In the villages, where work of one or another kind is done for pay, Dr. Evans stated that a woman’s wage might not exceed $8, Mexican, or $3.44, gold, per year, and when we asked how it could be worth a woman’s while to work a whole year for so small a sum, his reply was, “If she did not do this she would earn nothing, and this would keep her in clothes and a little more.”  A cotton spinner in his church would procure a pound of cotton and on returning the yarn would receive one and a quarter pounds of cotton in exchange, the quarter pound being her compensation.

Dr. Evans also described a method of rooting slips from trees, practiced in various parts of China.  The under side of a branch is cut, bent upward and split for a short distance; about this is packed a ball of moistened earth wrapped in straw to retain the soil and to provide for future watering; the whole may then be bound with strips of bamboo for greater stability.  In this way slips for new mulberry orchards are procured.

At eight o’clock in the morning we entered the mouth of the Pei ho and wound westward through a vast, nearly sea-level, desert plain and in both directions, far toward the horizon, huge white stacks of salt dotted the surface of the Taku Government salt fields, and revolving in the wind were great numbers of horizontal sail windmills, pumping sea water into an enormous acreage of evaporation basins.  In Fig. 196 may be seen five of the large salt stacks and six of the windmills, together with many smaller piles of salt.  Fig. 197 is a closer view of the evaporation basins with piles of salt scraped from the surface after the mother liquor had been drained away.  The windmills, which were working one, sometimes two, of the large wooden chain pumps, were some thirty feet in diameter and lifted the brine from tide-water basins into those of a second and third higher level where the second and final concentration occurred.  These windmills, crude as they appear in Fig. 198, are nevertheless efficient, cheaply constructed and easily controlled.  The eight sails, each six by ten feet, were so hung as to take the wind through the entire revolution, tilting automatically to receive the wind on the opposite face the moment the edge passed the critical point.  Some 480 feet of sail surface were thus spread to the wind, working on a radius of fifteen feet.  The horizontal drive wheel had a diameter of ten feet, carried eighty-eight wooden cogs which engaged a pinion with fifteen leaves, and there were nine arms on the reel at the other end of the shaft which drove the chain.  The boards or buckets of the chain pump were six by twelve inches, placed nine inches apart, and with a fair breeze the pump ran full.

Enormous quantities of salt are thus cheaply manufactured through wind, tide and sun power directed by the cheapest human labor.  Before reaching Tientsin we passed the Government storage yards and counted two hundred stacks of salt piled in the open, and more than a third of the yard had been passed before beginning the count.  The average content of each stack must have exceeded 3000 cubic feet of salt, and more than 40,000,000 pounds must have been stored in the yards.  Armed guards in military uniform patrolled the alleyways day and night.  Long strips of matting laid over the stacks were the only shelter against rain.