Settlers poured in from the overpopulated country to the south as air rushes to fill a vacuum. An efficient Government would have seen that the windfall was exploited to the best advantage; in the absence of one it was ruthlessly looted. Precious as are trees and wood in China these great forests hardly a hundred miles from Peking were wiped out as wantonly as those of southern Brazil, as those of virgin Cuba lying in the path of advancing cane-fields. Half-burned trunks littered the hillsides; acres of fire-blackened stumps, wood that might have been turned into lumber enough to supply several provinces felled and left to rot or burn where it lay, men grubbing at slopes that had never before known the hoe were things that could not be reconciled with China. Alpine valleys filled with pink blossoms, of which cued coolies wore a cluster behind each ear, untainted mountain streams purling down across the trail, provided here and there with solid timber bridges instead of mats and branches sagging under their covering of loose earth, seemed as out of place in this part of the world as did the pungent scent of burning woodland that carried me back to a rural childhood. It was the most delightful day’s tramp in North China, and hardly once did I think of evicting my one-eyed companion from the white donkey.
But it was China after all, with many of its national characteristics. Streams of friendly, cheerful coolies climbed the defiles with their earthly possessions, consisting of a grub-ax and a few rags, ready for any task offered them, or in lieu of it prepared to gather a bundle of brush and carry it to a market many miles away; they realized that already this new land is so thickly peopled that it has no real openings for them. To see a line of men and boys, elbow to elbow, scratching one of these stony, thin-soiled, more than half-perpendicular hillsides, made the crowding of population a more living problem than a shelf of books could. There were a few pioneer shacks of split rails, but with unlimited logs and mighty boulders everywhere this imported generation of mountaineers built their huts mainly of mud, at best of unshaped stones and sticks. Burnt-log stockades surrounded many of these new homes, for you cannot break the Chinese of their habit of building walls merely by transplanting them to where walls are entirely unneeded. The Chinese birthright of the most laborious forms of labor still prevailed. Plows were home-made affairs drawn by a boy, a woman, or a donkey, and were so crude and small that the man who held them was bent double as he shuffled along. Thousands of roughly squared timbers nearly twice the size of a railroad-tie lay blackening and rotting along the trail, and every little while we met a man with two of these roped to his back picking his way down slopes rougher and steeper than any stairway disrupted by an earthquake. Goiter was more prevalent and reached more loathsome proportions in all this region than I have ever seen it elsewhere. New territory, new homes, new opportunities, all was as new as a new world, except the people, as soil- and custom-incrusted as if they had lived here a thousand years. The thought persisted that these beautiful mountains should have been left clothed in their magnificent forests instead of being enslaved to what can scarcely be called agriculture. At most they offer steep little strips of very stony patches, and the population these support is hardly worth the trees it has displaced. Human beings grubbing out an existence which hardly seems worth the effort may be seen anywhere in China; such primeval forests as have so recklessly been reduced to charred rubbish and clumps of trees only on the most inaccessible peaks and ridges behind Tung Ling are rare and precious there.