Two crops of rice are commonly grown each year in southern China and during the winter and early spring, grain, cabbage, rape, peas, beans, leeks and ginger may occupy the fields as a third or even fourth crop, making the total year’s product from the land very large; but the amount of thought, labor and fertilizers given to securing these is even greater and beyond anything Americans will endure.  How great these efforts are will be appreciated from what is seen in Fig. 50, representing two fields thrown into high ridges, planted to ginger and covered with straw.  All of this work is done by hand and when the time for rice planting comes every ridge will again be thrown down and the surface smoothed to a water level.  Even when the ridges and beds are not thrown down for the crops of rice, the furrows and the beds will change places so that all the soil is worked over deeply and mainly through hand labor.  The statement so often made, that these people only barely scratch the surface of their fields with the crudest of tools is very far from the truth, for their soils are worked deeply and often, notwithstanding the fact that their plowing, as such, may be shallow.

Through Dr. John Blumann of the missionary hospital at Tungkun, east from Canton, we learned that the good rice lands there a few years ago sold at $75 to $130 per acre but that prices are rising rapidly.  The holdings of the better class of farmers there are ten to fifteen mow—­one and two-thirds to two and a half acres—­upon which are maintained families numbering six to twelve.  The day’s wage of a carpenter or mason is eleven to thirteen cents of our currency, and board is not included, but a day’s ration for a laboring man is counted worth fifteen cents, Mexican, or less than seven cents, gold.

Fish culture is practiced in both deep and shallow basins, the deep permanent ones renting as high as $30 gold, per acre.  The shallow basins which can be drained in the dry season are used for fish only during the rainy period, being later drained and planted to some crop.  The permanent basins have often come to be ten or twelve feet deep, increasing with long usage, for they are periodically drained by pumping and the foot or two of mud which has accumulated, removed and sold as fertilizer to planters of rice and other crops.  It is a common practice, too, among the fish growers, to fertilize the ponds, and in case a foot path leads alongside, screens are built over the water to provide accommodation for travelers.  Fish reared in the better fertilized ponds bring a higher price in the market.  The fertilizing of the water favors a stronger growth of food forms, both plant and animal, upon which the fish live and they are better nourished, making a more rapid growth, giving their flesh better qualities, as is the case with well fed animals.

In the markets where fish are exposed for sale they are often sliced in halves lengthwise and the cut surface smeared with fresh blood.  In talking with Dr. Blumann as to the reason for this practice he stated that the Chinese very much object to eating meat that is old or tainted and that he thought the treatment simply had the effect of making the fish look fresher.  I question whether this treatment with fresh blood may not have a real antiseptic effect and very much doubt that people so shrewd as the Chinese would be misled by such a ruse.