Brick made from earth are very extensively used for house building, chaff and short straw being used as a binding material, the brick being simply dried in the sun, as seen in Fig. 89.  A house in the process of building, where the brick were being used, is seen in Fig. 90.  The foundation of the dwelling, it will be observed, was laid with well-formed hard-burned brick, these being necessary to prevent capillary moisture from the ground being drawn up and soften the earth brick, making the wall unsafe.

Several kilns for burning brick, built of clay and earth, were passed in our journey up the Pei ho, and stacked about them, covering an area of more than eight hundred feet back from the river were bundles of the kaoliang stems to serve as fuel in the kilns.

The extensive use of the unburned brick is necessitated by the difficulty of obtaining fuel, and various methods are adopted to reduce the number of burned brick required in construction.  One of these devices is shown in Fig. 79, where the city wall surrounding Kashing is constructed of alternate courses of four layers of burned brick separated by layers of simple earth concrete.

In addition to the multiple-function, farm-gown crops used for food, fuel and building material, there is a large acreage devoted to the growing of textile and fiber products and enormous quantities of these are produced annually.  In Japan, where some fifty millions of people are chiefly fed on the produce of little more than 21,000 square miles of cultivated land, there was grown in 1906 more than 75,500,000 pounds of cotton, hemp, flax and China grass textile stock, occupying 76,700 acres of the cultivated land.  On 141,000 other acres there grew 115,000,000 pounds of paper mulberry and Mitsumata, materials used in the manufacture of paper.  From still another 14,000 acres were taken 92,000,000 pounds of matting stuff, while more than 957,000 acres were occupied by mulberry trees for the feeding of silkworms, yielding to Japan 22,389,798 pounds of silk.  Here are more than 300,000,000 pounds of fiber and textile stuff taken from 1860 square miles of the cultivated land, cutting down the food producing area to 19,263 square miles and this area is made still smaller by devoting 123,000 acres to tea, these producing in 1906 58,900,000 pounds, worth nearly five million dollars.  Nor do these statements express the full measure of the producing power of the 21,321 square miles of cultivated land, for, in addition to the food and other materials named, there were also made $2,365,000 worth of braid from straw and wood shavings; $6,000,000 worth of rice straw bags, packing cases and matting; and $1,085,000 worth of wares from bamboo, willow and vine.  As illustrating the intense home industry of these people we may consider the fact that the 5,453,309 households of farmers in Japan produced in 1906, in their homes as subsidiary work, $20,527,000 worth of manufactured articles.  If correspondingly exact statistical data were available from China and Korea a similarity full utilization of cultural possibilities would be revealed there.