This art, as with so many others in China, was the inheritance of the family we saw at work, handed down to them through many generations.  The printer was standing at a rough work bench upon which a large heavy stone in cubical form served as a weight to hold in place a thoroughly lacquered sheet of tough cardboard in which was cut the pattern to appear in white on the cloth.  Beside the stone stood a pot of thick paste prepared from a mixture of lime and soy bean flour.  The soy beans were being ground in one corner of the same room by a diminutive edition of such an outfit as seen in Fig. 64.  The donkey was working in his permanent abode and whenever off duty he halted before manger and feed.  At the operator’s right lay a bolt of white cotton cloth fixed to unroll and pass under the stencil, held stationary by the heavy weight.  To print, the stencil was raised and the cloth brought to place under it.  The paste was then deftly spread with a paddle over the surface and thus upon the cloth beneath wherever exposed through the openings in the stencil.  This completes the printing of the pattern on one section of the bolt of cloth.  The free end of the stencil is then raised, the cloth passed along the proper distance by hand and the stencil dropped in place for the next application.  The paste is permitted to dry upon the cloth and when the bolt has been dipped into the blue dye the portions protected by the paste remain white.  In this simple manner has the printing of calico been done for centuries for the garments of millions of children.  From the ceiling of the drying room in this printery of olden times were hanging some hundreds of stencils bearing different patterns.  In our great calico mills, printing hundreds of yards per minute, the mechanics and the chemistry differ only in detail of application and in dispatch, not in fundamental principle.

In almost any direction we traveled outside the city, in the pleasant mornings when the air was still, the laying of warp for cotton cloth could be seen, to be woven later in the country homes.  We saw this work in progress many times and in many places in the early morning, usually along some roadside or open place, as seen in Fig. 65, but never later in the day.  When the warp is laid each will be rolled upon its stretcher and removed to the house to be woven.

In many places in Kiangsu province batteries of the large dye pits were seen sunk in the fields and lined with cement.  These were six to eight feet in diameter and four to five feet deep.  In one case observed there were nine pits in the set.  Some of the pits were neatly sheltered beneath live arbors, as represented in Fig. 66.  But much of this spinning, weaving, dyeing and printing of late years is being displaced by the cheaper calicos of foreign make and most of the dye pits we saw were not now used for this purpose, the two in the illustration serving as manure receptacles.  Our interpreter stated however that there is a growing dissatisfaction with foreign goods on account of their lack of durability; and we saw many cases where the cloth dyed blue was being dried in large quantities on the grave lands.