China by Harry Alverson Franck — Read

In October I left my family in Peking and set off on a two months' journey into the northwest. Yet the first part of this trip took me hundreds of miles south, on the railway from the capital to the Yang-tze River. Again I found the trains crowded with rowdy soldiers whose only tickets were their rifles and bayonets. From the windows I saw, besides millions of grave-mounds, thousands of smaller piles of earth of the same shape. These consisted of rich top-soil that was to be spread over the fields before they were planted again. Men and donkeys were plowing; sometimes a man and a donkey, or a cow and a donkey, were hitched together. Women who sat on tiny stools to spare their bound feet pulled up peanuts and put them in funnel-mouthed baskets. Great quantities of peanuts are grown in China. Some of them are miserably small, but American missionaries introduced the Georgia goober some years ago, and now those excellent peanuts are sold everywhere. I once heard of an American lady who sent her son in China a big bag of peanuts for Christmas. She did not know that peanuts are much more plentiful and far cheaper there than at home, or she might have sent popcorn instead, for there is none of that in China.

Not very far south of Peking I turned westward on a narrow-gauge railway built by the French. On this, soldiers without tickets did not ride, because the ticket-takers were Frenchmen or Belgians who were not afraid of them. This railway runs through a very rocky, mountainous region into the province of Shansi, which means "west of the mountains," just as Shantung means "east of the mountains. " Most Chinese names for places, which look and sound so queer to us, are just as simple as that when they are translated.