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