Sidelights on Chinese Life

by J. Macgowan

The Chinese farms as a rule are small. This is almost entirely due to the custom that prevails in China of the land being divided amongst the sons when the father dies. The constant subdivision that has been going on during the centuries of the past has resulted in the great diminishing in the size of the holdings, and the leaving of many of the rural population without any land at all.

There are of course many rich landowners who have invested their capital in land, and who have a superabundance of it. Where the native banks are uncertain and the modes of investment few and precarious, it has been found that to buy up farms brings in after all the highest interest, and is more to be relied upon than any other method of disposing of surplus funds.

A large number of farms are just large enough to support a family, say, of four or five people, but should the seasons be unfavourable, and the crops be parched by the fiery-faced sun and gradually be scorched to death in the fields, then sorrow comes upon the home, and the money-lender has to be sought to give relief. A still more considerable number of farms are too small even under the very best conditions to support the family. The fields are too few, though cultivated with the deft and cunning hand of the Chinese farmer, to produce food enough for the home, and so plans have to be thought of by which the deficiency may be met, and food and clothes provided for the wife and the little ones.

It is this widespread condition of affairs that has made the farmer in this land one of the handiest men in all the four great divisions into which society has been divided. The pressing needs of his home, and the absolute necessity for some mode of increasing his income if he would keep it together, have taxed his wits to the very utmost, and consequently have developed his thought and his ingenuity.

Some of them open little shops, where they sell miscellaneous articles that do not require a large capital to the neighbours and others who do not care for travelling as far as the neighbouring city to make such small purchases. Others, again, who have no money whatever to invest in even such small enterprises as these, start for some great centre of trade and there act as coolies. They become the beasts of burden of the whole city. Their muscles have been toughened by toil on their farms and their minds have been developed in their struggle with nature, so that they become valuable auxiliaries in doing the heavy work connected with the business of the town.

The favourite resorts of these farmers that are striving to keep a home above their heads, are the great shipping ports, where foreign vessels bring their cargoes from the four corners of the earth. Here labour is abundant and better paid, and consequently the chances of saving money considerably greater.

In Shanghai, for example, and Hongkong, the two greatest shipping ports in this extreme East, it is intensely interesting to watch how the farmers flock to them, to do the rough and dangerous work of loading and unloading the steamers and sailing ships that come in almost daily from their ocean voyages. Thousands of them congregate on the wharves and jetties waiting to be called off to the ships that are lying in the stream. Usually they are a rough-looking crowd, and, judged by a similar class of men that are seen in our home ports, they would seem to be of a much inferior character to those that we are accustomed to see there.

They are poorly clad, and their clothes are of such an unpicturesque description and so badly fitting and usually so full of patches, that they give one the impression that they must be the very refuse of the neighbourhoods from which they have come. If they were Englishmen, we would call them loafers and tramps who had gathered round the dock gates, not really to get work, but to pose as members of the unemployed in order that charity might be doled out to them.

But every man there is a bona fide farmer, who has so studied the mysteries of nature that he is able to wring her secrets out of her, and cause the fields to be covered with luxuriant crops. They nearly all have farms, and the wives and children are working them whilst they are away, and living on the barest subsistence that will keep body and soul together until they return with their hard-earned gains to drive away the wolf from the door, and to satisfy the inexorable money-lender, who will have nothing less than his pound of flesh.