CONIFERÆ AND GRASSES.
Many species of coniferæ are floated down to Canton, taken from the Mei ling, or brought from Kwangsí; the timber is used for fuel, but more for rafters and pillars in buildings. The wood of the pride of India is employed for cabinet work; there are also many kinds of fancy wood, some of which are imported, and more are indigenous. The nan muh, or southern wood, a magnificent species of laurus common in Sz’chuen, which resists time and insects, is peculiarly valuable, and reserved for imperial use. The cœsalpinia, rose wood, aigle wood, and the camphor, elm, willow, and aspen, are also serviceable in carpentry.
The people collect seaweed to a great extent, using it in the arts and also for food; among these the Gigartina tenax affords an excellent material for glues and varnishes. It is boiled, and the transparent glue obtained is brushed upon very coarse silk or mulberry paper, filling up their substance, and making a transparent covering for lanterns; it is also used as a size for stiffening silks and gauze. This and other kinds of fuci are boiled to a jelly and used for food; it is known in commerce under the name of agar-agar. The thick fronds of the laminaria are gathered on the northern coasts and imported from Japan. Among other cryptogams, the Tartarian lamb (Aspidium barometz), so graphically described by Darwin in his Botanic Garden, has long been celebrated; it is partly an artificial production of the ingenuity of Chinese gardeners taking advantage of the natural habits of the plant to form it into a shape resembling a sheep or other object.
Among remarkable grasses the zak or saxaul (Haloxylon) and the sulhir (Agriophyllum), which grow in the sandy parts of the desert of Gobi, should be mentioned. The first is found across the whole length of this arid region, growing on the bare sand, furnishing to the traveller a dry and ready fuel in its brittle twigs, while his camels greedily browse on its leafless but juicy and prickly branches. The Mongols pitch their tents beneath its shelter, seeking for some covert from the wintry winds, and encouraged to dig at its roots for water which has been detained by their succulent nature, a wonderful provision furnished by God in the bleakest desert. The sulhir is even more important, and is the “gift of the desert.” It grows on bare sand, is about two feet high, a prickly saline plant, producing many seeds in September, of a nutritious, agreeable nature, food for man and beast.
The list of gramineous plants cultivated for food is large; the common sorts include rice, wheat, barley, oats, maize, sugar-cane, panic, sorghum, spiked and panicled millet, of each kind several varieties. The grass (Phragmites) raised along the river banks is carefully cut and dried, to be woven into floor-matting; a coarser sort, called atap, is made of bamboo splints for roofs of huts, awnings, and sheds. In the milder climes of the southern coasts, cheap houses are constructed of these materials. The coarse grass and shrubbery on the hills is cut in the autumn for fuel by the poor; and when the hills are well sheared of their grassy covering, the stubble is set on fire, in order to supply ashes for manuring the next crop—an operation which tends to keep the hills bare of all shrubbery and trees.
THE BAMBOO—ITS BEAUTY AND USEFULNESS.
Few persons who have not seen the bamboo growing in its native climes get a full idea from pictures of its grace and beauty. A clump of this magnificent grass will gradually develop by new shoots into a grove, if care be taken to cut down the older stems as they reach full maturity, and not let them flower and go to seed; for as soon as they have perfected the seed, they die down to the root, like other grasses. The stalks usually attain the height of fifty feet, and in the Indian islands often reach seventy feet and upward, with a diameter of ten or twelve inches at the bottom. A road lined with them, with their feathery sprays meeting overhead, presents one of the most beautiful avenues possible to a warm climate.
In China the industry and skill of the people have multiplied and perpetuated a number of varieties (one author contents himself with describing sixty of them), among which are the yellow, the black, the green, the slender sort for pipes, and a slenderer one for writing-pencils, the big-leaved, etc. Its uses are so various that it is not easy to enumerate them all. The shoots come out of the ground nearly full-sized, four to six inches in diameter, and are cut like asparagus to eat as a pickle or a comfit, or by boiling or stewing. Sedentary Buddhist priests raise this lenten fare for themselves or to sell, and extract the tabasheer from the joints of the old culms, to sell as a precious medicine for almost anything which ails you. The roots are carved into fantastic and ingenious images and stands, or divided into egg-shaped divining-blocks to ascertain the will of the gods, or trimmed into lantern handles, canes, and umbrella-sticks.
The tapering culms are used for all purposes that poles can be applied to in carrying, propelling, supporting, and measuring, for which their light, elastic, tubular structure, guarded by a coating of silicious skin, and strengthened by a thick septum at each joint, most admirably fits them. The pillars and props of houses, the framework of awnings, the ribs of mat-sails, and the shafts of rakes are each furnished by these culms. So, also, are fences and all kinds of frames, coops, and cages, the wattles of abatis, and the ribs of umbrellas and fans. The leaves are sewed into rain-cloaks for farmers and sailors, and thatches for covering their huts and boats, pinned into linings for tea-boxes, plaited into immense umbrellas to screen the huckster and his stall from the sun and rain, or into coverings for theatres and sheds. Even the whole lot where a two-story house is building is usually covered in by a framework of bamboo-poles and attap—as this leaf covering is called, from its Malay name—all tied together by rattan, and protecting the workmen and their work from sun and rain.
The wood, cut into splints of proper sizes and forms, is woven into baskets of every shape and fancy, sewed into window-curtains and door-screens, plaited into awnings and coverings for tea-chests or sugar-cones, and twisted into cables. The shavings and curled threads aid softer things in stuffing pillows; while other parts supply the bed for sleeping, the chopsticks for eating, the pipe for smoking, and the broom for sweeping. The mattress to lie upon, the chair to sit upon, the table to eat on, the food to eat, and the fuel to cook it with, are also derivable from bamboo. The master makes his ferule from it, the carpenter his foot-measure, the farmer his water-pipes, irrigating wheels, and straw-rakes, the grocer his gill and pint cups, and the mandarin his dreaded instrument of punishment. This last use is so common that the name of the plant itself has come in our language to denote this application, and the poor wretch who is bambooed for his crimes is thus taught that laws cannot be violated with impunity.