In several sections along the course of this river there are limited areas of intense erosion where naked gulleys of no mean magnitude have developed but these were exceptions and we were continually surprised at the remarkable steepness of the slopes, with convexly rounded contours almost everywhere, well mantled with soil, devoid of gulleys and completely covered with herbaceous growth dotted with small trees.  The absence of forest growth finds its explanation in human influence rather than natural conditions.

Throughout the hill-land section of this mighty river the most characteristic and persistent human features were the stacks of brush-wood and the piles of stove wood along the banks or loaded upon boats and barges for the market.  The brush-wood was largely made from the boughs of pine, tied into bundles and stacked like grain.  The stove wood was usually round, peeled and made from the limbs and trunks of trees two to five inches in diameter.  All this fuel was coming to the river from the back country, sent down along steep slides which in the distance resemble paths leading over hills but too steep for travel.  The fuel was loaded upon large barges, the boughs in the form of stacks to shed rain but with a tunnel leading into the house of the boat about which they were stacked, while the wood was similarly corded about the dwelling, as seen in Fig. 44.  The wood was going to Canton and other delta cities while the pine boughs were taken to the lime and cement kilns, many of which were located along the river.  Absolutely the whole tree, including the roots and the needles, is saved and burned; no waste is permitted.

The up-river cargo of the Nanning was chiefly matting rush, taken on at Canton, tied in bundles like sheaves of wheat.  It is grown upon the lower, newer delta lands by methods of culture similar to those applied to rice, Fig. 45 showing a field as seen in Japan.

The rushes were being taken to one of the country villages on a tributary of the Sikiang and the steamer was met by a flotilla of junks from this village, some forty-five miles up the stream, where the families live who do the weaving.  On the return trip the flotilla again met the steamer with a cargo of the woven matting.  In keeping record of packages transferred the Chinese use a simple and unique method.  Each carrier, with his two bundles, received a pair of tally sticks.  At the gang-plank sat a man with a tally-case divided into twenty compartments, each of which could receive five, but no more, tallies.  As the bundles left the steamer the tallies were placed in the tally-case until it contained one hundred, when it was exchanged for another.

Wuchow is a city of some 65,000 inhabitants, standing back on the higher ground, not readily visible from the steamer landing nor from the approach on the river.  On the foreground, across which stretched the anchor chains of the dock, was living a floating population, many in shelters less substantial than Indian wigwams, but engaged in a great variety of work, and many water buffalo had been tied for the night along the anchor chains.  Before July much of this area would lie beneath the flood waters of the Sikiang.