tailieunhanh - GRAVE LANDS OF CHINA

The launch had returned the passengers to the steamer at 11:30; the captain was on the bridge; prompt to the minute at the call "Hoist away" the signal went below and the Yamaguchi's whistle filled the harbor and over-flowed the hills. The cable wound in, and at twelve, noon, we were leaving Nagasaki, now a city of 153,000 and the western doorway of a nation of fifty-one millions of people but of little importance before the sixteenth century when it became the chief mart of Portuguese trade. We were to pass the Koreans on our right and enter the. | GRAVE LANDS OF CHINA The launch had returned the passengers to the steamer at 11 30 the captain was on the bridge prompt to the minute at the call Hoist away the signal went below and the Yamaguchi s whistle filled the harbor and over-flowed the hills. The cable wound in and at twelve noon we were leaving Nagasaki now a city of 153 000 and the western doorway of a nation of fifty-one millions of people but of little importance before the sixteenth century when it became the chief mart of Portuguese trade. We were to pass the Koreans on our right and enter the portals of a third nation of four hundred millions. We had left a country which had added eighty-five millions to its population in one hundred years and which still has twenty acres for each man woman and child to pass through one which has but one and a half acres per capita and were going to another whose allotment of acres good and bad is less than . We had gone from practices by which three generations had exhausted strong virgin fields and were coming to others still fertile after thirty centuries of cropping. On January 30th we crossed the head waters of the Mississippi-Missouri four thousand miles from its mouth and on March 1st were in the mouth of the Yangtse river whose waters are gathered from a basin in which dwell two hundred millions of people. The Yamaguchi reached Woosung in the night and anchored to await morning and tide before ascending the Hwangpoo believed by some geographers to be the middle of three earlier delta arms of the Yangtse kiang the southern entering the sea at Hangchow 120 miles further south the third being the present stream. As we wound through this great delta plain toward Shanghai the city of foreign concessions to all nationalities the first striking feature was the graves of the fathers of the ancestors . At first the numerous grass-covered hillocks dotting the plain seemed to be stacks of grain or straw then came the query whether they might not be huge compost .