National Geographic magazine, volume 87, no. 6 (June 1945)

Page 45

China Fights Erosion with U. S. Aid 659 In a ten-day survey we talked to refugees, some on the trek, others who had settled on new farms. One family, Mah by name, had fled the flat land of Honan because the Yellow River, whose dikes were breached as a war measure, now flows over their farm. Never before had Farmer Mah cultivated sloping land; its problems were new to him. Another refugee family by the name of Li had stopped for lunch in the shade of trees beside a clear flowing stream and were making wheat and corn bread dough for their noon­day meal as we passed. This family, includ­ing an aged grandmother, had fled Hupeh and the cruelties of the Japs. The spirit of these people moved me. I wished the refugees how fu chih, good luck. The Wang family invited us to have lunch with them, for which, of course, we paid them well, despite their protestations. They gave us millet, wild celery, fresh green leaves of trees as cooked vegetables, onion tops, and boiled eggs. We had a nourishing meal. Chopsticks were cut from slender stems of bushes near by. The hospitality of these proud people was very real and dignified. We put in a demonstration for these refugee farmers, and more than 300 came to see their first surveyed contour furrow and to learn how to make A frames and V drags, to build broad-base terraces, and to sow strip crops. Many farmers asked help to do this work (Plates XIV, XX, and page 661). Where the King River Gets Its Silt After Siking our next objective was the loessal highlands out of which the King River draws its water and heavy loads of silt. We crossed the Wei River in our station wagon on the railway bridge that now serves both carts and automobile traffic. Guards close off highway vehicles when a train is coming. We drove across the loess plateau where it is a vast undulating country lying beautifully for large-scale farming and the application of soil- and water-conservation measures. Pass­ing the divide, we dropped by steep grades into the King Valley to Pinhsien, where dates grow large and persimmons good; thence up to Ping-liang, which we made the center of a number of field studies. After a breath-taking climb up Liu Pan Shan and down again, we reached Hwakialing, 7,500 feet altitude, a small village at the junc­tion of the highways that connect Tienshui, Siking, and Lanchow. The China Travel Service keeps an inn there that offers simple but ample accommodations to the many pas­sengers who must make an overnight stop. The country about Hwakialing had special meaning for us. The line of cultivation, which began more than 30 centuries ago in the allu­vial plain about Siking, reached this high ele­vation only about 100 years ago, and the lands have suffered little from soil erosion (Plate II). This area lies in the spring wheat belt, where only summer crops, such as spring wheat, millet, buckwheat, and rape seed, can be grown. About Hwakialing we found remnants of the original grassland. Forests never blanketed this part of China. The rolling stretches of this remarkably fertile wind-blown soil prob­ably once looked much like the Palouse grass­lands on the loess of eastern Washington State and Oregon. But the loessal lands of America have been cleared of grass and cultivated for only about a half century. Farmers Fight Erosion by Benching The Chinese farmer long ago developed the remarkable practice of benching his land to safeguard it from erosion (Plate XII). These bench terraces give landscapes of the loessal highlands a fantastic and unreal appearance. This measure as it has been applied has not been sufficient to prevent serious erosion dam­age in places, yet it has sufficed in others. We found benching across slopes to be in accord with sound principles of soil and water conservation. In fact, we have made use of the principles in our American program. But this excellent principle, to be applied effec­tively, calls for exact layout with engineering instruments and for other supporting measures of contour channels and strip crops. We com­bined these features in the three demonstra­tion projects set up in the course of our field work at Tienshui and out of Siking. From the studies of land use about Hwa­kialing we continued our way through fan­tastic country as we dropped down into the Yellow River Valley at Lanchow, the capital of Kansu Province. This center of China's new frontier, the Northwest, became our head­quarters for a number of surveys in the vicin­ity, to the Corridor and to the Tibetan grass­lands about Koko Nor (Tsing Hai). Lanchow is a center of Industrial Coopera­tives. When the Japanese invaded the coastal areas, they seized or destroyed about 90 per cent of China's factories. Chinese workmen loaded tools and machine parts on their backs and transported enough to Free China to keep up a supply of small arms and other necessary war materials sufficient to hold off the enemy. These small enterprises gave rise to Industrial Cooperatives.* * See "China Opens Her Wild West," by Owen Lattimore, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, Sept., 1942.