addition to
this, these farmers grew on the same land, the same season, at least
one other crop. Where this was barley the average yield exceeded
twenty-six bushels per acre, worth $17.

In connection with their farm duties these Japanese families
manufactured, from a portion of their rice straw, at night and
during the leisure hours of winter, 8,980,000 pieces of matting and
netting of different kinds having a market value of $262,000;
4,838,000 bags worth $185,000; 8,742,000 slippers worth $34,000;
6,254,000 sandals worth $30,000; and miscellaneous articles worth
$64,000. This is a gross earning of more than $21,000,000 from
eleven and a half townships of farm land and the labor of the
farmers' families, an average earning of, $80 per acre on nearly
three-fourths of the farm land of this prefecture. At this rate
three of the four forties of our 160-acre farms should bring a gross
annual income of $9,600 and the fourth forty should pay the
expenses.

At the Nara Experiment Station we were informed that the money value
of a good crop of rice in that prefecture should be placed at ninety
dollars per acre for the grain and eight dollars for the
unmanufactured straw; thirty-six dollars per acre for the crop of
naked barley and two dollars per acre for the straw. The farmers
here practice a rotation of rice and barley covering four or five
years, followed by a summer crop of melons, worth $320 per acre and
some other vegetable instead of the rice on the fifth or sixth year,
worth eighty yen per tan, or $160 per acre. To secure green manure
for fertilizing, soy beans are planted each year in the space
between the rows of barley, the barley being planted in November.
One week after the barley is harvested the soy beans, which produce
a yield of 160 kan per tan, or 5290 pounds per acre, are turned
under and the ground fitted for rice, At these rates the Nara
farmers are producing on four-fifths or five-sixths of their rice
lands a gross earning of $136 per acre annually, and on the other
fifth or sixth, an earning of $480 per acre, not counting the annual
crop of soy beans used in maintaining the nitrogen and organic
matter in their soils, and not counting their earnings from home
manufactures. Can the farmers of our south Atlantic and Gulf Coast
states, which are in the same latitude, sometime attain to this
standard? We see no reason why they should not, but only with the
best of irrigation, fertilization and proper rotation, with multiple
cropping.






XIII

SILK CULTURE





Another of the great and in some ways one of the most remarkable
industries of the Orient is that of silk production, and its
manufacture into the most exquisite and beautiful fabrics in the
world. Remarkable for its magnitude; for having had its birthplace
apparently in oldest China, at least 2600 years B. C.; for having
been founded on the domestication of a wild insect of the woods; and
for having lived through more than four thousand years, expanding
until a $1,000,000 cargo of the product has been laid down on our
western coast at one time and rushed by special fast express to New
York City for the Christmas trade.

Japan produced in 1907 26,072,000 pounds of raw silk from 17,154,000
bushels of cocoons, feeding the silkworms from mulberry leaves grown
on 957,560 acres. At the export selling price of this silk in Japan
the crop represents a money value of $124,000,000, or more than two
dollars per capita for the entire population of the Empire; and
engaged in the care of the silkworms, as seen in Figs. 184, 185, 186
and 187, there were, in 1906, 1,407,766 families or some 7,000,000
people.

Richard's geography of the Chinese Empire places the total export of
raw silk to all countries, from China, in 1905, at 30,413,200
pounds, and this, at the Japanese export price, represents a value
of $145,000,000. Richard also states that the value of the annual
Chinese export of silk to France amounts to 10,000,000 pounds
sterling and that this is but twelve per cent of the total, from
which it appears that her total export alone reaches a value near
$400,000,000.

The use of silk in wearing apparel is more general among the Chinese
than among the Japanese, and with China's eightfold greater
population, the home consumption of silk must be large indeed and
her annual production must much exceed that of Japan. Hosie places
the output of raw silk in Szechwan at 5,439,500 pounds, which is
nearly a quarter of the total output of Japan, and silk is
extensively grown in eight other provinces, which together have an
area nearly fivefold that of Japan. It would appear, therefore, that
a low estimate of China's annual production of raw silk must be some
120,000,000 pounds, and this, with the output of Japan and Korea,
would make a product for the three countries probably exceeding
150,000,000 pounds annually, representing a total value of perhaps
$700,000,000; quite equalling in value the wheat crop of the United
States, but produced on less than one-eighth of the area.

According to the observations of Count Dandola, the worms which
contribute to this vast earning are so small that some 700,000 of
them weigh at hatching only one pound, but they grow very rapidly,
shed their skins four times, weighing 15 pounds at the time of the
first moult, 94 pounds at the second, 400 pounds at the third, 1628
pounds at the fourth moulting and when mature have come to weigh
nearly five tons--9500 pounds. But in making this growth during
about thirty-six days, according to Paton, the 700,000 worms have
eaten 105 pounds by the time of the first moult; 315 pounds by the
second; 1050 pounds by the third; 3150 pounds by the fourth, and in
the final period, before spinning, 19,215 pounds, thus consuming in
all nearly twelve tons of mulberry leaves in producing nearly five
tons of live weight, or at the rate of two and a half pounds of
green leaf to one pound of growth.

According to Paton, the cocoons from the 700,000 worms would weigh
between 1400 and 2100 pounds and these, according to the
observations of Hosie in the province of Szechwan, would yield about
one-twelfth their weight of raw silk. On this basis the one pound of
worms hatched from the eggs would yield between 116 and 175 pounds
of raw silk, worth, at the Japanese export price for 1907, between
$550 and $832, and 164 pounds of green mulberry leaves would be
required to produce a pound of silk.

A Chinese banker in Chekiang province, with whom we talked, stated
that the young worms which would hatch from the eggs spread on a
sheet of paper twelve by eighteen inches would consume, in coming to
maturity, 2660 pounds of mulberry leaves and would spin 21.6 pounds
of silk. This is at the rate of 123 pounds of leaves to one pound of
silk. The Japanese crop for 1907, 26,072,000 pounds, produced on
957,560 acres, is a mean yield of 27.23 pounds of raw silk per acre
of mulberries, and this would require a mean yield of 4465 pounds of
green mulberry leaves per acre, at the rate of 164 pounds per pound
of silk.

Ordinary silk in these countries is produced largely from three
varieties of mulberries, and from them there may be three pickings
of leaves for the rearing of a spring, summer and autumn crop of
silk. We learned at the Nagoya Experiment Station, Japan, that there
good spring yields of mulberry leaves are at the rate of 400 kan,
the second crop, 150 kan, and the third crop, 250 kan per tan,
making a total yield of over thirteen tons of green leaves per acre.
This, however, seems to be materially higher than the average for
the Empire.

In Fig. 188 is a near view of a mulberry orchard in Chekiang
province, which has been very heavily fertilized with canal mud, and
which was at the stage for cutting the leaves to feed the first crop
of silkworms. A bundle of cut limbs is in the crotch of the front
tree in the view. Those who raise mulberry leaves are not usually
the feeders of the silkworms and the leaves from this orchard were
being sold at one dollar, Mexican, per picul, or 32.25 cents per one
hundred pounds. The same price was being paid a week later in the
vicinity of Nanking, Kiangsu province.

The mulberry trees, as they appear before coming into leaf in the
early spring, may be seen in Fig. 189. The long limbs are the shoots
of the last year's growth, from which at least one crop of leaves
had been picked, and in healthy orchards they may have a length of
two to three feet. An orchard from a portion of which the limbs had
just been cut, presented the appearance seen in Fig. 190. These
trees were twelve to fifteen years old and the enlargements on the
ends of the limbs resulted from the frequent pruning, year after
year, at nearly the same place. The ground under these trees was
thickly covered with a growth of pink clover just coming into bloom,
which would be spaded into the soil, providing nitrogen and organic
matter, whose decay would liberate potash, phosphorus and other
mineral plant food elements for the crop.

In Fig. 191 three rows of mulberry trees, planted four feet apart,
stand on a narrow embankment raised four feet, partly through
adjusting the surrounding fields for rice, and partly by additions
of canal mud used as a fertilizer. On either side of the mulberries
is a crop of windsor beans, and on the left a crop of rape, both of
which would be harvested in early June, the ground where they stand
flooded, plowed and transplanted to rice. This and the other
mulberry views were taken in the extensively canalized portion of
China represented in Fig. 52. The farmer owning this orchard had
just finished cutting two large bundles of limbs for the sale of the
leaves in the village. He stated that his first crop ordinarily
yields from three to as many as twenty piculs per mow, but that the
second crop seldom exceeded two to three piculs. The first and
second crop of leaves, if yielding together twenty-three piculs per
mow, would amount to 9.2 tons per acre, worth, at the price named,
$59.34. Mulberry leaves must be delivered fresh as soon as gathered
and must be fed the same day, the limbs, when, stripped of their
leaves, at the place where these are sold, are tied into bundles and
reserved for use as fuel.

In the south of China the mulberry is grown from low cuttings rooted
by layering. We have before spoken of our five hours ride in the
Canton delta region, on the steamer Nanning, through extensive
fields of low mulberry then in full leaf, which were first mistaken
for cotton nearing the blossom stage. This form of mulberry is seen
in Fig. 43, and the same method of pruning is practiced in southern
Japan. In middle Japan high pruning, as in Chekiang and Kiangsu
provinces, is followed, but in northern Japan the leaves are picked
directly, as is the case with the last crop of leaves everywhere,
pruning not being practiced in the more northern latitudes.

Not all silk produced in these northern countries is from the
domesticated Bombyx mori, large amounts being obtained from the
spinnings of wild silkworms feeding upon the leaves of species of
oak growing on the mountain and hill lands in various parts of
China, Korea and Japan. In China the collections in largest amount
are reeled from the cocoons of the tussur worm (Antheraea pernyi)
gathered in Shantung, Honan, Kweichow and Szechwan provinces. In the
hilly parts of Manchuria also this industry is attaining large
proportions, the cocoons being sent to Chefoo in the Shantung
province, to be woven into pongee silk.

M. Randot has estimated the annual crop of wild silk cocoons in
Szechwan at 10,180,000 pounds, although in the opinion of Alexander
Hosie much of this may come from Kweichow. Richard places the export
of raw wild silk from the whole of China proper, in 1904, at
4,400,000 pounds. This would mean not less than 75,300,000 pounds of
wild cocoons and may be less than half the home consumption.

From data collected by Alexander Hosie it appears that in 1899 the
export of raw tussur silk from Manchuria, through the port of
Newchwang by steamer alone, was 1,862,448 pounds, valued at
$1,721,200, and the production is increasing rapidly. The export
from the same port the previous year, by steamer, was 1,046,704
pounds. This all comes from the hilly and mountain lands south of
Mukden, lying between the Liao plain on the west and the Yalu river
on the east, covering some five thousand square miles, which we
crossed on the Antung-Mukden railway.

There are two broods of these wild silkworms each season, between
early May and early October. Cocoons of the fall brood are kept
through the winter and when the moths come forth they are caused to
lay their eggs on pieces of cloth and when the worms are hatched
they are fed until the first moult upon the succulent new oak leaves
gathered from the hills, after which the worms are taken to the low
oak growth on the hills where they feed themselves and spin their
cocoons under the cover of leaves drawn about them.

The moths reserved from the first brood, after becoming fertile, are
tied by means of threads to the oak bushes where they deposit the
eggs which produce the second crop of tussur silk. To maintain an
abundance of succulent leaves within reach the oaks are periodically
cut back.

Thus these plain people, patient, frugal, unshrinking from toil, the
basic units of three of the oldest nations, go to the uncultivated
hill lands and from the wild oak and the millions of insects which
they help to feed upon it, not only create a valuable export trade
but procure material for clothing, fuel, fertilizer and food, for
the large chrysalides, cooked in the reeling of the silk, may be
eaten at once or are seasoned with sauce to be used later. Besides
this, the last unreelable portion of each cocoon is laid aside to be
manufactured into silk wadding and into soft mattresses for caskets
upon which the wealthy lay their dead.






XIV

THE TEA INDUSTRY





The cultivation of tea in China and Japan is another of the great
industries of these nations, taking rank with that of sericulture,
if not above it, in the important part it plays in the welfare of
the people. There is little reason to doubt that the industry has
its foundation in the need of something to render boiled water
palatable for drinking purposes. The drinking of boiled water has
been universally adopted in these countries as an individually
available, thoroughly efficient and safe guard against that class of
deadly disease germs which it has been almost impossible to exclude
from the drinking water of any densely peopled country.

So far as may be judged from the success of the most thorough
sanitary measures thus far instituted, and taking into consideration
the inherent difficulties which must increase enormously with
increasing populations, it appears inevitable that modern methods
must ultimately fail in sanitary efficiency and that absolute safety
must be secured in some manner having the equivalent effect of
boiling water, long ago adopted by the Mongolian races, and which
destroys active disease germs at the latest moment before using. And
it must not be overlooked that the boiling of drinking water in
China and Japan has been demanded quite as much because of congested
rural populations as to guard against such dangers in large cities,
while as yet our sanitary engineers have dealt only with the urban
phases of this most vital problem and chiefly, too, thus far, only
where it has been possible to procure the water supply in
comparatively unpopulated hill lands. But such opportunities cannot
remain available indefinitely, any more than they did in China and
Japan, and already typhoid epidemics break out in our large cities
and citizens are advised to boil their drinking water.

If tea drinking in the family is to remain general in most portions
of the world, and especially if it shall increase in proportion to
population, there is great industrial and commercial promise for
China, Korea and Japan in their tea industry if they will develop
tea culture still further over the extensive and still unused flanks
of the hill lands; improve their cultural methods; their
manufacture; and develop their export trade. They have the best of
climatic and soil conditions and people sufficiently capable of
enormously expanding the industry. Both improvement and expansion of
methods along all essential lines, are needed, enabling them to put
upon the market pure teas of thoroughly uniform grades of guaranteed
quality, and with these the maintenance of an international code of
rigid ethics which shall secure to all concerned a square deal and a
fair division of the profits.

The production of rice, silk and tea are three industries which
these nations are preeminently circumstanced and qualified to
economically develop and maintain. Other nations may better
specialize along other lines which fitness determines, and the time
is coming when maximum production at minimum cost as the result of
clean robust living that in every way is worth while, will determine
lines of social progress and of international relations. With the
vital awakening to the possibility of and necessity for world peace,
it must be recognized that this can be nothing less than universal,
industrial, commercial, intellectual and religious, in addition to
making impossible forever the bloody carnage that has ravaged the
world through all the centuries.

With the extension of rapid transportation and more rapid
communication throughout the world, we are fast entering the state
of social development which will treat the whole world as a mutually
helpful, harmonious industrial unit. It must be recognized that in
certain regions, because of peculiar fitness of soil, climate and
people, needful products can be produced there better and enough
more cheaply than elsewhere to pay the cost of transportation. If
China, Korea and Japan, with parts of India, can and will produce
the best and cheapest silks, teas or rice, it must be for the
greatest good to seek a mutually helpful exchange, and the erection
of impassable tariff barriers is a declaration of war and cannot
make for world peace and world progress.

The date of the introduction of tea culture into China appears
unknown. It was before the beginning of the Christian era and
tradition would place it more than 2700 years earlier. The Japanese
definitely date its introduction into their islands as in the year
805 A. D., and state its coming to them from China. However and
whenever tea growing originated in these countries, it long ago
attained and now maintains large proportions. In 1907 Japan had
124,482 acres of land occupied by tea gardens and tea plantations.
These produced 60,877,975 pounds of cured tea, giving a mean yield
of 489 pounds per acre. Of the more than sixty million pounds of tea
produced annually on nearly two hundred square miles in Japan, less
than twenty-two million pounds are consumed at home, the balance
being exported at a cash value, in 1907, of $6,309,122, or a mean of
sixteen cents per pound.

In China the volume of tea produced annually is much larger than in
Japan. Hosie places the annual export from Szechwan into Tibet alone
at 40,000,000 pounds and this is produced largely in the mountainous
portion of the province west of the Min river. Richard places her
direct export to foreign countries, in 1905, at 176,027,255 pounds;
and in 1906 at 180,271,000 pounds, so that the annual export must
exceed 200,000,000 pounds, and her total product of cured tea must
be more than 400,000,000.

The general appearance of tea bushes as they are grown in Japan is
indicated in Fig. 192. The form of the bushes, the shape and size of
the leaves and the dense green, shiny foliage quite suggests our
box, so much used in borders and hedges. When the bushes are young,
not covering the ground, other crops are grown between the rows, but
as the bushes attain their full size, standing after trimming, waist
to breast high, the ground between is usually thickly covered with
straw, leaves or grass and weeds from the hill lands, which serve as
a mulch, as a fertilizer, as a means of preventing washing on the
hillsides, and to force the rain to enter the soil uniformly where
it falls.

Quite a large per cent of the tea bushes are grown on small,
scattering, irregular areas about dwellings, on land not readily
tilled, but there are also many tea plantations of considerable
size, presenting the appearance seen in Fig. 193. After each picking
of the leaves the bushes are trimmed back with pruning shears,
giving the rows the appearance of carefully trimmed hedges.

The tea leaves are hand picked, generally by women and girls, after
the manner seen in Fig. 194, where they are gathering the tender,
newly-formed leaves into baskets to be weighed fresh, as seen in
Fig. 195.

Three crops of leaves are usually gathered each season, the first
yielding in Japan one hundred kan per tan, the second fifty kan and
the third eighty kan per tan. This is at the rate of 3307 pounds,
1653 pounds, and 2645 pounds per acre, making a total of 7605 pounds
for the season, from which the grower realizes from a little more
than 2.2 to a little more than 3 cents per pound of the green
leaves, or a gross earning of $167 to $209.50 per acre.

We were informed that the usual cost for fertilizers for the tea
orchards was 15 to 20 yen per tan, or $30 to $40 per acre per annum,
the fertilizer being applied in the fall, in the early spring and
again after the first picking of the leaves. While the tea plants
are yet small one winter crop and one summer crop of vegetables,
beans or barley are grown between the rows, these giving a return of
some forty dollars per acre. Where the plantations are given good
care and ample fertilization the life of a plantation may be
prolonged continuously, it is said, through one hundred or more
years.

During our walk from Joji to Kowata, along a country road in one of
the tea districts, we passed a tea-curing house. This was a long
rectangular, one-story building with twenty furnaces arranged, each
under an open window, around the sides. In front of each heated
furnace with its tray of leaves, a Japanese man, wearing only a
breech cloth, and in a state of profuse perspiration, was busy
rolling the tea leaves between the palms of his hands.

At another place we witnessed the making of the low grade dust tea,
which is prepared from the leaves of bushes which must be removed or
from those of the prunings. In this case the dried bushes with their
leaves were being beaten with flails on a threshing floor. The dust
tea thus produced is consumed by the poorer people.






XV

ABOUT TIENTSIN





On the 6th of June we left central China for Tientsin and further
north, sailing by coastwise steamer from Shanghai, again plowing
through the turbid waters which give literal exactness to the name
Yellow Sea. Our steamer touched at Tsingtao, taking on board a body
of German troops, and again at Chefoo, and it was only between these
two points that the sea was not strongly turbid. Nor was this all.
From early morning of the 10th until we anchored at Tientsin, 2:30
P. M., our course up the winding Pei ho was against a strong
dust-laden wind which left those who had kept to the deck as grey as
though they had ridden by automobile through the Colorado desert; so
the soils of high interior Asia are still spreading eastward by
flood and by wind into the valleys and far over the coastal plains.
Over large areas between Tientsin and Peking and at other points
northward toward Mukden trees and shrubs have been systematically
planted in rectangular hedgerow lines, to check the force of the
winds and reduce the drifting of soils, planted fields occupying the
spaces between.

It was on this trip that we met Dr. Evans of Shunking, Szechwan
province. His wife is a physician practicing among the Chinese
women, and in discussing the probable rate of increase of population
among the Chinese, it was stated that she had learned through her
practice that very many mothers had borne seven to eleven children
and yet but one, two or at most three, were living.

It was said there are many customs and practices which determine
this high mortality among children, one of which is that of feeding
them meat before they have teeth, the mother masticating for the
children, with the result that often fatal convulsions follow. A
Scotch physician of long experience in Shantung, who took the
steamer at Tsingtao, replied to my question as to the usual size of
families in his circuit, "I do not know. It depends on the crops. In
good years the number is large; in times of famine the girls
especially are disposed of, often permitted to die when very young
for lack of care. Many are sold at such times to go into other
provinces." Such statements, however, should doubtless be taken with
much allowance. If all the details were known regarding the cases
which have served as foundations for such reports, the matter might
appear in quite a different light from that suggested by such cold
recitals.

Although land taxes are high in China Dr. Evans informed me that it
is not infrequent for the same tax to be levied twice and even three
times in one year. Inquiries regarding the land taxes among farmers
in different parts of China showed rates running from three cents to
a dollar and a half, Mexican, per mow; or from about eight cents to
$3.87 gold, per acre. At these rates a forty acre farm would pay
from $3.20 to $154.80, and a quarter section four times these
amounts. Data collected by Consul-General E. T. Williams of Tientsin
indicate that in Shantung the land tax is about one dollar per acre,
and in Chihli, twenty cents. In Kiangsi province the rate is 200 to
300 cash per mow, and in Kiangsu, from 500 to 600 cash per mow, or,
according to the rate of exchange given on page 76, from 60 to 80
cents, or 90 cents to $1.20 per acre in Kiangsi; and $1.50 to $2.00
or $1.80 to $2.40 in Kiangsu province. The lowest of these rates
would make the land tax on 160 acres, $96, and the highest would
place it at $384, gold.

In Japan the taxes are paid quarterly and the combined amount of the
national, prefectural and village assessments usually aggregates
about ten per cent of the government valuation placed on the land.
The mean valuation placed on the irrigated fields, excluding Formosa
and Karafuto, was in 1907, 35.35 yen per tan; that of the upland
fields, 9.40 yen, and the genya and pasture lands were given a
valuation of .22 yen per tan. These are valuations of $70.70, $18.80
and $.44, gold, per acre, respectively, and the taxes on forty acres
of paddy field would be $282.80; $75.20 on forty acres of upland
field, and $1.76, gold, on the same area of the genya and weed
lands.

In the villages, where work of one or another kind is done for pay,
Dr. Evans stated that a woman's wage might not exceed $8, Mexican,
or $3.44, gold, per year, and when we asked how it could be worth a
woman's while to work a whole year for so small a sum, his reply
was, "If she did not do this she would earn nothing, and this would
keep her in clothes and a little more." A cotton spinner in his
church would procure a pound of cotton and on returning the yarn
would receive one and a quarter pounds of cotton in exchange, the
quarter pound being her compensation.

Dr. Evans also described a method of rooting slips from trees,
practiced in various parts of China. The under side of a branch is
cut, bent upward and split for a short distance; about this is
packed a ball of moistened earth wrapped in straw to retain the soil
and to provide for future watering; the whole may then be bound with
strips of bamboo for greater stability. In this way slips for new
mulberry orchards are procured.

At eight o'clock in the morning we entered the mouth of the Pei ho
and wound westward through a vast, nearly sea-level, desert plain
and in both directions, far toward the horizon, huge white stacks of
salt dotted the surface of the Taku Government salt fields, and
revolving in the wind were great numbers of horizontal sail
windmills, pumping sea water into an enormous acreage of evaporation
basins. In Fig. 196 may be seen five of the large salt stacks and
six of the windmills, together with many smaller piles of salt. Fig.
197 is a closer view of the evaporation basins with piles of salt
scraped from the surface after the mother liquor had been drained
away. The windmills, which were working one, sometimes two, of the
large wooden chain pumps, were some thirty feet in diameter and
lifted the brine from tide-water basins into those of a second and
third higher level where the second and final concentration
occurred. These windmills, crude as they appear in Fig. 198, are
nevertheless efficient, cheaply constructed and easily controlled.
The eight sails, each six by ten feet, were so hung as to take the
wind through the entire revolution, tilting automatically to receive
the wind on the opposite face the moment the edge passed the
critical point. Some 480 feet of sail surface were thus spread to
the wind, working on a radius of fifteen feet. The horizontal drive
wheel had a diameter of ten feet, carried eighty-eight wooden cogs
which engaged a pinion with fifteen leaves, and there were nine arms
on the reel at the other end of the shaft which drove the chain. The
boards or buckets of the chain pump were six by twelve inches,
placed nine inches apart, and with a fair breeze the pump ran full.

Enormous quantities of salt are thus cheaply manufactured through
wind, tide and sun power directed by the cheapest human labor.
Before reaching Tientsin we passed the Government storage yards and
counted two hundred stacks of salt piled in the open, and more than
a third of the yard had been passed before beginning the count. The
average content of each stack must have exceeded 3000 cubic feet of
salt, and more than 40,000,000 pounds must have been stored in the
yards. Armed guards in military uniform patrolled the alleyways day
and night. Long strips of matting laid over the stacks were the only
shelter against rain.

Throughout the length of China's seacoast, from as far north as
beyond Shanhaikwan, south to Canton, salt is manufactured from sea
water in suitable places. In Szechwan province, we learn from the
report of Consul-General Hosie, that not less than 300,000 tons of
salt are annually manufactured there, largely from brine raised by
animal power from wells seven hundred to more than two thousand feet
deep.

Hosie describes the operations at a well more than two thousand feet
deep, at Tzeliutsing. In the basement of a power-house which
sheltered forty water buffaloes, a huge bamboo drum twelve feet
high, sixty feet in circumference, was so set as to revolve on a
vertical axis propelled by four cattle drawing from its
circumference. A hemp rope was wound about this drum, six feet from
the ground, passing out and under a pulley at the well, then up and
around a wheel mounted sixty feet above and descended to the bucket
made from bamboo stems four inches in diameter and nearly sixty feet
long, which dropped with great speed to the bottom of the well as
the rope unwound. When the bucket reached the bottom four
attendants, each with a buffalo in readiness, hitched to the drum
and drove at a running pace, during fifteen minutes, or until the
bucket was raised from the well. The buffalo were then unhitched
and, while the bucket was being emptied and again dropped to the
bottom of the well, a fresh relay were brought to the drum. In this
way the work continued night and day.

The brine, after being raised from the well, was emptied into
distributing reservoirs, flowing thence through bamboo pipes to the
evaporating sheds where round bottomed, shallow iron kettles four
feet across were set in brick arches in which jets of natural gas
were burning.

Within an area some sixty miles square there are more than a
thousand brine and twenty fire wells from which fuel gas is taken.
The mouths of the fire wells are closed with masonry, out from which
bamboo conduits coated with lime lead to the various furnaces,
terminating with iron burners beneath the kettles. Remarkable is the
fact that in the city of Tzeliutsing, both these brine and the fire
wells have been operated in the manufacture of salt since before
Christ was born.

The forty water buffalo are worth $30 to $40 per head and their food
fifteen to twenty cents per day. The cost of manufacturing this salt
is placed at thirteen to fourteen cash per catty, to which the
Government adds a tax of nine cash more, making the cost at the
factory from 82 cents to $1.15, gold, per hundred pounds. Salt
manufacture is a Government monopoly and the product must be sold
either to Government officials or to merchants who have bought the
exclusive right to supply certain districts. The importation of salt
is prohibited by treaties. For the salt tax collection China is
divided into eleven circuits each having its own source of supply
and transfer of salt from one circuit to another is forbidden.

The usual cost of salt is said to vary between one and a half and
four cash per catty. The retail price of salt ranges from
three-fourths to three cents per pound, fully twelve to fifteen
times the cost of manufacture. The annual production of salt in the
Empire is some 1,860,000 tons, and in 1901 salt paid a tax close to
ten million dollars.

Beyond the salt fields, toward Tientsin, the banks of the river were
dotted at short intervals with groups of low, almost windowless
houses, Fig. 199, built of earth brick plastered with clay on sides
and roof, made more resistant to rain by an admixture of chaff and
cut straw, and there was a remarkable freshness of look about them
which we learned was the result of recent preparations made for the
rainy season about to open. Beyond the first of these villages came
a stretch of plain dotted thickly and far with innumerable grave
mounds, to which reference has been made. For nearly an hour we had
traveled up the river before there was any material vegetation, the
soil being too saline apparently to permit growth, but beyond this,
crops in the fields and gardens, with some fruit and other trees,
formed a fringe of varying width along the banks. Small fields of
transplanted rice on both banks were frequent and often the land was
laid out in beds of two levels, carefully graded, the rice occupying
the lower areas, and wooden chain pumps were being worked by hand,
foot and animal power, irrigating both rice and garden crops.

In the villages were many stacks of earth compost, of the Shantung
type; manure middens were common and donkeys drawing heavy stone
rollers followed by men with large wooden mallets, were going round
and round, pulverizing and mixing the dry earth compost and the
large earthen brick from dismantled kangs, preparing fertilizer for
the new series of crops about to be planted, following the harvest
of wheat and barley. Large boatloads of these prepared fertilizers
were moving on the river and up the canals to the fields.

Toward the coast from Tientsin, especially in the country, traversed
by the railroad, there was little produced except a short grass,
this being grazed at the time of our visit and, in places, cut for a
very meagre crop of hay. The productive cultivated lands lie chiefly
along the rivers and canals or other water courses, where there is
better drainage as well as water for irrigation. The extensive,
close canalization that characterizes parts of Kiangsu and Chekiang
provinces is lacking here and for this reason, in part, the soil is
not so productive. The fuller canalization, the securing of adequate
drainage and the gaining of complete control of the flood waters
which flow through this vast plain during the rainy season
constitute one of China's most important industrial problems which,
when properly solved, must vastly increase her resources. During our
drive over the old Peking-Taku road saline deposits were frequently
observed which had been brought to the surface during the dry
season, and the city engineer of Tientsin stated that in their
efforts at parking portions of the foreign concessions they had
found the trees dying after a few years when their roots began to
penetrate the more saline subsoil, but that since they had opened
canals, improving the drainage, trees were no longer dying. There is
little doubt that proper drainage by means of canals, and the
irrigation which would go with it, would make all of these lands,
now more or less saline, highly productive, as are now those
contiguous to the existing water courses.

It had rained two days before our drive over the Taku road and when
we applied for a conveyance, the proprietor doubted whether the
roads were passible, as he had been compelled to send out an extra
team to assist in the return of one which had been stalled during
the previous night. It was finally arranged to send an extra horse
with us. The rainy season had just begun but the deep trenching of
the roads concentrates the water in them and greatly intensifies the
trouble. In one of the little hamlets through which we passed the
roadway was trenched to a depth of three to four feet in the middle
of the narrow street, leaving only five feet for passing in front of
the dwellings on either side, and in this trench our carriage moved
through mud and water nearly to the hubs.

Between Tientsin and Peking, in the early morning after a rain of
the night before, we saw many farmers working their fields with the
broad hoes, developing an earth mulch at the first possible moment
to conserve their much needed moisture. Men were at work, as seen in
Figs. 200 and 201, using long handled hoes, with blades nine by
thirteen inches, hung so as to draw just under the surface, doing
very effective work, permitting them to cover the ground rapidly.

Walking further, we came upon six women in a field of wheat,
gleaning the single heads which had prematurely ripened and broken
over upon the ground between the rows soon to be harvested. Whether
they were doing this as a privilege or as a task we do not know;
they were strong, cheerful, reasonably dressed, hardly past middle
life and it was nearly noon, yet not one of them had collected more
straws than she could readily grasp in one hand. The season in
Chihli as in Shantung, had been one of unusual drought, making the
crop short and perhaps unusual frugality was being practiced; but it
is in saving that these people excel perhaps more than in producing.
These heads of wheat, if left upon the ground, would be wasted and
if the women were privileged gleaners in the fields their returns
were certainly much greater than were those of the very old women we
have seen in France gathering heads of wheat from the already
harvested fields.

In the fields between Tientsin and Peking all wheat was being
pulled, the earth shaken from the roots, tied in small bundles and
taken to the dwellings, sometimes on the heavy cart drawn by a team
consisting of a small donkey and cow hitched tandem, as seen in Fig.
202. Millet had been planted between the rows of wheat in this field
and was already up. When the wheat was removed the ground would be
fertilized and planted to soy beans. Because of the dry season this
farmer estimated his yield would be but eight to nine bushels per
acre. He was expecting to harvest thirteen to fourteen bushels of
millet and from ten to twelve bushels of soy beans per acre from the
same field. This would give him an earning, based on the local
prices, of $10.36, gold, for the wheat; $6.00 for the beans, and
$5.48 per acre for the millet. This land was owned by the family of
the Emperor and was rented at $1.55, gold, per acre. The soil was a
rather light sandy loam, not inherently fertile, and fertilizers to
the value of $3.61 gold, per acre, had been applied, leaving the
earning $16.71 per acre.

Another farmer with whom we talked, pulling his crop of wheat, would
follow this with millet and soy beans in alternate rows. His yield
of wheat was expected to be eleven to twelve bushels per acre, his
beans twenty-one bushels and his millet twenty-five bushels which,
at the local prices for grain and straw, would bring a gross earning
of $35, gold, per acre.

Before reaching the end of our walk through the fields toward the
next station we came across another of the many instances of the
labor these people are willing to perform for only a small possible
increase in crop. The field was adjacent to one of the windbreak
hedges and the trees had spread their roots far afield and were
threatening his crop through the consumption of moisture and plant
food. To check this depletion the farmer had dug a trench twenty
inches deep the length of his field, and some twenty feet from the
line of trees, thereby cutting all of the surface roots to stop
their draft on the soil. The trench was left open and an interesting
feature observed was that nearly every cut root on the field side of
the trench had thrown up one or more shoots bearing leaves, while
the ends still connected with the trees showed no signs of leaf
growth.

In Chihli as elsewhere the Chinese are skilled gardeners, using
water for irrigation whenever it is advantageous. One gardener was
growing a crop of early cabbage, followed by one of melons, and
these with radish the same season. He was paying a rent of $6.45,
gold, per acre; was applying fertilizer at a cost of nearly $8 per
acre for each of the three crops, making his cash outlay $29.67 per
acre. His crop of cabbage sold for $103, gold; his melons for $77,
and his radish for something more than $51, making a total of
$232.20 per acre, leaving him a net value of $202.53.

A second gardener, growing potatoes, obtained a yield, when sold
new, of 8,000 pounds per acre; and of 16,000 pounds when the crop
was permitted to mature. The new potatoes were sold so as to bring
$51.60 and the mature potatoes $185.76 per acre, making the earning
for the two crops the same season a total of $237.36, gold. By
planting the first crop very early these gardeners secure two crops
the same season, as far north as Columbus, Ohio, and Springfield,
Illinois, the first crop being harvested when the tubers are about
the size of walnuts. The rental and fertilizers in this case
amounted to $30.96 per acre.

Still another gardener growing winter wheat followed by onions, and
these by cabbage, both transplanted, realized from the three crops a
gross earning of $176.73, gold, per acre, and incurred an expense of
$31.73 per acre for fertilizer and rent, leaving him a net earning
of $145 per acre.

These old people have acquired the skill and practice of storing and
preserving such perishable fruits as pears and grapes so as to
enable them to keep them on the markets almost continuously. Pears
were very common in the latter part of June, and Consul-General
Williams informed me that grapes are regularly carried into July. In
talking with my interpreter as to the methods employed I could only
learn that the growers depend simply upon dry earth cellars which
can be maintained at a very uniform temperature, the separate fruits
being wrapped in paper. No foreigner with whom we talked knew their
methods.

Vegetables are carried through the winter in such earth cellars as
are seen in Fig. 88, page 161, these being covered after they are
filled.

As to the price of labor in this part of China, we learned through
Consul-General Williams that a master mechanic may receive 50 cents,
Mexican, per day, and a journeyman 18 cents, or at a rate of 21.5
cents and 7.75 cents, gold. Farm laborers receive from $20 to $30,
Mexican, or $8.60 to $12.90, gold, per year, with food, fuel and
presents which make a total of $17.20 to $21.50. This is less for
the year than we pay for a month of probably less efficient labor.
There is relatively little child labor in China and this perhaps
should be expected when adult labor is so abundant and so cheap.






XVI

MANCHURIA AND KOREA





The 39th parallel of latitude lies just south of Tientsin; followed
westward, it crosses the toe of Italy's boot, leads past Lisbon in
Portugal, near Washington and St. Louis and to the north of
Sacramento on the Pacific. We were leaving a country with a mean
July temperature of 80 deg F., and of 21 deg in January, but where
two feet of ice may form; a country where the eighteen year mean
maximum temperature is 103.5 deg and the mean minimum 4.5 deg; where
twice in this period the thermometer recorded 113 deg above zero,
and twice 7 deg below, and yet near the coast and in the latitude of
Washington; a country where the mean annual rainfall is 19.72 inches
and all but 3.37 inches falls in June, July, August and September.
We had taken the 5:40 A. M. Imperial North-China train, June 17th,
to go as far northward as Chicago,--to Mukden in Manchuria, a
distance by rail of some four hundred miles, but all of the way
still across the northward extension of the great Chinese coastal
plain. Southward, out from the coldest quarter of the globe, where
the mean January temperature is more than 40 deg below zero, sweep
northerly winds which bring to Mukden a mean January temperature
only 3 deg above zero, and yet there the July temperature averages
as high as 77 deg and there is a mean annual rainfall of but 18.5
inches, coming mostly in the summer, as at Tientsin.

Although the rainfall of the northern extension of China's coastal
plain is small, its efficiency is relatively high because of its
most favorable distribution and the high summer temperatures. In the
period of early growth, April, May and June, there are 4.18 inches;
but in the period of maximum growth, July and August, the rainfall
is 11.4 inches; and in the ripening period, September and October,
it is 3.08 inches, while during the rest of the year but 1.06 inch
falls. Thus most of the rain comes at the time when the crops
require the greatest daily consumption and it is least in
mid-winter, during the period of little growth.

As our train left Tientsin we traveled for a long distance through a
country agriculturally poor and little tilled, with surface flat,
the soil apparently saline, and the land greatly in need of
drainage. Wherever there were canals the crops were best, apparently
occupying more or less continuous areas along either bank. The day
was hot and sultry but laborers were busy with their large hoes,
often with all garments laid aside except a short shirt or a pair of
roomy trousers.

In the salt district about the village of Tangku there were huge
stacks of salt and smaller piles not yet brought together, with
numerous windmills, constituting most striking features in the
landscape, but there was almost no agricultural or other vegetation.
Beyond Pehtang there are other salt works and a canal leads westward
to Tientsin, on which the salt is probably taken thither, and still
other salt stacks and windmills continued visible until near Hanku,
where another canal leads toward Peking. Here the coast recedes
eastward from the railway and beyond the city limits many grave
mounds dot the surrounding plains where herds of sheep were grazing.

As we hurried toward the delta region of the Lwan ho, and before
reaching Tangshan, a more productive country was traversed. Thrifty
trees made the landscape green, and fields of millet, kaoliang and
wheat stretched for miles together along the track and back over the
flat plain beyond the limit of vision. Then came fields planted with
two rows of maize alternating with one row of soy beans, but not
over twenty-eight inches apart, one stalk of corn in a place every
sixteen to eighteen inches, all carefully hoed, weedless and
blanketed with an excellent earth mulch; but still the leaves were
curling in the intense heat of the sun. Tangshan is a large city,
apparently of recent growth on the railroad in a country where
isolated conical hills rise one hundred or two hundred feet out of
the flat, plains. Cart loads of finely pulverized earth compost were
here moving to the fields in large numbers, being laid in single
piles of five hundred to eight hundred pounds, forty to sixty feet
apart. At Kaiping the country grows a little rolling and we passed
through the first railway cuts, six to eight feet deep, and the
water in the streams is running ten to twelve feet below the surface
of the fields. On the right and beyond Kuyeh there are low hills,
and here we passed enormous quantities of dry, finely powdered earth
compost, distributed on narrow unplanted area over the fields. What
crop, if indeed any, had occupied these areas this season, we could
not judge. The fertilization here is even more extensive and more
general than we found it in the Shantung province, and in places
water was being carried in pails to the fields for use either in
planting or in transplanting, to ensure the readiness of the new
crops to utilize the first rainfall when it comes.

Then the bed of a nearly dry stream some three hundred feet wide was
crossed and beyond it a sandy plain was planted in long narrow
fields between windbreak hedges. The crops were small but evidently
improved by the influence of the shelter. The sand in places had
drifted into the hedges to a height of three feet. At a number of
other places along the way before Mukden was reached such protected
areas were passed and oftenest on the north side of wide, now nearly
dry, stream channels.

As we passed on toward Shanhaikwan we were carried over broad plains
even more nearly level and unobstructed than any to be found in the
corn belt of the middle west, and these too planted with corn,
kaoliang, wheat and beans, and with the low houses hidden in distant
scattered clusters of trees dotting the wide plain on either side,
with not a fence, and nothing to suggest a road anywhere in sight.
We seemed to be moving through one vast field dotted with hundreds
of busy men, a plowman here, and there a great cart hopelessly lost
in the field so far as one could see any sign of road to guide their
course.

Some early crop appeared to have been harvested from areas
alternating with those on the ground, and these were dotted with
piles of the soil and manure compost, aggregating hundreds of tons,
distributed over the fields but no doubt during the next three or
four days these thousands of piles would have been worked into the
soil and vanished from sight, to reappear after another crop and
another year.

It was at Lwanchow that we met the out-going tide of soy beans
destined for Japan and Europe, pouring in from the surrounding
country in gunny sacks brought on heavy carts drawn by large mules,
as seen in Fig. 203, and enormous quantities had been stacked in the
open along the tracks, with no shelter whatever, awaiting the
arrival of trains to move them to export harbors.

The planting here, as elsewhere, is in rows, but not of one kind of
grain. Most frequently two rows of maize, kaoliang or millet
alternated with the soy beans and usually not more than twenty-eight
inches apart, sharp high ridge cultivation being the general
practice. Such planting secures the requisite sunshine with a larger
number of plants on the field; it secures a continuous general
distribution of the roots of the nitrogen-fixing soy beans in the
soil of all the field every season, and permits the soil to be more
continuously and more completely laid under tribute by the root
systems. In places where the stand of corn or millet was too open
the gaps were filled with the soy beans. Such a system of planting
possibly permits a more immediate utilization of the nitrogen
gathered from the soil air in the root nodules, as these die and
undergo nitrification during the same season, while the crops are
yet on the ground, and so far as phosphorus and potassium compounds
are liberated by this decay, they too would become available to the
crops.

The end of the day's journey was at Shanhaikwan on the boundary
between Chihli and Manchuria, the train stopping at 6:20 P. M. for
the night. Stepping upon the veranda from our room on the second
floor of a Japanese inn in the early morning, there stood before us,
sullen and grey, the eastern terminus of the Great Wall, winding
fifteen hundred miles westward across twenty degrees of longitude,
having endured through twenty-one centuries, the most stupendous
piece of construction ever conceived by man and executed by a
nation. More than twenty feet thick at the base and than twelve feet
on the top; rising fifteen to thirty feet above the ground with
parapets along both faces and towers every two hundred yards rising
twenty feet higher, it must have been, for its time and the methods
of warfare then practiced, when defended by their thousands, the
boldest and most efficient national defense ever constructed. Nor in
the economy of construction and maintenance has it ever been
equalled.

Even if it be true that 20,000 masons toiled through ten years in
its building, defended by 400,000 soldiers, fed by a commissariat of
20,000 more and supported by 30,000 others in the transport, quarry
and potters' service, she would then have been using less than eight
tenths per cent of her population, on a basis of 60,000,000 at the
time; while according to Edmond Théry's estimate, the officers and
soldiers of Europe today, in time of peace, constitute one per cent
of a population of 400,000,000 of people, and these, at only one
dollar each per day for food, clothing and loss of producing power
would cost her nations, in ten years, more than $14,000 million.
China, with her present habits and customs, would more easily have
maintained her army of 470,000 men on thirty cents each per day, or
for a total ten-year cost of but $520,000,000. The French cabinet in
1900 approved a naval program involving an expenditure of
$600,000,000 during the next ten years, a tax of more than $15 for
every man, woman and child in the Republic.

Leaving Shanhaikwan at 5:20 in the morning and reaching Mukden at
6:30 in the evening, we rode the entire day through Manchurian
fields. Manchuria has an area of 363,700 square miles, equal to that
of both Dakotas, Minnesota, Nebraska and Iowa combined. It has
roughly the outline of a huge boot and could one slide it eastward
until Port Arthur was at Washington, Shanhaikwan would fall well
toward Pittsburgh, both at the tip of the broad toe to the boot. The
foot would lie across Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and all of
New England, extending beyond New Brunswick with the heel in the
Gulf of St. Lawrence. Harbin, at the instep of the boot, would lie
fifty miles east of Montreal and the expanding leg would reach
northwestward nearly to James Bay, entirely to the north of the
Ottawa river and the Canadian Pacific, spanning a thousand miles of
latitude and nine hundred miles of longitude.

The Liao plain, thirty miles wide, and the central Sungari plain,
are the largest in Manchuria, forming together a long narrow valley
floor between two parallel mountain systems and extending
northeasterly from the Liao gulf, between Port Arthur and
Shanhaikwan, up the Liao river and down the Sungari to the Amur, a
distance of eight hundred or more miles. These plains have a
fertile, deep soil and it is on them and other lesser river bottoms
that Manchurian agriculture is developed, supporting eight or nine
million people on a cultivated, acreage possibly not greater than
25,000 square miles.

Manchuria has great forest and grazing possibilities awaiting future
development, as well as much mineral wealth. The population of
Tsitsihar, in the latitude of middle North Dakota, swells from
thirty thousand to seventy thousand during September and October,
when the Mongols bring in their cattle to market. In the middle
province, at the head of steam navigation on the Sungari, because of
the abundance and cheapness of lumber, Kirin has become a
shipbuilding center for Chinese junks. The Sungari-Milky-river, is a
large stream carrying more water at flood season than the Amur above
its mouth, the latter being navigable 450 miles for steamers drawing
twelve feet of water, and 1500 miles for those drawing four feet, so
that during the summer season the middle and northern provinces have
natural inland waterways, but the outlet to the sea is far to the
north and closed by ice six months of the year.

Not far beyond the Great Wall of China, fast falling into ruin,
partly through the appropriation of its material for building
purposes now that it has outlived its usefulness, another broad,
nearly dry stream bed was crossed. There, in full bloom, was what
appeared to be the wild white rose seen earlier, further south, west
of Suchow, having a remarkable profusion of small white bloom in
clusters resembling the Rambler rose. One of these bushes growing
wild there on the bank of the canal had over spread a clump of trees
one of which was thirty feet in height, enveloping it in a mantle of
bloom, as seen in the upper section of Fig. 204. The lower section
of the illustration is a closer view showing the clusters. The stem
of this rose, three feet above the ground, measured 14.5 inches in
circumference. If it would thrive in this country nothing could be
better for parks and pleasure drives. Later on our journey we saw it
many times in bloom along the railway between Mukden and Antung, but
nowhere attaining so large growth. The blossoms are scant
three-fourths inch in diameter, usually in compact clusters of three
to eleven, sometimes in twos and occasionally standing singly. The
leaves are five-foliate, sometimes trifoliate; leaflets broadly
lanceolate, accuminate and finely serrate; thorns minute, recurrent
and few, only on the smaller branches.

In a field beyond, a small donkey was drawing a stone roller three
feet long and one foot in diameter, firming the crests of narrow,
sharp, recently formed ridges, two at a time. Millet, maize and
kaoliang were here the chief crops. Another nearly dry stream was
crossed, where the fields became more rolling and much cut by deep
gullies, the first instances we had seen in China except on the
steep hillsides about Tsingtao. Not all of the lands here were
cultivated, and on the untilled areas herds of fifty to a hundred
goats, pigs, cattle, horses and donkeys were grazing.

Fields in Manchuria are larger than in China and some rows were a
full quarter of a mile long, so that cultivation was being done with
donkeys and cattle, and large numbers of men were working in gangs
of four, seven, ten, twenty, and in one field as high as fifty,
hoeing millet. Such a crew as the largest mentioned could probably
be hired at ten cents each, gold, per day, and were probably men
from the thickly settled portions of Shantung who had left in the
spring, expecting to return in September or October. Both laborers
and working animals were taking dinner in the fields, and earlier in
the day we had seen several instances where hay and feed were being
taken to the field on a wooden sled, with the plow and other tools.
At noon this was serving as manger for the cattle, mules or donkeys.

In fields where the close, deep furrowing and ridging was being done
the team often consisted of a heavy ox and two small donkeys driven
abreast, the three walking in adjacent rows, the plow following the
ox, or a heavy mule instead.

The rainy season had not begun and in many fields there was planting
and transplanting where water was used in separate hills, sometimes
brought in pails from a nearby stream, and in other cases on carts
provided with tanks. Holes were made along the crests of the ridges
with the blade of a narrow hoe and a little water poured in each
hill, from a dipper, before planting or setting. These must have
been other instances where the farmers were willing to incur
additional labor to save time for the maturing of the crop by
assisting germination in a soil too dry to make it certain until the
rains came.

It appears probable that the strong ridging and the close level rows
so largely adopted here must have marked advantages in utilizing the
rainfall, especially the portions coming early, and that later also
if it should come in heavy showers. With steep narrow ridging, heavy
rains would be shed at once to the bottom of the deep furrows
without over-saturating the ridges, while the wet soil in the bottom
of the furrows would favor deep percolation with lateral capillary
flow taking place strongly under the ridges from the furrows,
carrying both moisture and soluble plant food where they will be
most completely and quickly available. When the rain comes in heavy
showers each furrow may serve as a long reservoir which will prevent
washing and at the same time permit quick penetration; the ridges
never becoming flooded or puddled, permit the soil air to escape
readily as the water from the furrows sinks, as it cannot easily do
in flat fields when the rains fall rapidly and fill all of the soil
pores, thus closing them to the escape of air from below, which must
take place before the water can enter.

When rows are only twenty-four to twenty-eight inches apart, ridging
is not sufficiently more wasteful of soil moisture, through greater
evaporation because of increased surface, to compensate for the
other advantages gained, and hence their practice, for their
conditions, appears sound.

The application of finely pulverized earth compost to fields to be
planted, and in some cases where the fields were already planted,
continued general after leaving Shanhailkwan as it had been before.
Compost stacks were common in yards wherever buildings were close
enough to the track to be seen. Much of the way about one-third of
the fields were yet to be, or had just been, planted and in a great
majority of these compost fertilizer had been laid down for use on
them, or was being taken to them in large heavy carts drawn
sometimes by three mules. Between Sarhougon and Ningyuenchow
fourteen fields thus fertilized were counted in less than half a
mile; ten others in the next mile; eleven in the mile and a quarter
following. In the next two miles one hundred fields were counted and
just before reaching the station we counted during five minutes,
with watch in hand, ninety-five fields to be planted, upon which
this fertilizer had been brought. In some cases the compost was
being spread in furrows between the rows of a last year's crop,
evidently to be turned under, thus reversing the position of the
ridges.

After passing Lienshan, where, the railway runs near the sea, a sail
was visible on the bay and many stacks of salt piled about the
evaporation fields were associated with the revolving sail windmills
already described. Here, too, large numbers of cattle, horses, mules
and donkeys were grazing on the untilled low lands, beyond which we
traversed a section where all fields were planted, where no
fertilizer was piled in the field but where many groups of men were
busy hoeing, sometimes twenty in a gang.

Chinese soldiers with bayonetted guns stood guard at every railway
station between Shanhaikwan and Mukden, and from Chinchowfu our
coach was occupied by some Chinese official with guests and military
attendants, including armed soldiers. The official and his guests
were an attractive group of men with pleasant faces and winning
manners, clad in many garments of richly figured silk of bright,
attractive, but unobtrusive, colors, who talked, seriously or in
mirth, almost incessantly. They took the train about one o'clock and
lunch was immediately served in Chinese style, but the last course
was not brought until nearly four o'clock. At every station soldiers
stood in line in the attitude of salute until the official car had
passed.

Just before reaching Chinchowfu we saw the first planted fields
littered with stubble of the previous crop, and in many instances
such stubble was being gathered and removed to the villages, large
stacks having been piled in the yards to be used either as fuel or
in the production of compost. As the train approached Taling ho
groups of men were hoeing in millet fields, thirty in one group on
one side and fifty in another body on the other. Many small herds of
cattle, horses, donkeys and flocks of goats and sheep were feeding
along stream courses and on the unplanted fields. Beyond the
station, after crossing the river, still another sand dune tract was
passed, planted with willows, millet occupying the level areas
between the dunes, and not far beyond, wide untilled flats were
crossed, on which many herds were grazing and dotted with grave
mounds as we neared Koupantze, where a branch of the railway
traverses the Liao plain to the port of Newchwang. It was in this
region that there came the first suggestion of resemblance to our
marshland meadows; and very soon there were seen approaching from
the distance loads so green that except for the large size one would
have judged them to be fresh grass. They were loads of cured hay in
the brightest green, the result, no doubt, of curing under their dry
weather conditions.

At Ta Hu Shan large quantities of grain in sacks were piled along
the tracks and in the freight yards, but under matting shelters.
Near here, too, large three-mule loads of dry earth compost were
going to the fields and men were busy pulverizing and mixing it on
the threshing floors preparatory for use. Nearly all crops growing
were one or another of the millets, but considerable areas were yet
unplanted and on these cattle, horses, mules and donkeys were
feeding and eight more loads of very bright new made hay crossed the
track.

When the train reached Sinminfu where the railway turns abruptly
eastward to cross the Liao ho to reach Mukden we saw the first
extensive massing of the huge bean cakes for export, together with
enormous quantities of soy beans in sacks piled along the railway
and in the freight yards or loaded on cars made up in trains ready
to move. Leaving this station we passed among fields of grain
looking decidedly yellow, the first indication we had seen in China
of crops nitrogen-hungry and of soils markedly deficient in
available nitrogen. Beyond the next station the fields were
decidedly spotted and uneven as well as yellow, recalling conditions
so commonly seen at home and which had been conspicuously absent
here before. Crossing the Liao ho with its broad channel of shifting
sands, the river carrying the largest volume of water we had yet
seen, but the stream very low and still characteristic of the close
of the dry season of semi-arid climates, we soon reached another
station where the freight yards and all of the space along the
tracks were piled high with bean cakes and yet the fields about were
reflecting the impoverished condition of the soil through the yellow
crops and their uneven growth on the fields.

Since the Japanese-Russian war the shipments of soy beans and of
bean cake from Manchuria have increased enormously. Up to this time
there had been exports to the southern provinces of China where the
bean cakes were used as fertilizers for the rice fields, but the new
extensive markets have so raised the price that in several instances
we were informed they could not then afford to use bean cake as
fertilizer. From Newchwang alone, in 1905, between January 1st and
March 31st, there went abroad 2,286,000 pounds of beans and bean
cake, but in 1906 the amount had increased to 4,883,000 pounds. But
a report published in the Tientsin papers as official, while we were
there, stated that the value of the export of bean cake and soy
beans from Dalny for the months ending March 31st had been, in 1909,
only $1,635,000, gold, compared with $3,065,000 in the corresponding
period of 1908, and of $5,120,000 in 1907, showing a marked
decrease.

Edward C. Parker, writing from Mukden for the Review of Reviews,
stated: "The bean cake shipments from Newchwang, Dalny and Antung in
1908 amounted to 515,198 tons; beans, 239,298 tons; bean oil, 1930
tons; having a total value of $15,016,649 (U. S. gold)". According
to the composition of soy beans as indicated in Hopkins' table of
analyses, these shipments of beans and bean cake would remove an
aggregate of 6171 tons of phosphorus, 10,097 tons of potassium, and
47,812 tons of nitrogen from Manchurian soils as the result of
export for that year. Could such a rate have been maintained during
two thousand years there would have been sold from these soils
20,194,000 tons of potassium; 12,342,000 tons of phosphorus and
95,624,000 tons of nitrogen; and the phosphorus, were it thus
exported, would have exceeded more than threefold all thus far
produced in the United States; it would have exceeded the world's
output in 1906 more than eighteen times, even assuming that all
phosphate rock mined was seventy-five per cent pure.

The choice of the millets and the sorghums as the staple bread crops
of northern China and Manchuria has been quite as remarkable as the
selection of rice for the more southern latitudes, and the two
together have played a most important part in determining the high
maintenance efficiency of these people. In nutritive value these
grains rank well with wheat; the stems of the larger varieties are
extensively used for both fuel and building material and the smaller
forms make excellent forage and have been used directly for
maintaining the organic content of the soil. Their rapid development
and their high endurance of drought adapt them admirably to the
climate of north China and Manchuria where the rains begin only
after late June and where weather too cold for growth comes earlier
in the fall. The quick maturity of these crops also permits them to
be used to great advantage even throughout the south, in their
systems of multiple cropping so generally adopted, while their great
resistance to drought, being able to remain at a standstill for a
long time when the soil is too dry for growth and yet be able to
push ahead rapidly when favorable rains come, permits them to be
used on the higher lands generally where water is not available for
irrigation.

In the Shantung province the large millet, sorghum or kaoliang,
yields as high as 2000 to 3000 pounds of seed per acre, and 5600 to
6000 pounds of air-dry stems, equal in weight to 1.6 to 1.7 cords of
dry oak wood. In the region of Mukden, Manchuria, its average yield
of seed is placed at thirty-five bushels of sixty pounds weight per
acre, and with this comes one and a half tons of fuel or of building
material. Hosie states that, the kaoliang is the staple food of the
population of Manchuria and the principal grain food of the work
animals. The grain is first washed in cold water and then poured
into a kettle with four times its volume of boiling water and cooked
for an hour, without salt, as with rice. It is eaten with chopsticks
with boiled or salted vegetables. He states that an ordinary servant
requires about two pounds of this grain per day, and that a workman
at heavy labor will take double the amount. A Chinese friend of his,
keeping five servants, supplied them with 240 pounds of millet per
month, together with 16 pounds of native flour, regarded as
sufficient for two days, and meat for two days, the amount not being
stated. Two of the small millets (Setaria italica, and Panicum
milliaceum), wheat, maize and buckwheat are other grains which are
used as food but chiefly to give variety and change of diet.

Very large quantities of matting and wrappings are also made from
the leaves of the large millet, which serve many purposes
corresponding with the rice mattings and bags of Japan and southern
China.

The small millets, in Shantung, yield as high as 2700 pounds of seed
and 4800 pounds of straw per acre. In Japan, in the year 1906, there
were grown 737,719 acres of foxtail, barnyard and proso millet,
yielding 17,084,000 bushels of seed or an average of twenty-three
bushels per acre. In addition to the millets, Japan grew, the same
year, 5,964,300 bushels of buckwheat on 394,523 acres, or an average
of fifteen bushels per acre. The next engraving, Fig. 205, shows a
crop of millet already six inches high planted between rows of
windsor beans which had matured about the middle of June. The leaves
had dropped, the beans had been picked from the stems, and a little
later, when the roots had had time to decay the bean stems would be
pulled and tied in bundles for use as fuel or for fertilizer.

We had reached Mukden thoroughly tired after a long day of
continuous close observation and writing. The Astor House, where we
were to stop, was three miles from the station and the only
conveyance to meet the train was a four-seated springless, open,
semi-baggage carryall and it was a full hour lumbering its way to
our hotel. But here as everywhere in the Orient the foreigner meets
scenes and phases of life competent to divert his attention from
almost any discomfort. Nothing could be more striking than the
peculiar mode the Manchu ladies have of dressing their hair, seen in
Fig. 206, many instances of which were passed on the streets during
this early evening ride. It was fearfully and wonderfully done, laid
in the smoothest, glossiest black, with nearly the lateral spread of
the tail of a turkey cock and much of the backward curve of that of
the rooster; far less attractive than the plainer, refined, modest,
yet highly artistic style adopted by either Chinese or Japanese
ladies.

The journey from Mukden to Antung required two days, the train
stopping for the night at Tsaohokow. Our route lay most of the way
through mountainous or steep hilly country and our train was made up
of diminutive coaches drawn by a tiny engine over a three-foot
two-inch narrow gauge track of light rails laid by the Japanese
during the war with Russia, for the purpose of moving their armies
and supplies to the hotly contested fields in the Liao and Sungari
plains. Many of the grades were steep, the curves sharp, and in
several places it was necessary to divide the short train to enable
the engines to negotiate them.

To the southward over the Liao plain the crops were almost
exclusively millet and soy beans, with a little barley, wheat, and a
few oats. Between Mukden and the first station across the Hun river
we had passed twenty-four good sized fields of soy beans on one side
of the river and twenty-two on the other, and before reaching the
hilly country, after travelling a distance of possibly fifteen
miles, we had passed 309 other and similar fields close along the
track. In this distance also we had passed two of the monuments
erected by the Japanese, marking sites of their memorable battles.
These fields were everywhere flat, lying from sixteen to twenty feet
above the beds of the nearly dry streams, and the cultivation was
mostly being done with horses or cattle.

After leaving the plains country the railway traversed a narrow
winding valley less than a mile wide, with gradient so steep that
our train was divided. Fully sixty per cent of the hill slopes were
cultivated nearly to the summit and yet rising apparently more than
one in three to five feet, and the uncultivated slopes were closely
wooded with young trees, few more than twenty to thirty feet high,
but in blocks evidently of different ages. Beyond the pass many of
the cultivated slopes have walled terraces. We crossed a large
stream where railway ties were being rafted down the river. Just
beyond this river the train was again divided to ascend a gradient
of one in thirty, reaching the summit by five times switching back,
and matched on the other side of the pass by a down grade of one in
forty.

At many of the farm houses in the narrow valleys along the way large
rectangular, flat topped compost piles were passed, thirty to forty
inches high and twenty, thirty, forty and even in one case as much
as sixty feet square on the ground. More and more it became evident
that these mountain and hill lands were originally heavily wooded
and that the new growth springs up quickly, developing rapidly. It
was clear also that the custom of cutting over these wooded areas at
frequent intervals is very old, not always in the same stage of
growth but usually when the trees are quite small. Considerable
quantities of cordwood were piled at the stations along the railway
and were being loaded on the cars. This was always either round wood
or sticks split but once; and much charcoal, made mostly from round
wood or sticks split but once, was being shipped in sacks shaped
like those used for rice, seen in Fig. 180. Some strips of the
forest growth had been allowed to stand undisturbed apparently for
twenty or more years, but most areas have been cut at more frequent
intervals, often apparently once in three to five, or perhaps ten,
years.

At several places on the rapid streams crossed, prototypes of the
modern turbine water-wheel were installed, doing duty grinding beans
or grain. As with native machinery everywhere in China, these wheels
were reduced to the lowest terms and the principle put to work
almost unclothed. These turbines were of the downward discharge
type, much resembling our modern windmills, ten to sixteen feet in
diameter, set horizontally on a vertical axis rising through the
floor of the mill, with the vanes surrounded by a rim, the water
dropping through the wheel, reacting when reflected from the
obliquely set vanes. American engineers and mechanics would
pronounce these very crude, primitive and inefficient. A truer view
would regard them as examples of a masterful grasp of principle by
some, man who long ago saw the unused energy of the stream and
succeeded thus in turning it to account.

Both days of our journey had been bright and very warm and, although
we took the train early in the morning at Mukden, a young Japanese
anticipated the heat, entering the train clad only in his kimono and
sandals, carrying a suitcase and another bundle. He rode all day,
the most comfortably, if immodestly, clad man on the train, and the
next morning took his seat in front of us clad in the same garb, but
before the train reached Antung he took down his suitcase and then
and there, deliberately attired himself in a good foreign suit,
folding his kimono and packing it away with his sandals.

From Antung we crossed the Yalu on the ferry to New Wiju at 6:30 A.
M., June 22, and were then in quite a different country and among a
very different people, although all of the railway officials,
employes, police and guards were Japanese, as they had been from
Mukden. At Antung and New Wiju the Yalu is a very broad slow stream
resembling an arm of the sea more than a river, reminding one of the
St. Johns at Jacksonville, Florida.

June 22nd proved to be one of the national festival days in Korea,
called "Swing day", and throughout our entire ride to Seoul the
fields were nearly all deserted and throngs of people, arrayed in
gala dress, appeared all along the line of the railway, sometimes
congregating in bodies of two to three thousand or more, as seen in
Fig. 207. Many swings had been hung and were being enjoyed by the
young people. Boys and men were bathing in all sorts of "swimming
holes" and places. So too, there were many large open air gatherings
being addressed by public speakers, one of which is seen in Fig.
208.

Nearly everyone was dressed in white outer garments made from some
fabric which although not mosquito netting was nearly as open and
possessed of a remarkable stiffness which seemed to take and retain
every dent with astonishing effect and which was sufficiently
transparent to reveal a third undergarment. The full outstanding
skirts of five Korean women may be seen in Fig. 209, and the
trousers which went with these were proportionately full but tied
close about the ankles. The garments seemed to be possessed of a
powerful repulsion which held them quite apart and away from the
person, no doubt contributing much to comfort. It was windy but one
of those hot sultry, sticky days, and it made one feel cool to see
these open garments surging in the wind.

The Korean men, like the Chinese, wear the hair long but not braided
in a queue. No part of the head is shaved but the hair is wound in a
tight coil on the top of the head, secured by a pin which, in the
case of the Korean who rode in our coach from Mukden to Antung, was
a modern, substantial tenpenny wire nail. The tall, narrow, conical
crowns of the open hats, woven from thin bamboo splints, are
evidently designed to accommodate this style of hair dressing as
well as to be cool.

Here, too, as in China and Manchuria, nearly all crops are planted
in rows, including the cereals, such as wheat, rye, barley and oats.
We traversed first a flat marshy country with sandy soil and water
not more than four feet below the surface where, on the lowest areas
a close ally of our wild flower-de-luce was in bloom. Wheat was
coining into head but corn and millet were smaller than in
Manchuria. We had left New Wiju at 7:30 in the morning and at 8:15
we passed from the low land into a hill country with narrow valleys.
Scattering young pine, seldom more than ten to twenty-five feet
high, occupied the slopes and as we came nearer the hills were seen
to be clothed with many small oak, the sprouts clearly not more than
one or two years old. Roofs of dwellings in the country were usually
thatched with straw laid after the manner of shingles, as may be
seen in Fig. 210, where the hills beyond show the low tree growth
referred to, but here unusually dense. Bundles of pine boughs,
stacked and sheltered from the weather, were common along the way
and evidently used for fuel.

At 8:25 we passed through the first tunnel and there were many along
the route, the longest requiring thirty seconds for the passing of
the train. The valley beyond was occupied by fields of wheat where
beans were planted between the rows. Thus far none of the fields had
been as thoroughly tilled and well cared for as those seen in China,
nor were the crops as good. Further along we passed hills where the
pines were all of two ages, one set about thirty feet high and the
others twelve to fifteen feet or less, and among these were numerous
oak sprouts. Quite possibly these are used as food for the wild
silkworms. In some places appearances indicate that the oak and
other deciduous growth, with the grass, may be cut annually and only
the pines allowed to stand for longer periods. As we proceeded
southward and had passed Kosui the young oak sprouts were seen to
cover the hills, often stretching over the slopes much like a
regular crop, standing at a height of two to four feet, and fresh
bundles of these sprouts were seen at houses along the foot of the
slopes, again suggesting that the leaves may be for the tussur
silkworms although the time appears late for the first moulting.
After we had left Seoul, entering the broader valleys where rice was
more extensively grown, the using of the oak boughs and green grass
brought down from the hill lands for green manure became very
extensive.

After the winter and early spring crops have been harvested the
narrow ridges on which they are grown are turned into the furrows by
means of their simple plow drawn by a heavy bullock, different from
the cattle in China but closely similar to those in Japan. The
fields are then flooded until they have the appearance seen in Fig.
12. Over these flooded ridges the green grass and oak boughs are
spread, when the fields are again plowed and the material worked
into the wet soil. If this working is not completely successful men
enter the fields and tramp the surface until every twig and blade is
submerged. The middle section in this illustration has been fitted
and transplanted; in front of it and on the left are two other
fields once plowed but not fertilized; those far to the right have
had the green manure applied and the ground plowed a second time but
not finished, and in the immediate foreground the grass and boughs
have been scattered but the second plowing is not yet done.

We passed men and bullocks coming from the hill lands loaded with
this green herbage and as we proceeded towards Fusan more and more
of the hill area was being made to contribute materials for green
manure for the cultivated fields. The foreground of Fig. 211 had
been thus treated and so had the field in Fig. 212, where the man
was engaged in tramping the dressing beneath the surface. In very
many cases this material was laid along the margin of the paddies;
in other cases it had been taken upon the fields as soon as the
grain was cut and was lying in piles among the bundles; while in
still other cases the material for green manure had been carried
between the rows while the grain was still standing, but nearly
ready to harvest. In some fields a full third of a bushel of the
green stuff had been laid down at intervals of three feet over the
whole area. In other cases piles of ashes alternated with those of
herbage, and again manure and ashes mixed had been distributed in
alternate piles with the green manure.

In still other cases we saw untreated straw distributed through the
fields awaiting application. At Shindo this, straw had the
appearance of having been dipped in or smeared with some mixture,
apparently of mud and ashes or possibly of some compost which had
been worked into a thin paste with water.

After passing Keizan, mountain herbage had been brought down from
the hills in large bales on cleverly constructed racks saddled to
the backs of bullocks, and in one field we saw a man who had just
come to his little field with an enormous load borne upon his
easel-like packing appliance. Thus we find the Koreans also adopting
the rice crop, which yields heavily under conditions of abundant
water; we find them supplementing a heavy summer rainfall with water
from their hills, and bringing to their fields besides both green
herbage for humus and organic matter, and ashes derived from the
fuel coming also from the hills, in these ways making good the
unavoidable losses, through intense cropping.

The amount of forest growth in Korea, as we saw it, in proximity to
the cultivated valleys, is nowhere large and is fairly represented
in Figs. 210, 213 and 214. There were clear evidences of periodic
cutting and considerable, amounts of cordwood split from timber a
foot through were being brought to the stations on the backs of
cattle. In some places there was evident and occasionally very
serious soil erosion, as may be seen in Fig. 214, one such region
being passed just before reaching Kinusan, but generally the hills
are well rounded and covered with a low growth of shrubs and
herbaceous plants.

Southernmost Korea has the latitude of the northern boundary of
South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, while the
northeast corner attains that of Madison, Wisconsin, and the
northern boundary of Nebraska, the country thus spanning some nine
degrees and six hundred miles of latitude. It has an area of some
82,000 square miles, about equaling the state of Minnesota, but much
of its surface is occupied by steep hill and mountain land. The
rainy season had not yet set in, June 23rd. Wheat and the small
grains were practically all harvested southward of Seoul and the
people were everywhere busy with their flails threshing in the open,
about the dwellings or in the fields, four flails often beating
together on the same lot of grain. As we journeyed southward the
valleys and the fields became wider and more extensive, and the
crops, as well as the cultural methods, were clearly much better.

Neither the foot-power, animal-power, nor the wooden chain pump of
the Chinese were observed in Korea in use for lifting water, but we
saw many instances of the long handled, spoonlike swinging scoop
hung over the water by a cord from tall tripods, after the manner
seen in Fig. 215, each operated by one man and apparently with high
efficiency for low lifts. Two instances also were observed of the
form of lift seen in Fig. 173, where the man walks the circumference
of the wheel, so commonly observed in Japan. Much hemp was being
grown in southern Korea but everywhere on very small isolated areas
which flecked the landscape with the deepest green, each little
field probably representing the crop of a single family.

It was 6:30 P. M. when our train reached Fusan after a hot and dusty
ride. The service had been good and fairly comfortable but the
ice-water tanks of American trains were absent, their place being
supplied by cooled bottled waters of various brands, including
soda-water, sold by Japanese boys at nearly every important station.
Close connection was made by trains with steamers to and from Japan
and we went directly on board the Iki Maru which was to weigh anchor
for Moji and Shimonoseki at 8 P. M. Although small, the steamer was
well equipped, providing the best of service. We were fortunate in
having a smooth passage, anchoring at 6:30 the next morning and
making close connection with the train for Nagasaki, landing at the
wharf with the aid of a steam launch.

Our ride by train through the island of Kyushu carried us through
scenes not widely different from those we had just left. The journey
was continuously among fields of rice, with Korean features strongly
marked but usually under better and more intensified culture, and
the season, too, was a little more advanced. Here the plowing was
being done mostly with horses instead of the heavy bullocks so
exclusively employed in Korea. Coming from China into Korea, and
from there into Japan, it appeared very clear that in agricultural
methods and appliances the Koreans and Japanese are more closely
similar than the Chinese and Koreans, and the more we came to see of
the Japanese methods the more strongly the impression became fixed
that the Japanese had derived their methods either from the Koreans
or the Koreans had taken theirs more largely from Japan than from
China.

It was on this ride from Moji to Nagasaki that we were introduced to
the attractive and very satisfactory manner of serving lunches to
travelers on the trains in Japan. At important stations hot tea is
brought to the car windows in small glazed, earthenware teapots
provided with cover and bail, and accompanied with a teacup of the
same ware. The set and contents could be purchased for five sen, two
and a half cents, our currency. All tea is served without milk or
sugar. The lunches were very substantial and put together in a neat
sanitary manner in a three-compartment wooden box, carefully made
from clear lumber joined with wooden pegs and perfect joints. Packed
in the cover we found a paper napkin, toothpicks and a pair of
chopsticks. In the second compartment there were thin slices of
meat, chicken and fish, together with bamboo sprouts, pickles, cakes
and small bits of salted vegetables, while the lower and chief
compartment was filled with rice cooked quite stiff and without
salt, as is the custom in the three countries. The box was about six
inches long, four inches deep and three and a half inches wide.
These lunches are handed to travelers neatly wrapped in spotless
thin white paper daintily tied with a bit of color, all in exchange
for 25 sen,--12.5 cents. Thus for fifteen cents the traveler is
handed, through the car window, in a respectful manner, a square
meal which he may eat at his leisure.






XVII

RETURN TO JAPAN





We had returned to Japan in the midst of the first rainy season, and
all the day through, June 25th, and two nights, a gentle rain fell
at Nagasaki, almost without interruption. Across the narrow street
from Hotel Japan were two of its guest houses, standing near the
front of a wall-faced terrace rising twenty-eight feet above the
street and facing the beautiful harbor. They were accessible only by
winding stone steps shifting on paved landings to continue the
ascent between retaining walls overhung with a wealth of shrubbery
clothed in the densest foliage, so green and liquid in the drip of
the rain, that one almost felt like walking edgewise amid stairs
lest the drip should leave a stain. Over such another series of
steps, but longer and more winding, we found our way to the American
Consulate where in the beautifully secluded quarters Consul-General
Scidmore escaped many annoyances of settling the imagined petty
grievances arising between American tourists and the ricksha boys.

Through the kind offices of the Imperial University of Sapporo and
of the National Department of Agriculture and Commerce, Professor
Tokito met us at Nagasaki, to act as escort through most of the
journey in Japan. Our first visit was to the prefectural
Agricultural Experiment Station at Nagasaki. There are four others
in the four main islands, one to an average area of 4280 square
miles, and to each 1,200,000 people. The island of Kyushu, whose
latitude is that of middle Mississippi and north Louisiana, has two
rice harvests, and gardeners at Nagasaki grow three crops, each
year. The gardener and his family work about five tan, or a little
less than one and one-quarter acres, realizing an annual return of
some $250 per acre. To maintain these earnings fertilizers are
applied rated worth $60 per acre, divided between the three crops,
the materials used being largely the wastes of the city, animal
manure, mud from the drains, fuel ashes and sod, all composted
together. If this expenditure for fertilizers appears high it must
be remembered that nearly the whole product is sold and that there
are three crops each year. Such intense culture requires a heavy
return if large yields are maintained. Good agricultural lands were
here valued at 300 yen per tan, approximately $600 per acre.

When returning toward Moji to visit the Agricultural Experiment
Station of Fukuoka prefecture, the rice along the first portion of
the route was standing about eight inches above the water. Large
lotus ponds along the way occupied areas not readily drained, and
the fringing fields between the rice paddies and the untilled hill
lands were bearing squash, maize, beans and Irish potatoes. Many
small areas had been set to sweet potatoes on close narrow ridges,
the tops of which were thinly strewn with green grass, or sometimes
with straw or other litter, for shade and to prevent the soil from
washing and baking in the hot sun after rains. At Kitsu we passed
near Government salt works, for the manufacture of salt by the
evaporation of sea water, this industry in Japan, as in China, being
a Government monopoly.

Many bundles of grass and other green herbage were collected along
the way, gathered for use in the rice fields. In other cases the
green manure had already been spread over the flooded paddies and
was being worked beneath the surface, as seen in Fig. 216. At this
time the hill lands were clothed in the richest, deepest green but
the tree growth was nowhere large except immediately about temples,
and was usually in distinct small areas with sharp boundaries
occasioned by differences in age. Some tracts had been very recently
cut; others were in their second, third or fourth years; while
others still carried a growth of perhaps seven to ten years. At one
village many bundles of the brush fuel had been gathered from an
adjacent area, recently cleared.

A few fields were still bearing their crop of soy beans planted in
February between rows of grain, and the green herbage was being
worked into the flooded soil, for the crop of rice. Much compost,
brought to the fields, was stacked with layers of straw between,
laid straight, the alternate courses at right angles, holding the
piles in rectangular form with vertical sides, some of which were
four to six feet high and the layers of compost about six inches
thick.

Just before reaching Tanjiro, a region is passed where orchards of
the candleberry tree occupy high leveled areas between rice paddies,
after the manner described for the mulberry orchards in Chekiang,
China. These trees, when seen from a distance, have quite the
appearance of our apple orchards.

At the Fukuoka Experiment Station we learned that the usual depth of
plowing for the rice fields is three and a half to four and a half
inches, but that deeper plowing gives somewhat larger yields. As an
average of five years trials, a depth of seven to eight inches
increased the yield from seven to ten per cent over that of the
usual depth. In this prefecture grass from the bordering hill lands
is applied to the rice fields at rates ranging from 3300 to 16,520
pounds green weight per acre, and, according to analyses given,
these amounts would carry to, the fields from 18 to 90 pounds of
nitrogen; 12.4 to 63.2 pounds of potassium, and 2.1 to 10.6 pounds
of phosphorus per acre.

Where bean cake is used as a fertilizer the applications may be at
the rate of 496 pounds per acre, carrying 33.7 pounds of nitrogen,
nearly 5 pounds of phosphorus and 7.4 pounds of potassium. The earth
composts are chiefly applied to the dry land fields and then only
after they are well rotted, the fermentation being carried through
at least sixty days, during which the material is turned three times
for aeration, the work being done at the home. When used on the rice
fields where water is abundant the composts are applied in a less
fermented condition.

The best yields of rice in this prefecture are some eighty bushels
per acre, and crops of barley may even exceed this, the two crops
being grown the same year, the rice following the barley. In most
parts of Japan the grain food of the laboring people is about 70 per
cent naked barley mixed with 30 per cent of rice, both cooked and
used in the same manner. The barley has a lower market value and its
use permits a larger share of the rice to be sold as a money crop.

The soils are fertilized for each crop every year and the
prescription for barley and rice recommended by the Experiment
Station, for growers in this prefecture, is indicated by the
following table:


         FERTILIZATION FOR NAKED BARLEY.
                    Pounds per acre.
 Fertilizers.               N       P      K
Manure compost   6,613    33.0     7.4   33.8
Rape seed cake     330    16.7     2.8    3.5
Night soil       4,630    26.4     2.6   10.2
Superphosphate     132             9.9
                 ----------------------
      Sum       11,705    76.1    22.7   47.5

         FERTILIZATION FOR PADDY RICE.

Manure compost   5,291    26.4     5.9   27.1
Green manure,
  soy beans      3,306    19.2     1.1   19.6
Soy bean cake      397    27.8     1.7    6.4
Superphosphate     198            12.8
                 ----------------------
       Sum       9,192    73.4    21.5   53.1
                ======   =====    ====  =====
Total for year  20,897   149.5    44.2  100.6


Where these recommendations are followed there is an annual
application of fertilizer material which aggregates some ten tons
per acre, carrying about 150 pounds of nitrogen, 44 pounds of
phosphorus and 100 pounds of potassium. The crop yields which have
been associated with these applications on the Station fields are
about forty-nine bushels of barley and fifty bushels of rice per
acre.

The general rotation recommended for this portion of Japan covers
five years and consists of a crop of wheat or naked barley the first
two years with rice as the summer crop; in the third year genge,
"pink clover" (Astragalus sinicus) or some other legume for green
manure is the winter crop, rice following in the summer; the fourth
year rape is the winter crop, from which the seed is saved and the
ash of the stems returned to the soil, or rarely the stems
themselves may be turned under; on the fifth and last year of the
rotation the broad kidney or windsor bean is the winter crop,
preceding the summer crop of rice. This rotation is not general yet
in the practice of the farmers of the section, they choosing rape or
barley and in February plant windsor or soy beans between the rows
for green manure to use when the rice comes on.

It was evident from our observations that the use of composts in
fertilizing was very much more general and extensive in China than
it was in either Korea or Japan, but, to encourage the production
and use of compost fertilizers, this and other prefectures have
provided subsidies which permit the payment of $2.50 annually to
those farmers who prepare and use on their land a compost heap
covering twenty to forty square yards, in accordance with specified
directions given.

The agricultural college at Fukuoka was not in session the day of
our visit, it being a holiday usually following the close of the
last transplanting season. One of the main buildings of the station
and college is seen in Fig. 217, and Figs. 218, 219 and 220, placed
together from left to right in the order of their numbers, form a
panoramic view of the station grounds and buildings with something
of the beautiful landscape setting. There is nowhere in Japan the
lavish expenditure of money on elaborate and imposing architecture
which characterizes American colleges and stations, but in equipment
for research work, both as to professional staff and appliances,
they compare favorably with similar institutions in America. The
dormitory system was in vogue in the college, providing room and
board at eight yen per month or four dollars of our currency. Eight
students were assigned to one commodious room, each provided with a
study table, but beds were mattresses spread upon the matting floor
at night and compactly stored on closet shelves during the day.

The Japanese plow, which is very similar to the Korean type, may be
seen in Fig. 221, the one on the right costing 2.5 yen and the other
2 yen. With the aid of the single handle and the sliding rod held in
the right hand, the course of the plow is directed and the plow
tilted in either direction, throwing the soil to the right or the
left.

The nursery beds for rice breeding experiments and variety tests by
this station are shown in Fig. 222. Although these plots are flooded
the marginal plants, adjacent to the free water paths, were
materially larger than those within and had a much deeper green
color, showing better feeding, but what seemed most strange was the
fact that these stronger plants are never used in transplanting, as
they do not thrive as well as those less vigorous.

We left the island of Kyushu in the evening of June 29th, crossing
to the main island of Honshu, waiting in Shimonoseki for the morning
train. The rice-planted valleys near Shimonoseki were relatively
broad and the paddies had all been recently set in close rows about
a foot apart and in hills in the rows. Mountain and hill lands were
closely wooded, largely with coniferous trees about the base but
toward and at the summits, especially on the South slopes, they were
green only with herbage cut for fertilizing and feeding stock. Many
very small trees, often not more than one foot high, were growing on
the recently cut-over areas; tall slender graceful bamboos clustered
along the way and everywhere threw wonderful beauty into the
landscape. Cartloads of their slender stems, two to four inches in
diameter at the base and twenty or more feet long, were moving along
the generally excellent, narrow, seldom fenced roads, such as seen
in Fig. 223. On the borders and pathways between rice paddies many
small stacks of straw were in waiting to be laid between the rows of
transplanted rice, tramped beneath the water and overspread with mud
to enrich the soil. The farmers here, as elsewhere, must contend
against the scouring rush, varieties of grass and our common
pigweeds, even in the rice fields. The large area of mountain and
hill land compared with that which could be tilled, and the
relatively small area of cultivated land not at this time under
water and planted to rice persisted throughout the journey.

If there could be any monotony for the traveller new to this land of
beauty it must result from the quick shifting of scenes and in the
way the landscapes are pieced together, out-doing the craziest
patchwork woman ever attempted; the bits are almost never large;
they are of every shape, even puckered and crumpled and tilted at
all angles. Here is a bit of the journey: Beyond Habu the foothills
are thickly wooded, largely with conifers. The valley is extremely
narrow with only small areas for rice. Bamboo are growing in
congenial places and we pass bundles of wood cut to stove length, as
seen in Fig. 224. Then we cross a long narrow valley practically all
in rice, and then another not half a mile wide, just before reaching
Asa. Beyond here the fields become limited in area with the
bordering low hills recently cut over and a new growth springing up
over them in the form of small shrubs among which are many pine. Now
we are in a narrow valley between small rice fields or with none at
all, but dash into one more nearly level with wide areas in rice
chiefly on one side of the track just before reaching Onoda at 10:30
A. M. and continuing three minutes ride beyond, when we are again
between hills without fields and where the trees are pine with
clumps of bamboo. In four minutes more we are among small rice
paddies and at 10:35 have passed another gap and are crossing
another valley checkered with rice fields and lotus ponds, but in
one minute more the hills have closed in, leaving only room for the
track. At 10:37 we are running along a narrow valley with its
terraced rice paddies where many of the hills show naked soil among
the bamboo, scattering pine and other small trees; then we are out
among garden patches thickly mulched with straw. At 10:38 we are
between higher hills with but narrow areas for rice stretching close
along the track, but in two minutes these are passed and we are
among low hills with terraced dry fields. At 10:42 we are spinning
along the level valley with its rice, but are quickly out again
among hills with naked soil where erosion was marked. This is just
before passing Funkai where we are following the course of a stream
some sixty feet wide with but little cultivated land in small areas.
At 10:47 we are again passing narrow rice fields near the track
where the people are busy weeding with their hands, half knee-deep
in water. At 10:53 we enter a broader valley stretching far to the
south and seaward, but we had crossed it in one minute, shot through
another gap, and at 10:55 are traversing a much broader valley
largely given over to rice, but where some of the paddies were
bearing matting rush set in rows and in hills after the manner of
rice. It is here we pass Oyou and just beyond cross a stream
confined between levees built some distance back from either bank.
At 11:17 this plain is left and we enter a narrow valley without
fields. Thus do most of the agricultural lands of Japan lie in the
narrowest valleys, often steeply sloping, and into which jutting
spurs create the greatest irregularity of boundary and slope.

The journey of this day covered 350 miles in fourteen hours, all of
the way through a country of remarkable and peculiar beauty which
can be duplicated nowhere outside the mountainous, rice-growing
Orient and there only during fifteen days closing the transplanting
season. There were neither high mountains nor broad valleys, no
great rivers and but few lakes; neither rugged naked rocks, tall
forest trees nor wide level fields reaching away to unbroken
horizons. But the low, rounded, soil-mantled mountain tops clothed
in herbaceous and young forest growth fell everywhere into lower
hills and these into narrow steep valleys which dropped by a series
of water-level benches, as seen in Fig. 225, to the main river
courses. Each one of these millions of terraces, set about by its
raised rim, was a silvery sheet of water dotted in the daintiest
manner with bunches of rice just transplanted, but not so close nor
yet so high and over-spreading as to obscure the water, yet quite
enough to impart to the surface a most delicate sheen of green; and
the grass-grown narrow rims retaining the water in the basins,
cemented them into series of the most superb mosaics, shaped into
the valley bottoms by artizan artists perhaps two thousand years
before and maintained by their descendants through all the years
since, that on them the rains and fertility from the mountains and
the sunshine from heaven might be transformed by the rice plant into
food for the families and support for the nation. Two weeks earlier
the aspect of these landscapes was very different, and two weeks
later the reflecting water would lie hidden beneath the growing and
rapidly developing mantle of green, to go on changing until autumn,
when all would be overspread with the ripened harvest of grain. And
what intensified the beauty of it all was the fact that only along
the widest valley bottoms were the mosaics level, except the water
surface of each individual unit and these were always small. At one
time we were riding along a descending series of steps and then
along another rising through a winding valley to disappear around a
projecting spur, and anywhere in the midst of it all might be
standing Japanese cottages or villas with the water and the growing
rice literally almost against the walls, as seen in Fig. 226, while
a near-by high terrace might hold its water on a level with the
chimney-tops. Can one wonder that the Japanese loves his country or
that they are born and bred landscape artists?

Just before reaching Hongo there were considerable areas thrown into
long narrow, much-raised, east and west beds under covers of straw
matting inclined at a slight angle toward the south, some two feet
above the ground but open toward the north. What crop may have been
grown here we did not learn but the matting was apparently intended
for shade, as it was hot midsummer weather, and we suspect it may
have been ginseng. It was here, too, that we came into the region of
the culture of matting rush, extensively grown in Hiroshima and
Okayama prefectures, but less extensively all over the empire. As
with rice, the rush is first grown in nursery beds from which it is
transplanted to the paddies, one acre of nursery supplying
sufficient stock for ten acres of field. The plants are set twenty
to thirty stalks in a hill in rows seven inches apart with the hills
six inches from center to center in the row. Very high fertilization
is practiced, costing from 120 to 240 yen per acre, or $60 to $120
annually, the fertilizer consisting of bean cake and plant ashes, or
in recent years, sometimes of sulphate of ammonia for nitrogen, and
superphosphate of lime. About ten per cent of the amount of
fertilizer required for the crop is applied at the time of fitting
the ground, the balance being administered from time to time as the
season advances. Two crops of the rush may be taken from the same
ground each year or it is grown in rotation with rice, but most
extensively on the lands less readily drained and not so well suited
for other crops. Fields of the rush, growing in alternation with
rice, are seen in Fig. 45, and in Fig. 227, with the Government salt
fields lying along the seashore beyond.

With the most vigorous growth the rush attain a height exceeding
three feet and the market price varies materially with the length of
the stems. Good yields, under the best culture, may be as high as
6.5 tons per acre of the dry stems but the average yield is less,
that of 1905 being 8531 pounds, for 9655 acres, The value of the
product ranges from $120 to $200 per acre.

It is from this material that mats are woven in standard sizes, to
be laid over padding, upholstering the floors which are the seats of
all classes in Japan, used in the manner seen in Fig. 228 and in
Fig. 229, which is a completely furnished guest room in a first
class Japanese inn, finished in natural unvarnished wood, with walls
of sliding panels of translucent paper, which may open upon a porch,
into a hallway or into another apartment; and with its bouquet,
which may consist of a single large shapely branch of the purple
leaved maple, having the cut end charred to preserve it fresh for a
longer time, standing in water in the vase.

"Two little maids I've heard of, each with a pretty taste, Who had
two little rooms to fix and not an hour to waste. Eight thousand
miles apart they lived, yet on the selfsame day The one in Nikko's
narrow streets, the other on Broadway, They started out, each happy
maid her heart's desire to find, And her own dear room to furnish
just according to her mind.

When Alice went a-shopping, she bought a bed of brass, A bureau and
some chairs and things and such a lovely glass To reflect her little
figure--with two candle brackets near-- And a little dressing table
that she said was simply dear! A book shelf low to hold her books, a
little china rack, And then, of course, a bureau set and lots of
bric-a-brac; A dainty little escritoire, with fixings all her own
And just for her convenience, too, a little telephone. Some oriental
rugs she got, and curtains of madras, With 'cunning' ones of lace
inside, to go against the glass; And then a couch, a lovely one,
with cushions soft to crush, And forty pillows, more or less, of
linen, silk and plush; Of all the ornaments besides I couldn't tell
the half, But wherever there was nothing else, she stuck a
photograph. And then, when all was finished, she sighed a little
sigh, And looked about with just a shade of sadness in her eye: 'For
it needs a statuette or so--a fern--a silver stork Oh, something,
just to fill it up!' said Alice of New York.

When little Oumi of Japan went shopping, pitapat, She bought a fan
of paper and a little sleeping mat; She set beside the window a lily
in a vase, And looked about with more than doubt upon her pretty
face: 'For, really--don't you think so?--with the lily and the fan.
It's a little overcrowded!' said Oumi of Japan."

(Margaret Johnson in St. Nicholas Magazine)

In the rural homes of Japan during 1906 there were woven 14,497,058
sheets of these floor mats and 6,628,772 sheets of other matting,
having a combined value of $2,815,040, and in addition, from the
best quality of rush grown upon the same ground, aggregating 7657
acres that year, there were manufactured for the export trade, fancy
mattings, having the value of $2,274,131. Here is a total value, for
the product of the soil and for the labor put into the manufacture,
amounting to $664 per acre for the area named.

At the Akashi agricultural experiment station, under the
Directorship of Professor Ono, we saw some of the methods of fruit
culture as practiced in Japan. He was conducting experiments with
the object of improving methods of heading and training pear trees,
to which reference was made on page 22. A study was also being made
of the advantages and disadvantages associated with covering the
fruit with paper bags, examples of which are seen in Figs. 6 and 7.
The bags were being made at the time of our visit, from old
newspapers cut, folded and pasted by women. Naked cultivation was
practiced in the orchard, and fertilizers consisting of fish guano
and superphosphate of lime were being applied twice each year in
amounts aggregating a cost of twenty-four dollars per acre.

Pear orchards of native varieties, in good bearing, yield returns of
150 yen per tan, and those of European varieties, 200 yen per tan,
which is at the rate of $300 and $400 per acre. The bibo, so
extensively grown in China was being cultivated here also and was
yielding about $320 per acre.

It was here that we first met the cultivation of a variety of
burdock grown from the seed, three crops being taken each season
where the climate is favorable, or as one of three in the multiple
crop system. It is grown for the root, yielding a crop valued at $40
to $50 per acre. One crop, planted, in March, was being harvested
July 1st.

During our ride to Akashi on the early morning train we passed long
processions of carts drawn by cattle, horses or by men, moving along
the country road which paralleled the railway, all loaded with the
waste of the city of Kobe, going to its destination in the fields,
some of it a distance of twelve miles, where it was sold at from 54
cents to $1.63 per ton.

At several places along our route from Shimonoseki to Osaka we had
observed the application of slacked lime to the water of the rice
fields, but in this prefecture, Hyogo, where the station is located,
its use was prohibited in 1901, except under the direction of the
station authorities, where the soil was acid or where it was needed
on account of insect troubles. Up to this time it had been the
custom of farmers to apply slacked lime at the rate of three to five
tons per acre, paying for it $4.84 per ton. The first restrictive
legislation permitted the use of 82 pounds of lime with each 827
pounds of organic manure, but as the farmers persisted in using much
larger quantities, complete prohibition was resorted to.

Reference has been made to subsidies encouraging the use of
composts, and in this prefecture prizes are awarded for the best
compost heaps in each county, examinations being made by a
committee. The composts receiving the four highest awards in each
county are allowed to compete with those in other counties for a
prefectural prize awarded by another committee.

The "pink clover" grown in Hyogo after rice, as a green manure crop,
yields under favorable conditions twenty tons of the green product
per acre, and is usually applied to about three times the area upon
which it grew, at the rate of 6.6 tons per acre, the stubble and
roots serving for the ground upon which the crop grew.

On July 3rd we left Osaka, going south through Sakai to Wakayama,
thence east and north to the Nara Experiment Station. After passing
the first two stations the route lay through a very flat, highly
cultivated garden section with cucumbers trained on trellises, many
squash in full bloom, with fields of taro, ginger and many other
vegetables. Beyond Hamadera considerable areas of flat sandy land
had been set close with pine, but with intervening areas in rice,
where the growers were using the revolving weeder seen in Fig. 14.
At Otsu broad areas are in rice but here worked with the short
handled claw weeders, and stubble from a former crop had been drawn
together into small piles, seen in Fig. 230, which later would be
carefully distributed and worked beneath the mud.

Much of the mountain lands in this region, growing pine, is owned by
private parties and the growth is cut at intervals of ten, twenty or
twenty-five years, being sold on the ground to those who will come
and cut it at a price of forty sen for a one-horse load, as already
described, page 159.

The course from here was up the rather rapidly rising Kiigawa valley
where much water was being applied to the rice fields by various
methods of pumping, among them numerous current wheels; an
occasional power-pump driven by cattle; and very commonly the
foot-power wheel where the man walks on the circumference, steadying
himself with a long pole, as seen in the field, Fig. 231. It was
here that a considerable section of the hill slope had been very
recently cut over, the area showing light in the engraving. It was
in the vicinity of Hashimoto on this route, too, that the two
beautiful views reproduced in Figs. 151 and 152 were taken.

At the experiment station it was learned that within the prefecture
of Nara, having a population of 558,314, and 107,574 acres of
cultivated land, two-thirds of this was in paddy rice. Within the
province there are also about one thousand irrigation reservoirs
with an average depth of eight feet. The rice fields receive 16.32
inches of irrigation water in addition to the rain.

Of the uncultivated hill lands, some 2500 acres contribute green
manure for fertilization of fields. Reference has been made to the
production of compost for fertilizers on page 211. The amount
recommended in this prefecture as a yearly application for two crops
grown is:


Organic matter       3,711 to 4,640 lbs. per acre
Nitrogen               105 to   131 lbs. per acre
Phosphorus              35 to    44 lbs. per acre
Potassium               56 to    70 lbs. per acre


These amounts, on the basis of the table, p. 214, are nearly
sufficient for a crop of thirty bushels of wheat, followed by one of
thirty bushels of rice, the phosphorus being in excess and the
potassium not quite enough, supposing none to be derived from other
sources.

At the Nara hotel, one of the beautiful Japanese inns where we
stopped, our room opened upon a second story veranda from which one
looked down upon a beautiful, tiny lakelet, some twenty by eighty
feet, within a diminutive park scarcely more than one hundred by two
hundred feet, and the lakelet had its grassy, rocky banks over-hung
with trees and shrubs planted in all the wild disorder and beauty of
nature; bamboo, willow, fir, pine, cedar, red-leaved maple, catalpa,
with other kinds, and through these, along the shore, wound a
woodsy, well trodden, narrow footpath leading from the inn to a half
hidden cottage apparently quarters for the maids, as they were
frequently passing to and fro. A suggestion of how such wild beauty
is brought right to the very doors in Japan may be gained from Fig.
232, which is an instance of parking effect on a still smaller scale
than that described.

On the morning of July 6th, with two men for each of our rickshas,
we left the Yaami hotel for the Kyoto Experiment station, some two
miles to the southwest of the city limits. As soon as we had entered
upon the country road we found ourselves in a procession of cart men
each drawing a load of six large covered receptacles of about ten
gallons capacity, and filled with the city's waste. Before reaching
the station we had passed fifty-two of these loads, and on our
return the procession was still moving in the same direction and we
passed sixty-one others, so that during at least five hours there
had moved over this section of road leading into the country, away
from the city, not less than ninety tons of waste; along other
roadways similar loads were moving. These freight carts and those
drawn by horses and bullocks were all provided with long racks
similar to that illustrated in Fig. 108, page 197, and when the load
is not sufficient to cover the full length it is always divided
equally and placed near each end, thus taking advantage of the
elasticity of the body to give the effect of springs, lessening the
draft and the wear and tear,

One of the most common commodities coming into the city along the
country roads was fuel from the hill lands, in split sticks tied in
bundles as represented in Fig. 224; as bundles of limbs twenty-four
to thirty inches, and sometimes four to six feet, long; and in the
form of charcoal made from trunks and stems one and a half inches to
six inches long, and baled in straw matting. Most of the draft
animals used in Japan are either cows, bulls or stallions; at least
we saw very few oxen and few geldings.

As early as 1895 the Government began definite steps looking to the
improvement of horse breeding, appointing at that time a commission
to devise comprehensive plans. This led to progressive steps finally
culminating in 1906 in the Horse Administration Bureau, whose duties
were to extend over a period of thirty years, divided into two
intervals, the first, eighteen and the second, twelve years. During
the first interval it is contemplated that the Government shall
acquire 1,500 stallions to be distributed throughout the country for
the use of private individuals, and during the second period it is
the expectation that the system will have completely renovated the
stock and familiarized the people with proper methods of management
so that matters may be left in their hands.

As our main purpose and limited time required undivided attention to
agricultural matters, and of these to the long established practices
of the people, we could give but little time to sight-seeing or even
to a study of the efforts being made for the introduction of
improved agricultural methods and practices. But in the very old
city of Kyoto, which was the seat of the Mikado's court from before
800 A. D. until 1868, we did pay a short visit to the Kiyomizu
temple, situated some three hundred yards south from the Yaami
hotel, which faces the Maruyaami park with its centuries-old giant
cherry tree, having a trunk of more than four feet through and wide
spreading branches, now much propped up to guard against accident,
as seen in Fig. 233. These cherry trees are very extensively used
for ornamental purposes in Japan with striking effect. The tree does
not produce an edible fruit, but is very beautiful when in full
bloom, as may be seen from Fig. 234. It was these trees that were
sent by the Japanese government to this country for use at
Washington but the first lot were destroyed because they were found
to be infested and threatened danger to native trees.

Kyoto stands amid surroundings of wonderful beauty, the site
apparently having been selected with rare acumen for its
possibilities in large landscape effects, and these have been
developed with that fullness and richness which the greatest artists
might be content to approach. We are thinking particularly of the
Kiyomizu-dera, or rather of the marvelous beauty of tree and foliage
which has overgrown it and swept far up and over the mountain
summit, leaving the temple half hidden at the base. No words, no
brush, no photographic art can transfer the effect. One must see to
feel the influence for which it was created, and scores of people,
very old and very young, nearly all Japanese, and more of them on
that day from the poorer rather than from the well-to-do class, were
there, all withdrawing reluctantly, like ourselves, looking
backward, under the spell. So potent and impressive was that
something from the great overshadowing beauty of the mountain, that
all along up the narrow, shop-lined street leading to the gateway of
the temple, seen in Fig. 235, the tiniest bits of park effect were
flourishing in the most impossible situations; and as Professor
Tokito and myself were coming away we chanced upon six little
roughly dressed lads laying out in the sand an elaborate little
park, quite nine by twelve feet. They must have been at it hours,
for there were ponds, bridges, tiny hills and ravines and much
planting in moss and other little greens. So intent on their task
were they that we stood watching full two minutes before our
presence attracted their attention, and yet the oldest of the group
must have been under ten years of age.

One partly hidden view of the temple is seen in Fig. 236, the dense
mountain verdure rising above and beyond it. And then too, within
the temple, as the peasant men and women came before the shrine and
grasped the long depending rope knocker, with the heavy knot in
front of the great gong, swinging it to strike three rings,
announcing their presence before their God, then kneeling to offer
prayers, one could not fail to realize the deep sincerity and faith
expressed in face and manner, while they were oblivious to all else.
No Christian was ever more devout and one may well doubt if any ever
arose from prayer more uplifted than these. Who need believe they
did not look beyond the imagery and commune with the Eternal Spirit?

A third view of the same temple, showing resting places beneath the
shade, which serve the purpose of lawn seats in our parks, is seen
in Fig. 237.

That a high order of the esthetic sense is born to the Japanese
people; that they are masters of the science of the beautiful; and
that there are artists among them capable of effective and
impressive results, is revealed in a hundred ways, and one of these
is the iris garden of Fig. 238. One sees it here in the bulrushes
which make the iris feel at home; in the unobtrusive semblance of a
log that seems to have fallen across the run; in the hard beaten
narrow path and the sore toes of the old pine tree, telling of the
hundreds that come and go; it is seen in the dress and pose of the
ladies, and one may be sure the photographer felt all that he saw
and fixed so well.

The vender of Oumi's lily that Margaret Johnson saw, is in Fig. 239.
There another is bartering for a spray of flowers, and thus one sold
the branch of red maple leaves in our room at the Nara inn. His
floral stands are borne along the streets pendant from the usual
carrying pole.

When returning to the city from the Kyoto Experiment Station several
fields of Japanese indigo were passed, growing in water under the
conditions of ordinary rice culture, Fig. 240 being a view of one of
these. The plant is Poligonum tinctoria, a close relative of the
smartweed. Before the importation of aniline and alizarin dyes,
which amounted in 1907 to 160,558 pounds and 7,170,320 pounds
respectively, the cultivation of indigo was much more extensive than
at present, amounting in 1897 to 160,460,000 pounds of the dried
leaves; but in 1906 the production had fallen to 58,696,000 pounds,
forty-five per cent of which was grown in the prefecture of
Tokushima in the eastern part of the island of Shikoku. The
population of this prefecture is 707,565, or 4.4 people to each of
the 159,450 acres of cultivated field, and yet 19,969 of these acres
bore the indigo crop, leaving more than five people to each
food-producing acre.

The plants for this crop are started in nursery beds in February and
transplanted in May, the first crop being cut the last of June or
first of July, when the fields are again fertilized, the stubble
throwing out new shoots and yielding a second cutting the last of
August or early September. A crop of barley may have preceded one of
indigo, or the indigo may be set following a crop of rice. Such
practice, with the high fertilization for every crop, goes a long
way toward supplying the necessary food. The dense population, too,
has permitted the manufacture of the indigo as a home industry among
the farmers, enabling them to exchange the spare labor of the family
for cash. The manufactured product from the reduced planting in 1907
was worth $1,304,610, forty-five per cent of which was the output of
the rural population of the prefecture of Tokushima, which they
could exchange for rice and other necessaries. The land in rice in
this prefecture in 1907 was 73,816 acres, yielding 114,380,000
pounds, or more than 161 pounds to each man, woman and child, and
there were 65,665 acres bearing other crops. Besides this there are
874,208 acres of mountain and hill land in the prefecture which
supply fuel, fuel ashes and green manure for fertilizer; run-off
water for irrigation; lumber and remunerative employment for service
not needed in the fields.

The journey was continued from Kyoto July 7th, taking the route
leading northeastward, skirting lake Biwa which we came upon
suddenly on emerging from a tunnel as the train left Otani. At many
places we passed waterwheels such as that seen in Fig. 241, all
similarly set, busily turning, and usually twelve to sixteen feet in
diameter but oftenest only as many inches thick. Until we had
reached Lake Biwa the valleys were narrow with only small areas in
rice. Tea plantations were common on the higher cultivated slopes,
and gardens on the terraced hillsides growing vegetables of many
kinds were common, often with the ground heavily mulched with straw,
while the wooded or grass-covered slopes still further up showed the
usual systematic periodic cutting. After passing the west end of the
lake, rice fields were nearly continuous and extensive. Before
reaching Hachiman we crossed a stream leading into the lake but
confined between levees more than twelve feet high, and we had
already passed beneath two raised viaducts after leaving Kusatsu.
Other crops were being grown side by side with the rice on similar
lands and apparently in rotation with it, but on sharp, narrow close
ridges twelve to fourteen inches high. As we passed eastward we
entered one of the important mulberry districts where the fields are
graded to two levels, the higher occupied with mulberry or other
crops not requiring irrigation, while the lower was devoted to rice
or crops grown in rotation with it.

On the Kisogawa, at the station of the same name, there were four
anchored floating water-power mills propelled by two pair of large
current wheels stationed fore and aft, each pair working on a common
axle from opposite sides of the mill, driven by the force of the
current flowing by.

At Kisogawa we had entered the northern end of one of the largest
plains of Japan, some thirty miles wide and extending forty miles
southward to Owari bay. The plain has been extensively graded to two
levels, the benches being usually not more than two feet above the
rice paddies, and devoted to various dry land crops, including the
mulberry. The soil is decidedly sandy in character but the mean
yield of rice for the prefecture is 37 bushels per acre and above
the average for the country at large. An analysis of the soils at
the sub-experiment station north of Nagoya shows the following
content of the three main plant food elements.


                        Nitrogen Phosphorus Potassium
                             Pounds per million
                               In paddy field
Soil                      1520      769        805
Subsoil                    810      756        888
                               In upland field
Soil                      1060      686       1162
Subsoil                    510      673       1204


The green manure crops on this plain are chiefly two varieties of
the "pink clover," one sowed in the fall and one about May 15th, the
first yielding as high as sixteen tons green weight per acre and the
other from five to eight tons.

On the plain distant from the mountain and hill land the stems of
agricultural crops are largely used as fuel and the fuel ashes are
applied to the fields at the rate of 10 kan per tan, or 330 pounds
per acre, worth $1.20, little lime, as such, being used.

In the prefecture of Aichi, largely in this plain, with an area of
cultivated land equal to about sixteen of our government townships,
there is a population of 1,752,042, or a density of 4.7 per acre,
and the number of households of farmers was placed at 211,033, thus
giving to each farmer's family an average of 1.75 acres, their chief
industries being rice and silk culture.

Soon after leaving the Agricultural Experiment Station of Aichi
prefecture at An Jo we crossed the large Yahagigawa, flowing between
strong levees above the level of the rice fields. Mulberries, with
burdock and other vegetables were growing upon all of the tables
raised one to two, feet above the rice paddies, and these features
continued past Okasaki, Koda, and Kamagori, where the hills in many
places had been recently cut clean of the low forest growth and
where we passed many large stacks of pine boughs tied in bundles for
fuel. After passing Goyu sixty-five miles east from Nagoya, mulberry
was the chief crop. Then came a plain country which had been graded
and leveled at great cost of labor, the benches with their square
shoulders standing three to four feet above the paddy fields; and
after passing Toyohashi some distance we were surprised to cross a
rather wide section of comparatively level land overgrown with pine
and herbaceous, plants which had evidently been cut and recut many
times. Beyond Futagawa rice fields were laid out on what appeared to
be, similar land but with soil a little finer in texture, and still
further along were other flat areas not cultivated.

At Maisaka quite half the cultivated fields appear to be in mulberry
with ponds of lotus plants in low places, while at Hamamatsu the
rice fields are interspersed with many square-shouldered tables
raised three to four feet and occupied with mulberry or vegetables.
As we passed upon the flood plain of the Tenryugawa, with its nearly
dry bed of coarse gravel half a mile wide, the dwellings of farm
villages were, many of them surrounded with nearly solid,
flat-topped, trimmed evergreen hedges nine to twelve feet high, of
the umbrella pine, forming beautiful and effective screens.

At Nakaidzumi we had left the mulberry orchards for those of tea,
rice still holding wherever paddies could be formed. Here, too, we
met the first fields of tobacco, and at Fukuroi and Homouchi large
quantities of imported Manchurian bean cake were stacked about the
station, having evidently been brought by rail. At Kanaya we passed
through a long tunnel and were in the valley of the Oigawa, crossing
the broad, nearly dry stream over a bridge of nineteen long spans
and were then in the prefecture of Shizuoka where large fields of
tea spread far up the hillsides, covering extensive areas, but after
passing the next station, and for seventeen miles before reaching
Shizuoka we traversed a level stretch of nearly continuous rice
fields.

The Shizuoka Experiment Station is devoting special attention to the
interests of horticulture, and progress has already been made in
introducing new fruits of better quality and in improving the native
varieties. The native pears and peaches, as we found them served on
the hotel tables in either China or Japan, were not particularly
attractive in either texture or flavor, but we were here permitted
to test samples of three varieties of ripe figs of fine flavor and
texture, one of them as large as a good sized pear. Three varieties
of fine peaches were also shown, one unusually large and with
delicate deep rose tint, including the flesh. If such peaches could
be canned so as to retain their delicate color they would prove very
attractive for the table. The flavor and texture of this peach were
also excellent, as was the case with two varieties of pears.

The station was also experimenting with the production of marmalades
and we tasted three very excellent brands, two of them lacking the
bitter flavor. It would appear that, in Japan, Korea and China there
should be a very bright future along the lines of horticultural
development, leading to the utilization of the extensive hill lands
of these countries and the development of a very extensive export
trade, both in fresh fruits and marmalades, preserves and the canned
forms. They have favorable climatic and soil conditions and great
numbers of people with temperament and habits well suited to the
industries, as well as an enormous home need which should be met, in
addition to the large possibilities in the direction of a most
profitable export trade which would increase opportunities for labor
and bring needed revenue to the people. In Fig. 242 are three views
at this station, the lower showing a steep terraced hillside set
with oranges and other fruits, holding out a bright promise for the
future.

Peach orchards were here set on the hill lands, the trees six feet
apart each way. They come into bearing in three years, remain
productive ten to fifteen years, and the returns are 50 to 60 yen
per tan, or at the rate of $100 to $120 per acre. The usual
fertilizers for a peach orchard are the manure-earth-compost,
applied at the rate of 3300 pounds per acre, and fish guano applied
in rotation and at the same rate.

Shizuoka is one of the large prefectures, having a total area of
3029 square miles; 2090 of which are in forest; 438 in pasture and
genya land, and 501 square miles cultivated, not quite one-half of
which is in paddy fields. The mean yield of paddy rice is nearly 33
bushels per acre. The prefecture has a population of 1,293,470, or
about four to the acre of cultivated field, and the total crop of
rice is such as, to provide 236 pounds to each person.

At many places along the way as we left Shizuoka July 10th for
Tokyo, farmers were sowing broadcast, on the water, over their rice
fields, some pulverized fertilizer, possibly bean cake. Near the
railway station of Fuji, and after crossing the boulder gravel bed
of the Fujikawa which was a full quarter of a mile wide, we were
traversing a broad plain of rice paddies with their raised tables,
but on them pear orchards were growing, trained to their overhead
trellises. About. Suduzuka grass was being cut with sickles along
the canal dikes for use as green manure in the rice fields, which on
the left of the railway, stretched eastward more than six miles to
beyond Hara where we passed into a tract of dry land crops
consisting of mulberry, tea and various vegetables, with more or
less of dry land rice, but we returned to the paddy land again at
Numazu, in another four miles. Here there were four carloads of beef
cattle destined for Tokyo or Yokohama, the first we had seen.

It was at this station that the railway turns northward to skirt the
eastern flank of the beautiful Fuji-yama, rising to higher lands of
a brown loamy character, showing many large boulders two feet in
diameter. Horses were here moving along the roadways under large
saddle loads of green grass, going to the paddy fields from the
hills, which in this section are quite free from all but herbaceous
growth, well covered and green. Considerable areas were growing
maize and buckwheat, the latter being ground into flour and made
into macaroni which is eaten with chopsticks, Fig. 243, and used to
give variety to the diet of rice and naked barley. At Gotenba, where
tourists leave the train to ascend Fuji-yama, the road turns
eastward again and descends rapidly through many tunnels, crossing
the wide gravelly channel of the Sakawagawa, then carrying but
little water, like all of the other main streams we had crossed,
although we were in the rainy season. This was partly because the
season was yet not far advanced; partly because so much water was
being taken upon the rice fields, and again because the drainage is
so rapid down the steep slopes and comparatively short water
courses. Beyond Yamakita the railway again led along a broad plain
set in paddy rice and the hill slopes were terraced and cultivated
nearly to their summits.

Swinging strongly southeastward, the coast was reached at Noduz in a
hilly country producing chiefly vegetables, mulberry and tobacco,
the latter crop being extensively grown eastward nearly to Oiso,
beyond which, after a mile of sweet potatoes, squash and cucumbers,
there were paddy fields of rice in a flat plain. Before Hiratsuka
was reached the rice paddies were left and the train was crossing a
comparatively flat country with a sandy, sometimes gravelly, soil
where mulberries, peaches, eggplants, sweet potatoes and dry land
rice were interspersed with areas still occupied with small pine and
herbaceous growth or where small pine had been recently set. Similar
conditions prevailed after we had crossed the broad channel of the
Banyugawa and well toward and beyond Fujishiwa where a leveled plain
has its tables scattered among the fields of paddy rice, this being
the southwest margin of the Tokyo plain, the largest in Japan, lying
in five prefectures, whose aggregate area of 1,739,200 acres of
arable lands was worked by 657,235 families of farmers; 661,613
acres of which was in paddy rice, producing annually some 19,198,000
bushels, or 161 pounds for each of the 7,194,045 men, women and
children in the five prefectures, 1,818,655 of whom were in the
capital city, Tokyo.

Three views taken in the eastern portion of this plain in the
prefecture of Chiba, July 17th, are seen in Fig. 244, in two of
which shocks of wheat were still standing in the fields among the
growing crops, badly weathered and the grain sprouting as the result
of the rainy season. Peanuts, sweet potatoes and millet were the
main dry land, crops then on the ground, with paddy rice in the
flooded basins. Windsor beans, rape, wheat and barley had been
harvested. One family with whom we talked were threshing their
wheat. The crop had been a good one and was yielding between 38.5
and. 41.3 bushels per acre, worth at the time $35 to $40. On the
same land this farmer secures a yield of 352 to 361 bushels of
potatoes, which at the market price at that time would give a gross
earning of $64 to $66 per acre.

Reference has been made to the extensive use of straw in the
cultural methods of the Japanese. This is notably the case in their
truck garden work, and two phases of this are shown in Fig. 245. In
the lower section of the illustration the garden has been ridged and
furrowed for transplanting, the sets have been laid and the roots
covered with a little soil; then, in the middle section, showing the
next step in the method, a layer of straw has been pressed firmly
above the roots, and in the final step this would be covered with
earth. Adopting this method the straw is so placed that (1) it acts
as an effective mulch without in any way interfering with the
capillary rise of water to the roots of the sets; (2) it gives deep,
thorough aeration of the soil, at the same time allowing rains to
penetrate quickly, drawing the air after it; (3) the ash ingredients
carried in the straw are leached directly to the roots where they
are needed; (4) and finally the straw and soil constitute a compost
where the rapid decay liberates plant food gradually and in the
place where it will be most readily available. The upper section of
the illustration shows rows of eggplants very heavily mulched with
coarse straw, the quantity being sufficient to act as a most
effective mulch, to largely prevent the development of weeds and to
serve during the rainy season as a very material fertilizer.

In growing such dry land crops as barley, beans, buckwheat or dry
land rice the soil of the field is at first fitted by plowing or
spading, then furrowed deeply where the rows are to be planted. Into
these furrows fertilizer is placed and covered with a layer of earth
upon which the seed is planted. When the crop is up, if a second
fertilization is desired, a furrow may be made alongside each row,
into which the fertilizer is sowed and then covered. When the crop
is so far matured that a second may be planted, a new furrow is
made, either midway between two others or adjacent to one of them,
fertilizer applied and covered with a layer of soil and the seed
planted. In this way the least time possible is lost during the
growing season, all of the soil of the field doing duty in crop
production.

It was our privilege to visit the Imperial Agricultural Experiment
Station at Nishigahara, near Tokyo, which is charged with the
leadership of the general and technical agricultural research work
for the Empire. The work is divided into the sections of
agriculture, agricultural chemistry, entomology, vegetable
pathology, tobacco, horticulture, stock breeding, soils, and tea
manufacture, each with their laboratory equipment and research
staff, while the forty-one prefectural stations and fourteen
sub-stations are charged with the duty of handling all specific
local, practical problems and with testing out and applying
conclusions and methods suggested by the results obtained at the
central station, together with the local dissemination of knowledge
among the farmers of the respective prefectures.

A comprehensive soil survey of the arable lands of the Empire has
been in progress since before 1893, excellent maps being issued on a
scale of 1 to 100,000, or about 1.57 inch-to the mile, showing the
geological formations in eight colors with subdivisions indicated by
letters. Some eleven soil types are recognized, based on physical
composition and the areas occupied by these are shown by means of
lines and dots in black printed over the colors. Typical profiles of
the soil to depths of three meters are printed as insets on each
sheet and localities where these apply are indicated by
corresponding numbers in red on the map.

Elaborate chemical and physical studies are also being made in the
laboratories of samples of both soil and subsoil. The Imperial
Agricultural Experiment Station is well equipped for investigation
work along many lines and that for soils is notably strong. In Fig.
246 may be seen a portion of the large immersed cylinders which are
filled with typical soils from different parts of the Empire, and
Fig. 247 shows a portion of another part of their elaborate outfit
for soil studies which are in progress.

It is found that nearly all cultivated soils of Japan are acid to
litmus, and this they are inclined to attribute to the presence of
acid hydro-aluminum silicates.

The Island Empire of Japan stretches along the Asiatic coast through
more than twenty-nine degrees of latitude from the southern
extremity of Formosa northward to the middle of Saghalin, some 2300
statute miles; or from the latitude of middle Cuba to that of north
Newfoundland and Winnipeg; but the total land area is only 175,428
square miles, and less than that of the three states of Wisconsin,
Iowa and Minnesota. Of this total land area only 23,698 square miles
are at present cultivated; 7151 square miles in the three main
islands are weed and pasture land. Less than fourteen per cent of
the entire land area is at present under cultivation.

If all lands having a slope of less than fifteen degrees may be
tilled, there yet remain in the four main islands, 15,400 square
miles to bring under cultivation, which is an addition of 65.4 per
cent to the land already cultivated.

In 1907 there were in the Empire some 5,814,362 households of
farmers tilling 15,201,969 acres and feeding 3,522,877 additional
households, or 51,742,398 people. This is an average of 3.4 people
to the acre of cultivated land, each farmer's household tilling an
average of 2.6 acres.

The lands yet to be reclaimed are being put under cultivation
rapidly, the amount improved in 1907 being 64,448 acres. If the new
lands to be reclaimed can be made as productive as those now in use
there should be opportunity for an increase in population to the
extent of about 35,000,000 without changing the present ratio of 3.4
people to the acre of cultivated land.

While the remaining lands to be reclaimed are not as inherently
productive as those now in use, improvements in management will more
than compensate for this, and the Empire is certain to quite double
its present maintenance capacity and provide for at least a hundred
million people with many more comforts of home and more satisfaction
for the common people than they now enjoy.

Since 1872 there has been an increase in the population of Japan
amounting to an annual average of about 1.1 per cent, and if this
rate is maintained the one hundred million mark would be passed in
less than sixty years. It appears probable however that the
increased acreage put under cultivation and pasturage combined, will
more than keep pace with the population up to this limit, while the
improvement in methods and crops will readily permit a second like
increment to her population, bringing that for the present Empire up
to 150 millions. Against this view, perhaps, is the fact that the
rice crop of the twenty years ending in 1906 is only thirty-three
per cent greater than the crop of 1838.

In Japan, as in the United States, there has been a strong movement
from the country to the city as a natural result of the large
increase in manufactures and commerce, and the small amount of land
per each farmer's household. In 1903 only .23 per cent of the
population of Japan were living in villages of less than 500, while
79.06 per cent were in towns and villages of less than 10,000
people, 20.7 per cent living in those larger. But in 1894 84.36 per
cent of the population were living in towns and villages of less
than 10,000, and only 15.64 per cent were in cities, towns and
villages of over 10,000 people; and while during these ten years the
rural population had increased at the rate of 640 per 10,000, in
cities the increase had been 6,174 per 10,000.

Japan has been and still is essentially an agricultural nation and
in 1906 there were 3,872,105 farmers' households, whose chief work
was farming, and 1,581,204 others whose subsidiary work was farming,
or 60.2 per cent of the entire number of households. A like ratio
holds in Formosa. Wealthy land owners who do not till their own
fields are not included.

Of the farmers in Japan some 33.34 per cent own and work their land.
Those having smaller holdings, who rent additional land, make up
46.03 per cent of the total farmers; while 20.63 per cent are
tenants who work 44.1 per cent of the land. In 1892 only one per
cent of the land holders owned more than twenty-five acres each;
those holding between twenty-five acres and five acres made up 11.7
per cent; while 87.3 per cent held less than five acres each. A man
owning seventy-five acres of land in Japan is counted among the
"great landholders". It is never true, however, except in the
Hokkaido, which is a new country agriculturally, that such holdings
lie in one body.

Statistics published in "Agriculture in Japan", by the Agricultural
Bureau, Department of Agriculture and Commerce, permit the following
statements of rent, crop returns, taxes and expenses, to be made.
The wealthy land owners who rent their lands receive returns like
these:


              For paddy field,  For upland field,
                 per acre.         per acre.
Rent              $27.98            $13.53
Taxes               7.34              1.98
Expenses            1.72              2.48
Total expenses     $9.06             $4.46
Net profit         18.92              9.07


It is stated, in connection with these statistics, that the rate of
profit for land capital is 5.6 per cent for the paddy field, and 5.7
per cent for the upland field. This makes the valuation of the land
about $338 and $159 per acre, respectively. A land holder who owns
and rents ten acres of paddy field and ten acres of upland field
would, at these rates, realize a net annual income of $279.90.

Peasant farmers who own and work their lands receive per acre an
income as follows:


                  For paddy field,    For upland field,
                     per acre.            per acre.
Crop returns          $55.00               $30.72
Taxes                   7.34                 1.98
Labor and expenses     36.20                24.00
                     -------              -------
Total expense         $43.54               $25.98
Net profit             11.46                 4.74



The peasant farmer who owns and works five acres, 2.5 of paddy and
2.5 of upland field, would realize a total net income of $40.50.
This is after deducting the price of his labor. With that included,
his income would be something like $91.

Tenant farmers who work some 41 per cent of the farm lands of Japan,
would have accounts something as follows:


               For paddy field,  For upland field,
               1 crop.  2 crops.
                   per acre.        per acre.
Crop returns    $49.03   $78.62       $41.36
Tenant fee       23.89    31.58        13.52
Labor            15.78    25.79        14.69
Fertilization     7.82    17.30        10.22
Seed               .82     1.40         1.57
Other expenses    1.69     2.82         1.66
                  -------------   -------
Total expenses   $50.00  $78.89       $41.66
Net profit        --.97   --.27        --.30



This statement indicates that tenant farmers do not realize enough
from the crops to quite cover expenses and the price named for their
labor. If the tenant were renting five acres, equally divided
between paddy and upland field, the earning would be $73.00 or
$99.73 according as one or two crops are taken from the paddy field,
this representing what he realizes on his labor, his other expenses
absorbing the balance of the crop value.

But the average area tilled by each Japanese farmer's household is
only 2.6 acres, hence the average earning of the tenant household
would be $37.95 or $51.86. A clearer view of the difference in the
present condition of farmers in Japan and of those in the United
States may be gained by making the Japanese statement on the basis
of our 160-acre farm, as expressed in the table below:


                For paddy field. For upland field.  Total.
                 For 80 acres.    For 80 acres.   160 acres.
Crop returns      $4,400.00         $2,457.60     $6,857.60
                  ----------        ----------    ----------
Taxes               $587.20           $158.40       $745.60
Expenses           1,633.60            744.80      2,378.40
Labor              1,262.40          1,175.20      2,437.60
                  ----------        ----------    ----------
   Total cost     $3,488.20         $2,078.40     $5,561.60
Net return           916.80            379.20      1,296.00
Return
  including labor  2,179.20          1,554.40      3,783.60



In the United States the 160-acre farm is managed by and supports a
single family, but in Japan, as the average household works but 2.6
acres, the earnings of the 160 acres are distributed among some 61
households, making the net return to each but $21.25, instead of
$1296, and including the labor as earning, the income would be
$39.96 more, or $60.67 per household instead of $3733.60, the total
for a 160-acre farm worked under Japanese conditions.

These figures reveal something of the tense strain and of the
terrible burden which is being carried by these people, over and
above that required for the maintenance of the household. The tenant
who raises one crop of rice pays a rental of $23.89 per acre. If he
raises two crops he pays $31.58; if it is upland field, he pays
$13.52. To these amounts he adds $10.33, $21.52 or $13.45
respectively for fertilizer, seed and other expenses making a total
investment of $34.22, $53.10 or $26.97 per acre, which would require
as many bushels of wheat sold at a dollar a bushel to cover this
cost. In addition to this he assumes all the risks of loss from
weather, from insects and from blight, in the hope that he may
recoup his expenses and in addition have for his services $14.81,
$25.52 or $14.39 for the season's work.

The burdens of society, which have been and still are so largely
burdens of war and of government, with all nations, are reflected
with almost blinding effect in the land taxes of Japan, which range
from $1.98, on the upland, to $7.34 per acre on the paddy fields,
making a quarter section, without buildings, carry a burden of $300
to $1100 annually. Japan's budget in 1907 was $134,941,113, which is
at the rate of $2.60 for each man, woman and child; $8.90 for each
acre of cultivated land, and $23, for each household in the Empire.
When such is the case it is not strange that scenes like Fig. 248
are common in Japan today where, after seventy years, toil may not
cease.

There is a bright, as well as a pathetic side to scenes like this.
The two have shared for fifty years, but if the days have been full
of toil, with them have come strength of body, of mind and sterling
character. If the burdens have been heavy, each has made the other's
lighter, the satisfaction fuller, the joys keener, the sorrows less
difficult to bear; and the children who came into the home and have
gone from it to perpetuate new ones, could not well be other than
such as to contribute to the foundations of nations of great
strength and long endurance.

Reference has been made to the large amount of work carried on in
the farmers' households by the women and children, and by the men
when they are not otherwise employed, and the earnings of this
subsidiary work have materially helped to piece out the meagre
income and to meet the relatively high taxes and rent.






End of Project Gutenberg's Farmers of Forty Centuries, by F. H. King