A Chinese Farm.

Manawatu Herald, 30 December 1900, Page 3

A Chinese Farm.

The •• Post's " special correspondent writes :— The time of the year was late autumn, when the kao-liang had been cut and the grain nearly all threshed stored. In this district it had «been a prosperous year, and nearly every house had a full store of grain. On many of the threshing floors the grain was still spread out after threshing, one thresher being a stone roller, and around were stacks and bundles of straw, piles of yellow Indian-corn cobs, and sheaves of kao-liang, with perhaps a layer ot peanuts spread out to dry. In fact, the likeness to an ordinary farm scene such as we know in New Zealand is startling. Here and there we saw the farmer winnowing his seed by throwing it up against the wind in the immemorial way ; and the two round stones of the Scriptures, between which the grain was ground, were the common objects of every house. The fields were always small compared with the paddocks of the colonies, a strip of young wheat would alternate with a strip of kaoliang stubble, or perhaps a ploughed field would intervene. There were no hedges, no fences, no barbed-wire. The Chinaman just places a stone at the corner of his land— recalling the prohibition against removing a neigh - bours's land mark— and if in wet I weather the traveller on the road r - through his field encroaches on his land the owner just digs a trench or two at right angles to the road, and waits to see that traveller's cart bo«ed.