671. A nation of hard workers.—The Chinese have been in their land for such a long time that the population is very dense (Figs. 492, 495). There is only a little land for each family. For this reason they must work hard for a living. Everybody works, even the children. The children of China have rather a hard time of it, because they begin work so young and work long hours.
An Iowa farmer often has 160 acres of land, and has horses, tractors, reapers, and other machinery. Each year he raises thousands of bushels of grain. This is enough to give each member of his family the five or six bushels a person needs to eat in a year, and wagonloads besides—enough to feed many horses, cattle, and pigs. The Iowa farmer raises one crop on each field each year. Some of his land is usually in pasture. The farmer on the Chinese plains often has only two acres or even less, and he raises two crops a year on all of it. None of it is in pasture, because the yield from pasture is too small.
In the autumn, with the help of his family, he sows the land to winter wheat. In sum mer, if the land is in the northern or the inland section of light rain, the farmer uses a part of it for sweet potatoes, a part for corn or millet, and a part for soy beans. The only animals on the place are some chickens, a cow that pulls a cart and lives on straw and bean stalks, and a pig that eats scraps that no other animal will eat. To prepare the ground for crops a spade is used instead of the plow. Though the land yields two crops a year, there is very little to sell, because the family must eat nearly every thing that can be grown.
672. Rice.—You remember that Holland is the gift of the Rhine. Look on the map (Fig. 474), and see how the great plain of northeastern China is also the gift of two rivers. Which ones are they? They have cut sand and clay from the mountains, and have carried them down and built up the wide lowlands. This making of new land goes on so fast that cities that were once seaports are now thirty miles inland. This plain is the land of rice, the great summer crop of the warm lowlands of Central and South China. Here each summer tens of millions of men and women, boys and girls, work hard in the millions of little ricefields.
It takes a great deal of labor to grow rice in the way it is grown in the Far East. Rice is a swamp plant. To make it feel at home and grow well, the people turn their ricefields into ponds. To do this they
make the land as level as a floor, so that the water may be at the same depth in all parts of it: Then they make a bank of earth about a foot high all around the field. To bring water to the ricefields, canals cross the low plain in every direction, as roads cross the farmlands of the United States. Sometimes the water will run from the canal into the ricefields, but if it does not the people must do the hard work of lifting it from the canals up to the field in buckets or by treadmills.
The ricefield is fertilized with care and with an al most unbelievable amount of hard work. Mud that is shoveled out of canals is spread upon the fields year after year and thus, little by little, the plain has been built up. Some times mud from the canals is piled on stacks of clover and straw, and afterward shoveled over and over to mix it with the decaying stalks. Thus a fine corn ' post is made, which is spread upon the fields.
People wade nearly knee-deep in mud and water, weeding the rice by hand and pushing the weeds down into the mud so that they may decay, and help to fertilize the rice plants. As the grain ripens, the water is drawn off and the ground allowed to dry. The grain is harvested by hand, set up on sticks to dry, and threshed by hand. Then the ground is at once spaded up, and the crop of winter wheat or barley is planted for the harvest of May or June.
To save time for the next year's crop, the rice is planted in little seed beds, before the wheat or barley is harvested. The young plants are moved to the field or "paddy" and set out by hand as soon as the wheat is cut. Think of all the work that must be done to raise these two crops of grain each year! 673. The Chinese meal.
—In southeastern China the commonest meal con sists of rice, beans, a little vegetable oil, and a sur prisingly large amount of some kind of boiled greens, of which the Chinese have many varieties that we do not use. Long ago they learned that greens are very wholesome. In place Of butter they eat vegetable oil made from soy beans or the seed of rape, which is a kind of cabbage. These vegetables give much more edible fat to the acre than does the cow with her milk and butter, or the pig with his bacon. The Chinese eat great quantities of vegetables, and are the finest gardeners in the world. Many of the Chinese and Japanese who have come to America are vegetable growers.