Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and JapanKing, F. H. (Franklin Hiram)
Science
Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan
King, F. H. (Franklin Hiram)
Agriculture -- China; Agriculture -- Japan; Agriculture -- Korea
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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