From Our Own Correspondent, Pochow, An., March 1.
Your Pochow correspondent came to this section last week to select 300 famine sufferers to go to Pochow to work till harvest time, but found the people so busy in festivities in passing over the Feast of Lanterns that all markets were suspended till after February 27; so the Commissioner at Chengchow asked me to come to Szechui where seven carloads of grain from the General Famine Committee are being distributed. I am here for three days and find that the oficial and gentry have a well perfected system for distribution, but in the first distribution it works slowly.
The country is a small one, 180,000 people, 79,000 of whom are said to be in real suffering. There ts only an average of a small mow and a half of ground to the individual and much of that hills. Last spring there was only three-fifths of a wheat crop and no autumn crop. Cholera was quite bad late last summer, between 500 and 1,000 dying of it Snow "in THE Mountains.
The heavy snow in late December stopped up the mountain roads so that people could not get about to markets, and notwithstanding special efforts on the part of the officials and gentry to open the roads, quite a good many froze and starved to death. The official seema most active and zealous in trying to save his people. He bought and used last summer much chlorodyne in the cholera scourge.
The Peking Government has sent about 200,000 catties of mixed grain here for distribution 4s being one of the most needy countries and the Famine Relief Committee 150,000. They are now distributing 20 catties of the former and 14 or 21 of the latter to each district, giving out about 15,000 tickets, representing about 50,000 people.
I note that the majority of those who come with tickets are women, many of them tottering with age and hunger. They say most of the men have gone from home to seek more prosperous regions. The official furnishes men to carry grain bags from one yard to the other and on to the streets for the old and feeble women. Besides these two batches of grain now being distributed, a Buddhist society headed in Peking gave out a quantity to some thousands some weeks ago. Then the Ringtiaoku is buying and selling grain, professed below cost—a difference of 10 to 20 cash on the catty, and still further the official offers special protection and remission of tax to a large grain firm to go into the country and sell grain
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.