As there are few animals to pull plows, the farmers must often turn the soil and till the crops with hand tools. This makes much hard work. In some places, these patient and industrious people have carried dirt in baskets to make terraced gardens on hill sides. They often lift water by hand from canals to the rice fields.
Rice is the greatest crop grown on this low plain. It is the chief food of the people. The heavy summer rains give plenty of water, so that the farmers can flood their little rice fields. Rice, you remember (Sec. 173), is a swamp plant, and can grow in the water. As soon as the rice is planted, the fields are flooded for a time; but when the rice is ripe, the water is drawn off and the ground allowed to dry out, so that people can easily walk upon it as they harvest the rice.
As so much of the land is in farms, there are very few for ests, so that lumber is scarce. To have enough wood, some farmers set out groves of bamboo. The bamboo trees grow very quickly, and the Chinese and Japanese make a very great many things from the strong and hollow stems of this wonderful tree.
465. Trade and manufacture. — The roads of China are so very poor that wheelbarrows are often used instead of wagons. You can hunt the good part of a road easily with the single wheel of a wheelbarrow. China is rich in canals and good rivers, on which thousands of boats go slowly back and forth, carrying freight.
English and other foreign companies now run steamboats on Chinese rivers, and the Chinese have begun to build railroads, and, as a result, China's trade with other countries is increasing.
Most of this trade goes through Shang hai, which is the New York of China, and through Hongkong, a city owned by the British. It is on an island at the mouth of the Si River in South China. Steamers go from Manila to Hongkong, Shanghai, Yokohama, and San Francisco, and then on through the Panama Canal to New York. Other steamers go from Japan and China to New York by way of the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean Sea.
Hankow, on the Yangtze River, at the mouth of its branch, the Han, is sometimes called the Chicago of China, because of its central location. Peking, the capital of China, would be the fourth city in rank if it were in the United States. There is now a railroad from Peking to Hankow on the Yangtze, and also one through Man churia, Siberia, and on through to Moscow, Berlin, and Paris.
The trade of the United States with China is growing greater every year, and will some day be much larger than it now is. For thousands of years, the Chinese have done all their manufacturing by hand. Since they have begun to visit us and buy machinery, they are beginning to build factories like our own. Some day China may become the greatest manufacturing country in the world. . Why may this be so? Because she has so many industrious people to do the work and plenty of iron and coal to make the machinery. There is
more coal in China than in all of Europe. These three things—coal, iron, and work ers—may make her a rich and powerful nation; but first she must learn more about science and machinery. It will be fine if the Chinese use their great gifts for the health and happiness of mankind, rather than merely for wealth and, power and war.
466. Chinese territory. —The Chinese Republic is composed of China proper and the four big dencies of :Tibet, Sin Kiang, Mongolia, and Manchuria. All together, China and her provinces are about the size of the United States. However, they have three times as many people as the United States. Nearly all of these many people live in China proper, although it is not larger than the country east of the Mississippi River. Why are there so few people in the pro vinces? Look at the rain fall map (Fig. 454) and the physical map (Fig. 440). They will tell you. ' You see that Tibet is a plateau, so high that it is very cold. (Sec. 498.) Very few people can live there. Sin Kiang is a desert, so dry that during most of the year people cannot cross it. Travelers there must stick close to the foot of the very high mountains, so that they can get the water that comes down from the melting snow fields on the high peaks before it sinks into the desert sands. Mongolia is another desert region with only a few nomad herdsmen. Manchuria is a better province for people to live in, especially in the south where the Chinese farmers grow wheat, millet, and beans. There is enough rain there for farming, and many of the beans are sent to Japan and to Europe.
467. The provinces of China. — The people in the distant provinces of China are so far away from the capital at Peking, that the former emperors of China were not able to have much control over them. How could they? The white people in the United States did not explore the Rocky Mountains until after we began to build railroads. When the Emperor at Peking tried to rule in Tibet, or in Kashgar in far Sin Kiang, it was as though Presi dent Jefferson had tried to rule in Nevada in 1808, when he had only horses and wagons to move men and goods.
These high plateaus of Cen tral Asia are sometimes called the roof of the world. The windstorms are terrific, and the sand blows like a torrent of fire. The few shepherds move from place to place, following the scanty water and grass, as do Hakim and the Arabs in the Sahara. These Asiatic shepherds, who are not Chinese at all, receive you in their skin tents with all the grace and dignity and courtliness of people who know that their families have lived in that country for thousands of years, and have always had the habit of treating guests politely.