CHAPTER IV[ToC]
RIDING
No country in the world is so badly supplied with horses as China, both as regards quantity and quality.
The reasons for this are largely owing to the peculiar and wretched condition of internal communications, and to the fact that horses are seldom employed in cultivation of the soil, which is mostly performed by manual labour, supplemented by water buffaloes in the central and southern provinces and by oxen in the north.
Wherever rivers and lakes exist there is found a dense boating population, whose occupation is the conduct of every kind of traffic.
On the large fluvial highways stately junks laden deep with cargo pass backwards and forwards in unending procession. In shallower waters the vessels are smaller but more numerous, and this adaptation to circumstances goes on until the smallest streams and canals, which invariably cover the valleys of China's mighty rivers as with a net, are blocked with tiny craft, each bearing its load of merchandise or its quota of passengers.
In such districts, where everything is carried by water and where roads are few, there is little or no work for the horse, which, beyond a few wretched specimens attached to the various yamêns and military camps, is seldom seen.
Where waterways do not exist, and traffic must necessarily be carried overland, the highways are either narrow paths paved with large blocks of stone and suitable only for wheelbarrows and pack-animals, or tracks picked out at random over a width of perhaps a hundred yards, along which lumbering, ill-constructed and springless carts plough their ways, and strings of pack-animals wend slowly to and fro. The numberless creaking wheel-barrows, bearing heavy loads, are propelled by coolies, who, the yoke across the shoulders, stagger along between the shafts, helped occasionally by a small sail set to catch a favouring wind, or by another coolie harnessed to the vehicle by ropes. The pack-animals mostly consist of camels (especially in the north), mules and donkeys, ponies being used in more limited numbers. As a rule, the carts are supplied with mixed teams of very poor class animals, mules largely predominating, although ponies are also numerous.
Europeans, accustomed to see carriages, dog-carts and all kinds of horse-drawn conveyances circulating freely on macadamised roads, find it difficult to realise that, in the oldest civilised empire in existence, there are, outside the treaty-ports, not only no macadamised roads, but not even roads that could possibly be compared with our most out-of-the-way and most ill-kept country lanes, and that consequently there are neither carriages nor dogcarts, but only springless tumbrils, which, covered with a wain, discharge the functions of the celestial cab, and plough through deep mud with their massive wheels, or jolt over stone causeways to the intense discomfort of luckless occupants.