Viewing page 170 of 469
This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.
[[underline]] Chapter VIII. [[underline]] 147. making them look both higher and farther away than they were in reality. These rugged hills are part of the northern water-shed of the Yangtze River's drainage area; in antiquity they formed a region of "marches"---almost unpeopled belts of waste land---between the great southern kingdom of Ch'u and the more properly Chinese states north of the latter. Our road, like most of those in the rice-growing portions of China, was hardly more than a footpath, once paved with narrow, rectangular stone slabs placed end to end, but now largely gone. After a few hours' going over level ground, we entered a rather picturesque, rolling, and almost hilly country, of wooded slopes and sweeping grassy downs. The soil, where exposed, was a dense reddish-brown clay; and here and there were outcroppings of natural rock. The broad valleys and the hollows formed a patchwork of small, irregular, but carefully leveled and irrigated plots, sometimes terraced; in these, men and boys knee-deep in mud were industriously setting out the yound rice-plants. [[superscript]] (149) [[/superscript]] Birds sang and wild roses bloomed in the coppices; everywhere were signs that the season was con- ----------------------- [[superscript]] (149) [[/superscript]] Women and girls in the part of China where we now were, just as in the region and farther north, do not participate in field-work as they in central and southern China, Japan, Indo-China, and parts of the Philippines. This difference in custom is one of great antiquity and ethnic significance. ------------------------ siderably more advanced than it was in the region around Peking. I noted that hereabout, just as farther south, the water buffalo was the chief domestic animal, [[superscript]] (150) [[/superscript]] though a few small dun cattle were ------------------------- [[superscript]] (150) [[/superscript]] The Huai River basin seems to be the present northern limit of the water buddalo in China. -------------------------
