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
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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