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.