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
On returning to Canton we went by rail, with an interpreter, to
Samshui, visiting fields along the way, and Fig. 47 is a view of one
landscape. The woman was picking roses among tidy beds of garden
vegetables. Beyond her and in front of the near building are two
rows of waste receptacles. In the center background is a large
"go-down", in function that of our cold storage warehouse and in
part that of our grain elevator for rice. In them, too, the wealthy
store their fur-lined winter garments for safe keeping. These are
numerous in this portion of China and the rank of a city is
indicated by their number. The conical hillock is a large near-by
grave mound and many others serrate the sky line on the hill beyond.
In the next landscape, Fig. 48, a crop of winter peas, trained to
canes, are growing on ridges among the stubble of the second crop of
rice, In front is one canal, the double ridge behind is another and
a third canal extends in front of the houses. Already preparations
were being made for the first crop of rice, fields were being
flooded and fertilized. One such is seen in Fig. 49, where a laborer
was engaged at the time in bringing stable manure, wading into the
water to empty the baskets.
Two crops of rice are commonly grown each year in southern China and
during the winter and early spring, grain, cabbage, rape, peas,
beans, leeks and ginger may occupy the fields as a third or even
fourth crop, making the total year's product from the land very
large; but the amount of thought, labor and fertilizers given to
securing these is even greater and beyond anything Americans will
endure. How great these efforts are will be appreciated from what is
seen in Fig. 50, representing two fields thrown into high ridges,
planted to ginger and covered with straw. All of this work is done
by hand and when the time for rice planting comes every ridge will
again be thrown down and the surface smoothed to a water level. Even
when the ridges and beds are not thrown down for the crops of rice,
the furrows and the beds will change places so that all the soil is
worked over deeply and mainly through hand labor. The statement so
often made, that these people only barely scratch the surface of
their fields with the crudest of tools is very far from the truth,
for their soils are worked deeply and often, notwithstanding the
fact that their plowing, as such, may be shallow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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