The interpreter engaged for us failed to appear as per agreement so the next morning we took the early train for Tsinan to obtain a general view of the country and to note the places most favorable as points for field study.  We had resolved also to make an effort to secure an interpreter through the American Presbyterian College at Tsinan.  Leaving Tsingtao, the train skirts around the Kiaochow bay for a distance of nearly fifty miles, where we pass the city of the same name with its population of 120,000, which had an import and export trade in 1905 valued at over $24,000,000.  At Sochen we passed through a coal mining district where coal was being brought to the cars in baskets carried by men.  The coal on the loaded open cars was sprinkled with whitewash, serving as a seal to safe-guard against stealing during transit, making it so that none could be removed without the fact being revealed by breaking the seal.  This practice is general in China and is applied to many commodities handled in bulk.  We saw baskets of milled rice carried by coolies sealed with a pattern laid over the surface by sprinkling some colored powder upon it.  Cut stone, corded for the market, was whitewashed in the same manner as the coal.

As we were approaching Weihsien, another city of 100,000 people, we identified one of the deeply depressed, centuries-old roadways, worn eight to ten feet deep, by chancing to see half a dozen teams passing along it as the train crossed.  We had passed several and were puzzling to account for such peculiar erosion.  The teams gave the explanation and thus connected our earlier reading with the concrete.  Along these deep-cut roadways caravans may pass, winding through the fields, entirely unobserved unless one chances to be close along the line or the movement is discovered by clouds of dust, one of the methods that has produced them, and we would not be surprised if gathering manure from them has played a large part also.

Weihsien is near one of the great commercial highways of China and in the center of one of the coal mining regions of the province.  Still further along towards Tsinan we passed Tsingchowfu, another of the large cities of the province, with 150,000 population.  All day we rode through fields of wheat, always planted in rows, and in hills in the row east of Kaumi, but in single or double continuous drills westward from here to Tsinan.  Thousands of wells used for irrigation, of the type seen in Fig. 123, were passed during the day, many of them recently dug to supply water for the barley suffering from the severe drought which was threatening the crop at the time.