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.