The land journey from Hengchow gave one an opportunity of seeing the crops. Although the snow was very welcome to the farmers, there were no signs of anything that could be called drought. The wheat was in excellent condition, and J was surprised to find a considerably larger proportion of the fields with wheat than is the case in north Hunan. I do not understand the reason of this because in Hupeh there is still more wheat than in south Hunan. To be sure, of the three divisions, north Hunan produces more rice than either of the other two;*but in north Hunan a good many fields also bear wheat.
I was asked by the Chinese-Foreign Famine Relief Committee to gather such indication as I could of the effect the little work which had been done in these parts in the previous year. It was not a real famine area; only one in which there had been some amount of scarcity through drought and so a part in which comparatively little distribution of grain had been made. The outcry made by the representatives of these counties (some of them members of the Provincial Assembly) when they considered they were being overlooked was such as might have led listeners to think matters were as bad, if-not worse than in the west. The request for photos similar to those which were being sent to us from the west was, of necessity, voided.
The clamour considerably softened when millet was offered: "We don't eat millet in the south" was the reply, to which we could but retort "You would if conditions were as bad as you say they are." Faced -with the dilemma of millet or nothing, more than one county got new representatives to contradict the earlier ones and assure us that these previous ones were not really representatives and that there was real need of millet. We now find that there were differences in the counties: in two or three, the present of millet was wasted. I got to one place in the county of Tungan, where, five miles away from the county town, there was still over a ton of millet left from a stock sent there six or eight months ago. It was stored in a building right on the Siang and moored to the bank were a dozen boats loaded with home-grown millet which was being exported. At Yungming, which lies in a southern projection which is almost surrounded by Kuangsi territory, one of the missionary treasurers who went to inspect conditions, the report of which was most distressing, on his way passed more than a score of loads of beautifully white rice. On telling the county magistrate this, he was met with the naive response "Oh, that is all Kuangsi rice." At Sintien, a hilly, poor county lying east of Yungchow, a proper statement of the way in which millet had been distributed was given me by a Chinese gentleman who had come across speciallly to meet me-I was glad to see that the aborigines had received quite a good proportion of the grain. Sincere gratitude for the help given was expressed by the magistrate and local gentry.
The Peking government granted a large number of likin stamps to be used as surtaxes for famine relief. But not many have been sold. At Hengchow, the likin officer handed me over $355 and over $2,000 worth of unsold stamps.
It was good to find on our return to Hengchow, that the water had risen 3ft. and so the launches were running. We had a slight experience of the lordliness of the military men. At one of the small calling places, a petty official—he seemed like a lieutenant when he got on board, wanted to go to Changsha. He was not ready when the launch arrived, so as there was no place to moor, the launch decided to go on without the passenger. Before we had gone ten yards, two rifle bullets were fired off. I image the aim was deliberately bad, otherwise we were so close to the soldier who fired, that someone must have been wounded.
At Yungchow itself, the passing of the New Year interested me. Whereas here in Changsha, the old style of door gods are nearly gone out (I find on my return more have been pasted up than last year, there were hardly any two years ago) every house is gay with them at Yungchow. For the first three days it was the most Manchu-dynasty kind of New Year that have seen since the Revolution. By the sixth of the month, however, when I left the city, it had recovered near to normal circumstances more fully than used to be the case in a fortnight.
Changsha seems quite eventless.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.