6th June. In the province of Chibli maize become a common product during the last half century. The grains are large and very nutritive and the stalks-useful for fuel. The cost of living when maize meal is used is much less than for wheat flour. In a climate which is so cold in winter as that of the province of Chihli wheat flour is a very favourite article of food and is felt to be more satisfying than others. The well-to-do like it on this account. Ifthe population of Chibli were appealed to. as to what cereal suited them best for daily food they would by a majority vote for wheat flour. Rich, gcten being able to purchase animal food have rice daily. Rice is stored in the granaries, and distributed to the ban-germen for themselves and their families. These families use the cheaper kinds, but sell the dearer. If poor, they live on maize meal chiefly as being cheaper than other sorts of food. Maize has spread from western Asia into China during the present dynasty. Excellent rice is produced on river banks in favourable positions and always commands a good price. Such favourable positions are however few. The chief product is small millet for human food and Barbadoes millet for animals. Small millet which is used as bird seed in Europe is now peers the chief food of man in the northern Probably the recent application of the ravinees. But was this always so?
word ku, formerly meaning all kinds of grain, to signify ordinary millet is an index to the fact that anciently the ordinary food was not millet and that there has been achango. The northern people when they gradually came to adopt this kind of small millet as their staple article of food, at the same time as if by unconscious general agreement united to call it by this name. So also wheat is corn in England and maize is corn in the United States.
The oldest quotation in the Chinese Classics mentioning the five elements, water, fire, metal, wood, and earth, adds a sixth "grain." These were early singled out as the six classes into which the governor of the country could conveniently distribute the objects comin; under executive control. But grain did not remain in the classification long. The five elements of China and of complete without a sixth. The grain Persia were after this time regarded as
sown in various localities came soon to be spoken of as the "hundred grains" or "the five grains." Among the five, rice stood first. They were rice, hemp, millet, wheat, beans. Now wheat as we know was then grown in mountainous regions and ancient writers tell us that rice and pulse were the food common in the plains. To these we must add millet and panicled millet. Thus we have in view the five grains of China twenty-five centuries ago. In the time of Confucius the tall millet also, reaching ten feet high, was grown for the food of animals as it is now everywhere north China.
Wheat and oats bear cold weather best, and oats grow in a colder climate than wheat. At present wheat is produced abundantly in Kiangsu but it gives the best flour in Shantung and the climate of that province is probably the most suitable for wheat of any in China. Oats grow as far south as Yunnan because of the height, from four to-six thousand feet, of the plateau of the rovinee abore the sea. It is a high-grain by preference and will also grow on low grounds where there is a moist cold winter. It is modern like maize and potatoes in China, and on account of the stimulus applied to its cultivation by the growth of population it is on the ascending grade, Oats, potatoes, and maize are employed as food just now more than ever in north and west China for the three reasons, that the isothermal lines are, as com: pared with two thousand years retreating towards the south, that cob merce has brought these productions recently to China by the central Asian route, and that in a nation with a grows ing population domestic economy requires this change in food to counterbalance the increasing poverty. Potatees for example are Epreadu in highland China with unexampled rapidity, just as they did in Ireland at a time when the people of that island grew in a few decades from two or three millions to eight millions, and the relief of emigration was required to reduce the too great pressure on the means of subsistence. Over a great part of north China now, wheat and rice are the food of the well-to-do. Autumn and spring wheat are both produced extensively. Rice is grown once in the year in the warn summer where rivers favour irrigation, and there is no better rice than that cultivated a few miles from Poking on the west where the Huang Ho issues from the mountains, and has during myriads of years scooped out a valley of its own Which now possesses a few alluvial tracts supplying excellent white rice for the wealthy families of Peking. But the great rice-growing region is not here. It is in central China, on the Yangtze River, that rice is grown for export on a large scale. The reason is that the heat of the climate there is just sufficient to suit this product. In' 1888 from the port of Shanghai four million and a half piculs of rive were shipped to the northern and southern provinces. In 1887, the quantity shipped was 3,800,000 piculs. Last ear on account of floods and a probition to export, except under special permit, the quantity sank to less than 2,000,000 piculs. Most. of this lange export reaches Shanghai from rice grows ing grounds up the river, the land near Shanghai being pre-occupied with cotton and indigo required by the native looms of all the villages in the Shanghai plain. But the main product of the soil from Shanghai west along the great Yangtze valley to Hankow is rice. At Shanghai rice is sown once in the year and the time is May, the harvest being in September, This is in latitude thirty-one. Just a little farther to the South there are two crops of rice in the year. At Ningpo, latitude thirty, rice is sown in April and July and harvested in August and October. Shanghai is thus the centre of the national rice trade and the rice merchants of this port do an enormous business.
Let us compare this state of things with what we know of ancient China. This will help us to decide whether the climate of China is gradually getting colder. In the Chow li, a book of the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.