to go from one end of Shantung to the other, talking with coolies,
officials, old men and young men, students, and those who can neither
read nor write; missionaries and soldiers; natives and foreigners; to
see just what importance Shantung is to China as a whole.

The first thing I discovered was that it has about forty million people
living within the limits of the peninsula, close to half the population
of the United States. Does that sound as if it might be China's
appendix? You wouldn't think so if you saw the cities, roads and fields
of this great stretch of land literally swarming with human beings, and
every last one of them, as busy as ants.

I rode one whole day across the peninsula. I happened to be traveling
with a man from Kansas. He was a man interested in farming and
wheat-growing. For hundreds of miles we had been passing through land
that was absolutely level and every inch of it cultivated. I had been
saying to myself over and over again, "Why, it's exactly like our Middle
West Country."

Then much to my astonishment this Kansas man turned to me, and said,
"Did it ever occur to you that these fields of Shantung look just like
Kansas?"

"Yes, it has just occurred to me this minute," I responded.

Then the wife of the Kansas man said, "I have been shutting my eyes and
trying to imagine that I was in Kansas, it's so much like home."

"And say, man, but a tractor on those fields would work wonders," added
a portion of William Allen White's reading constituency.

And that is exactly how Shantung strikes an American when he has ridden
all day through its great stretches of level fields. He can easily
imagine himself riding through Kansas for a day.

My first visit to Shantung was at Tsingtao, the headquarters of the
German concession and now of the Japanese concession. I spent a day
there, and took photographs of the wharves and town. On the wharves
were still standing hundreds of boxes marked with German names and the
inevitable phrase "Made in Germany." Those boxes were mute reminders of
the evacuation of one nation from a foreign soil. But standing side by
side with these boxes were also other hundreds, already being shot into
Shantung in a steady stream; and these boxes have a new trademark
printed in every case in English and Japanese, "Made in Japan."

I spent several days in Tsinanfu and Tientsin, two great inland cities,
and more than a week in cruising about through Shantung's little towns