Agriculture has always been a leading calling in China. The farms are small and are intensively worked. They have been too small, and the immense population has been crowded into the river plains only of the vast country. Not one quarter of China and its territories is worked as it might be. The adopting of machinery and the application of the single tax to some of the unworked land by the new rÉgime will make possible the enlargement of farms, and the consequent stocking with meat, milk, egg, wool and skin-producing animals on a vast scale. The decrease of population that will occur owing to the decadence of ancestor-worshiping Confucianism, and the system of early marriage and concubinage, will necessitate the introduction of agricultural machinery. An increased agriculture will bring about the exportation of food products from so fertile and sunny a land. The enhancement of hygiene with the new medical knowledge will confirm this increased production in agriculture, as there will be no waste of life through ignorance, and human surplus vitality will be directed to increasing the productivity of the land, and the reclamation of the waste spaces.

In agricultural wisdom little can be taught the Chinese. In love of and assiduity in agriculture no one equals him. Professors King and Ross, of Wisconsin University, have dealt in an exhaustive way with the subject, and other books recommended to the inquirer are Ball’s Things Chinese, Williams’s Middle Kingdom, Fielde’s Corner of Cathay, the journals of the Royal Asiatic Society, Lay’s Chinese As They Are, and Douglas’s Society in China. The list of products is exceedingly long. Here are just a few as we run down the gamut from the north to the south: wheat, all millets, maize, buckwheat, sugar beet, tobacco, pulse, hay, straw braid, soy and other beans, barley, sorghum, rhubarb and drugs, hemp, all berries and tree fruits, cotton, sesamum, indigo, persimmons, melons, walnuts, almonds, olives, peanuts, tea, bamboo, rice, sweet and white potatoes, grass-cloth plant, oranges, sugar, coffee, rubber, cocoa, pumeloes, lichee, quince, ginger, loquat, mulberry, mustard, tallow trees, flowers for perfumery, lily roots for food and candy, colza nuts for oil, rhus nuts for varnish, camphor, all hardwoods, insect wax, matting and opium. Their truck farms are unequaled. They seem to lose not one lettuce or cabbage leaf. Every bug is nipped in the chrysalis by hand; everybody works from dewy dawn to twilight’s star! Where China exports $40,000,000 of agricultural products to-day to the manufacturing nations that border the Pacific and Atlantic, to-morrow she will export $400,000,000, besides becoming herself richer in pantry and bank.

The farmers are always searching for soil enrichers, with such success that you seldom see the nitrogen-starved yellow instead of green field. Not a handful of ashes is wasted; not an herb or branch but is gathered for the compost heap to make humus. Water is brought over the land, that it may deposit its nitrogenous wealth, and the mud of canals is dredged for the valuable rotted slime. Three times a year a part of China, 1,200 miles long and 1,200 miles wide, is one vast flooded field. By placing mud walls around his fields, a farmer does not need to raise all his irrigation water by power. Rather, he directs gravity, for he saves the rapid surface draining of the land, especially in the higher terraces. In the lower terraces he digs wells to store the surface water against drought. The water showered upon the higher fields he lets down to the lower during dry periods. They believe in a rotation of soils as well as in a rotation of crops, and will exchange bodily a rice field’s and an orchard’s top soil. By intensive farming a Chinese gets as much from a ten-acre farm as we get from a hundred-acre one, and he never permits a soil to be impoverished by its crop. You never see his implements, rude as they are, left uncovered over night. He carries home even his straw fork, which is made three-pronged by training nature instead of fashioning by hand. When the farmer’s wife and girls are not in the field they are working up straw braid for America’s and Europe’s hats and weaving silk and making embroidery for western gowns.

South of the Yangtze River human nightsoil is mixed with water and applied to the farms in liquid form. North of the Yangtze the drier climate permits of mixing the manure with earth and drying the slabs for transport. A farmer in South China willingly builds a toilet on the public road and requests the public, including the humorously shocked foreigner, with a sign which is much shorter than my words, to remember how China must be fertilized in order to support more inhabitants to the acre than any other land! The result is that China’s streams, outside of the suspended mud and silt that they carry, alone of all countries, are nearly pure, and foreign sanitary engineers take potable water directly from the rivers, as at Hankau, Canton, etc. The loss to the land of fertilizers by burning them as fuel, in the absence of forests and worked coal mines, is nowhere better illustrated than in Mongolia and the province of Fukien. In Mongolia the camel dung is dried and used as fuel. In Fukien, railway development has been retarded, and the coal of the Ankoi and other mines does not reach the hut in the field. Straw, therefore, instead of returning to the land, is of necessity used as fuel. For instance, take the tanning industry. The hides are thrown in a pond, in which there is a solution of alum. After peeling, the leather is stretched on springy frames of strong bamboo, and placed over an earthen furnace for smoking and drying. The fuel is straw, which gives the hide a yellow color, at a lamentable cost. In their opening era of manufacturing, the Chinese do not intend to permit dyes, chemicals, refuse or sewage to be drained into their streams and rivers, which from their source to the sea are used over and over for irrigation and for drinking.

Chinese matting comes mainly from the West River (Si Kiang) ports west of Canton. The fresh water reed is in some cases fertilized, as at Tung Kun and Lintan, so as to produce size and sheen. The reed is split when cut in the green and the sun rounds the strands. German aniline dyes are used, which produce a sorry product as compared with the famous natural dyes of old China. In producing red, however, the dye is obtained by boiling a Philippine redwood. The looms are simple hand looms, worked in the humble homes of the people. The mats are dried and set over a charcoal fire. The shipping season is in the fall. Vast quantities, baled in reeds, come by junk and steamer from the riverine ports to Hongkong, where they are put in godowns until the arrival of a trans-Pacific or Suez steamer, or a Standard Oil Company freighter and sailing vessel. The very low rate is controlled by the sailing ship, and quantity is of the first essence of importance in making the business pay any one concerned, except the middleman in America or Europe. Better dyes might be furnished to the reed farmers and better looms and designs will now probably be distributed among them. It is a floor covering which should grow more popular from an economic, and especially a sanitary point of view, as it does not harbor moths or germs, and is easy to handle; and from a conservation point of view, its wider use would reserve carpet wool for clothing. The clean Japanese despise us for our use of the fixed, unsanitary woolen carpet. The seed of the reed is planted, just as rice is, in a sheltered spot in the fall. Transplanting occurs early in the year and the fields are irrigated. It takes two men or women four days to weave a roll on a very crude loom.

The farmer is king. He has attacked the old magnificent roads, eight feet wide, cut at great expense in the mountains, carried soil over part of them and planted his corn. Marble-lined lotus gardens of magnificent old estates he has filled up with his rice seed; and the grain waves beneath the windows of deserted palaces, the owners probably long ago, because of their opinions and not their crimes, having, in Manchu days, dropped their heads beneath the blow of the taifo swords while they bowed upon their knees in a line at far-away Peking!

Ginger is grown extensively in China. It is used for cooking and as a medicine. Preserved in sugar, it is known world-wide as a delicious confection. The Chinese prefer it in a heavy syrup. This species of lily grows about two feet high. The roots are very heavy and are kept irrigated in mud. It is one of the few plants which leave their odor in the air in the fields where they grow. The marmalade industry will have a great future in the vast southern provinces. Java, the Philippines and Formosa, are near with their sugar, and the provinces of Kwantung, Kwangsi and Fukien have noble orchards of pumelo, lemon and orange trees. As the family-village farms the apparently undivided fields as a community, watchers have to be set in the fields and at the granary floors, when harvest time approaches. A platform is built of bamboo, and the watcher mounts it, carrying along his gong. As there are no fences and few trees, the watcher commands a wide view, and deters private bands and prowlers of other villages from making sudden raids. Manchuria has been found to be an ideal ground for the sugar beet, the black soil producing a higher percentage of sugar than anywhere in the world. The sugar industry is a most important addition to the agricultural wealth of those three extremely rich provinces, which are destined to help in the feeding of industrial America. Returned Chinese emigrants from Java and America started in 1911, in Fukien and Chekiang provinces the cultivation of cotton on an extended scale, looking to the new mills of Shanghai, Hangchow and Wuchang to buy the product, which will be shipped by junks, steamer and the new coast railway. The Chinese value their highly tilled lands near the large cities at a price equal to forty-five dollars in gold for our acre.

British Hongkong set the example in reforestation. Germany followed at Kiachou, Shangtung, with acacia, fir, ash, larch, walnut and oak trees along the railway line. Japan followed in South Manchuria, and China herself established a forestry school at Mukden in 1908, and in Kansu later. It is absolutely essential to retard the snows and rainfalls at the heads of the great rivers if the awful floods and consequent famines are ever to be obviated in the valleys of the Hoangho, Han, Yangtze and Hwei Rivers. The camphor is China’s own tree, especially in Formosa, Fukien, and the southern provinces. Ceylon, California, Texas, Florida, Jamaica, Malay, Italy and German East Africa have successfully introduced the tree, and will in time help to supply the world’s growing requirements for the arts and industries, which synthetic camphor can not do, because of the deforestation of America’s southern pine, which now supplies the necessary oil of turpentine. Camphor can be distilled from any part of the tree, even the dead leaves, and some conservation foresters, especially Americans and Germans, are urging a world movement to use the leaves, dropped twigs and cuttings alone for this purpose. Camphor formerly was made by cutting up the tree and treating the chips with water in a closed vessel, the volatilized camphor condensing on rice straw packed in the head of the still. The deposit was purified by sublimation in glass retorts in the presence of lime.

I have for years been writing that the Chinese is a born humorist. The humor of their arboriculturists is well known in their stunting and twisting of trees and bamboos. The matched curved bamboos of the Fati and other gardens of Canton are famous. Another quaint form is the splitting of a tree trunk so as to form a living arch. When the tree is young, it is uprooted and split up the trunk and replanted in the road leading to a shrine or temple. As the trunk grows apart, the road leads under the arch. Under the shelter of the north wall of the imperial section of the city of Peking, there are famous old cryptomeria cypresses split in this way. The humorist is saying: “See Nature’s god with his grotesque products laughing at man’s idea of religion!” The farmer and his boy are humorists. They meet you on the highroad and laugh because the pigs and geese which they are driving to market all have tiny straw sandals on their feet, and the water buffalo which they are riding to the exchange has sandals, but they themselves are in their bare feet, and they point out to you the humorous incongruity! The very handsome Hagenbeck pheasant from the Kobdo valley of Manchuria, fiftieth parallel, can live farthest north of any pheasant, and can therefore withstand our winters. It is large and edible. The Mongolian pheasant has been acclimated on the Rothschild estate in Herts, England. The Manchurian eared pheasant is heavy and edible, but unlike the others is not wild and active enough for the game fields. Accordingly it best suits the poulterer of China. The pheasant is a fairly cheap dish at all the clubs and hotels of China, and the indentured clerk of Hongkong is therefore to his surprise dining like a king daily on the game which the owner of his concern would consider at home a luxury reserved for the Christmas dinner! Some of the native proverbs are:

“No matter where the stream is, the sea is calling it.”

“Frost and ice are made of water, but they don’t grow things like rain and dew.”

“A spark is small, but it can burn a thousand farms.”

“Don’t try to put out the burning field with tears; run for water.”

“One bad bean makes the whole basket rot.”

“Rain on a summer’s dawn means a clear day, but a rain at noon will last.”