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TITLE: FARMERS OF FORTY CENTURIES
AUTHOR: F. H. KING
EBOOK: E02039 (O'Briens Book Cellar)

FARMERS OF FORTY CENTURIES

OR

PERMANENT AGRICULTURE IN CHINA, KOREA AND JAPAN

By

F. H. KING, D. Sc.

1911

PREFACE

By DR. L. H. BAILEY.

We have not yet gathered up the experience of mankind in the tilling
of the earth; yet the tilling of the earth is the bottom condition
of civilization. If we are to assemble all the forces and agencies
that make for the final conquest of the planet, we must assuredly
know how it is that all the peoples in all the places have met the
problem of producing their sustenance out of the soil.

We have had few great agricultural travelers and few books that
describe the real and significant rural conditions. Of natural
history travel we have had very much; and of accounts of sights and
events perhaps we have had too many. There are, to be sure, famous
books of study and travel in rural regions, and some of them, as
Arthur Young's "Travels in France," have touched social and
political history; but for the most part, authorship of agricultural
travel is yet undeveloped. The spirit of scientific inquiry must now
be taken into this field, and all earth-conquest must be compared
and the results be given to the people that work.

This was the point of view in which I read Professor King's
manuscript. It is the writing of a well-trained observer who went
forth not to find diversion or to depict scenery and common wonders,
but to study the actual conditions of life of agricultural peoples.
We in North America are wont to think that we may instruct all the
world in agriculture, because our agricultural wealth is great and
our exports to less favored peoples have been heavy; but this wealth
is great because our soil is fertile and new, and in large acreage
for every person. We have really only begun to farm well. The first
condition of farming is to maintain fertility. This condition the
oriental peoples have met, and they have solved it in their way. We
may never adopt particular methods, but we can profit vastly by
their experience. With the increase of personal wants in recent
time. the newer countries may never reach such density of population
as have Japan and China; but we must nevertheless learn the first
lesson in the conservation of natural resources, which are the
resources of the land. This is the message that Professor King
brought home from the East.

This book on agriculture should have good effect in establishing
understanding between the West and the East. If there could be such
an interchange of courtesies and inquiries on these themes as is
suggested by Professor King, as well as the interchange of athletics
and diplomacy and commerce, the common productive people on both
sides should gain much that they could use; and the results in amity
should be incalculable.

It is a misfortune that Professor King could not have lived to write
the concluding "Message of China and Japan to the World." It would
have been a careful and forceful summary of his study of eastern
conditions. At the moment when the work was going to the printer, he
was called suddenly to the endless journey and his travel here was
left incomplete. But he bequeathed us a new piece of literature, to
add to his standard writings on soils and on the applications of
physics and devices to agriculture. Whatever he touched he
illuminated.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

FIRST GLIMPSES OF JAPAN

GRAVE LANDS OF CHINA

TO HONGKONG AND CANTON

UP THE SI-KIANG, WEST RIVER

EXTENT OF CANALIZATION AND SURFACE FITTING OF FIELDS

SOME CUSTOMS OF THE COMMON PEOPLE

THE FUEL PROBLEM, BUILDING AND TEXTILE MATERIALS

TRAMPS AFIELD

THE UTILIZATION OF WASTE

IN THE SHANTUNG PROVINCE

ORIENTALS CROWD BOTH TIME AND SPACE

RICE CULTURE IN THE ORIENT

SILK CULTURE

THE TEA INDUSTRY

ABOUT TIENTSIN

MANCHURIA AND KOREA

RETURN TO JAPAN

INTRODUCTION

A word of introduction is needed to place the reader at the best
view point from which to consider what is said in the following
pages regarding the agricultural practices and customs of China,
Korea and Japan. It should be borne in mind that the great factors
which today characterize, dominate and determine the agricultural
and other industrial operations of western nations were physical
impossibilities to them one hundred years ago, and until then had
been so to all people.

It should be observed, too, that the United States as yet is a
nation of but few people widely scattered over a broad virgin land
with more than twenty acres to the support of every man, woman and
child, while the people whose practices are to be considered are
toiling in fields tilled more than three thousand years and who have
scarcely more than two acres per capita,* more than one-half of
which is uncultivable mountain land.

*[Footnote: This figure was wrongly stated in the first edition as
one acre, owing to a mistake in confusing the area of cultivated
land with total area.]

Again, the great movement of cargoes of feeding stuffs and mineral
fertilizers to western Europe and to the eastern United States began
less than a century ago and has never been possible as a means of
maintaining soil fertility in China, Korea or Japan, nor can it be
continued indefinitely in either Europe or America. These
importations are for the time making tolerable the waste of plant
food materials through our modern systems of sewage disposal and
other faulty practices; but the Mongolian races have held all such
wastes, both urban and rural, and many others which we ignore,
sacred to agriculture, applying them to their fields.

We are to consider some of the practices of a virile race of some
five hundred millions of people who have an unimpaired inheritance
moving with the momentum acquired through four thousand years; a
people morally and intellectually strong, mechanically capable, who
are awakening to a utilization of all the possibilities which
science and invention during recent years have brought to western
nations; and a people who have long dearly loved peace but who can
and will fight in self defense if compelled to do so.

We had long desired to stand face to face with Chinese and Japanese
farmers; to walk through their fields and to learn by seeing some of
their methods, appliances and practices which centuries of stress
and experience have led these oldest farmers in the world to adopt.
We desired to learn how it is possible, after twenty and perhaps
thirty or even forty centuries, for their soils to be made to
produce sufficiently for the maintenance of such dense populations
as are living now in these three countries. We have now had this
opportunity and almost every day we were instructed, surprised and
amazed at the conditions and practices which confronted us whichever
way we turned; instructed in the ways and extent to which these
nations for centuries have been and are conserving and utilizing
their natural resources, surprised at the magnitude of the returns
they are getting from their fields, and amazed at the amount of
efficient human labor cheerfully given for a daily wage of five
cents and their food, or for fifteen cents, United States currency,
without food.

The three main islands of Japan in 1907 had a population of
46,977,003 maintained on 20,000 square miles of cultivated field.
This is at the rate of more than three people to each acre, and of
2,349 to each square mile; and yet the total agricultural imports
into Japan in 1907 exceeded the agricultural exports by less than
one dollar per capita. If the cultivated land of Holland is
estimated at but one-third of her total area, the density of her
population in 1905 was, on this basis, less than one-third that of
Japan in her three main islands. At the same time Japan is feeding
69 horses and 56 cattle, nearly all laboring animals, to each square
mile of cultivated field, while we were feeding in 1900 but 30
horses and mules per same area, these being our laboring animals.

As coarse food transformers Japan was maintaining 16,500,000
domestic fowl, 825 per square mile, but only one for almost three of
her people. We were maintaining, in 1900, 250,600,000 poultry, but
only 387 per square mile of cultivated field and yet more than three
for each person. Japan's coarse food transformers in the form of
swine, goats and sheep aggregated but 13 to the square mile and
provided but one of these units for each 180 of her people while in
the United States in 1900 there were being maintained, as
transformers of grass and coarse grain into meat and milk, 95
cattle, 99 sheep and 72 swine per each square mile of improved
farms. In this reckoning each of the cattle should be counted as the
equivalent of perhaps five of the sheep and swine, for the

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