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