As noted above they have tilled
the same soil for four thousand years. Some of this soil too is very
thin and poor but it produces as well today as it did a thousand years
ago. While most of their methods are the oldest and crudest that can be
found, yet in some other ways the whole world can learn lessons from
them. They use fertilizer in the form of liquid and put it on the
growing plant rather than on the soil as we do. The farmer will feed his
plants with the same regularity and care that our farmers feed and care
for their horses and cattle. Every drop of urine and every particle of
night soil is preserved for fertilizer. This is saved in earthen jars
and gathered, mostly by women, each morning. A Chinese contractor paid
the city of Shanghai $31,000 in gold in a single year for the privilege
of collecting the human waste and selling it to the farmers around near
the city. Where a beast of burden is at work a boy or girl is near with
a long handled dipper ready to catch the urine and droppings as they
fall.

In China the farmers have always been held in high esteem. While the
scholar is highest, the farmer is second on the list in the social
scale. It is interesting to know that the soldier is fifth or last on
the list because his work is to destroy rather than to build up. The hoe
is an emblem of honor in China. For hundreds of years the Emperor with
his nobles went every spring to the Temple of Agriculture to offer
sacrifice. After this ceremony they all went to a field near the temple
and paid honor to the tillers of the soil. At a yellow painted plow, to
which was hitched a cow or buffalo, with a yellow robed peasant leading,
the Emperor dressed as a farmer put his hand to the plow and turned nine
furrows across the field while bands of musicians chanted the praises of
agriculture. Even the Empress set the example of honest agricultural
toil by picking the leaves from the mulberry trees, early each spring,
to be fed to silk worms.

All China is a network of canals and the Chinese are a race of
irrigators. Both men and women stand from daylight until dark walking on
a sort of a windlass turning an endless chain with buckets on it, one
end of which is in the canal and the other end up on the bank, pumping
the water up to flood the rice fields or irrigate the growing crops. No
people toil harder or more earnestly than do these simple people. While
they grow an abundance of vegetables, yet rice and tea are the grea