MUCH PLOWING DONE BY WATER BUFFALO
By Bob Van Leer

  (HENAN PROVINCE, CHINA, Oct. 16, 1991) - This is written on a train somewhere south of Zhengzhou, China, traveling through an intensively-cultivated farming area.
After a reasonably restful night on the train we woke and went through our morning rituals as best we could.

  Breakfast was fried rice, some kind of cured pork and mushroom soup washed down with tea. Toothpicks are slivers of bamboo.

  The area we are traveling through is flat, intensively cultivated farming country. Farming methods are quite primitive but the results are, in some ways, better than with large farm machinery. A donkey doesn't need a half acre to turn around so every tiny scrap of real estate is cultivated. They are planting winter wheat now.

  Tilling is done with a plough pulled by a donkey or an ox, sometimes two oxen. Some of the oxen actually look like the family cow. (An ox is a steer over five years old.) One man leads the animal and a second handles the plough.

  Betty saw one case where three men were pulling the plough instead of animals. Hand hoes are used for some of the work but the results are a smooth, well-tilled field.

  Grain threshing was being done in farm villages as we passed by.

  The methods are primitive. Spread out the grain on a stone covered area and beat it loose from the husks. Shovel up the grain and let the wind blow away the husks. Corn is everywhere laid out or hung up in strings of ears to dry.

Water Buffalos

  All the pictures you have seen of Chinese farms are true. As we got farther south water buffalos replace oxen. This area grows cotton as well as rice and cotton picking is being done by hand.

  Some irrigation is being done by a man carrying two buckets on a pole over his shoulder. The country is getting steeper as we go over a pass that will put us in the Yangtse drainage.

  Here rice paddies are terraced in small parcels at different elevations that would be impossible to work with large machinery. There is a rare small tractor on larger fields.

  Many are walking, not riding, tractors. The country gets greener as we near the Yangtse.

Ours First Class

  There are three types of accommodations on this train.
Ours is first class. The median level is "hard bunks" with bunks stacked three high and everything open. The lowest class is "hard seats" which would be pretty tough for a day and two nights. I was told that the price differential was 200-100-50 yuan.

  The trip is taking us through five Chines provinces, roughly equivalent to our states, and totals 1351 rail miles. We have all gone through to see the Chinese accommodations and many of them have slipped through our car to see the Americans.

  Since there are many more of them than us, we must be the monkeys in the zoo being stared at.

Yangtse River

  We crossed the Yangtse at Wuhan, a major distribution point. The Yangtse is the dividing line between north China and south China. Our host says ocean shipping can come up this far.

  It's a big river but we can't see much for the ever-present haze. A little south of the Yangtse we ran out of daylight. The water isn't safe to drink so we are kept supplied with bottled water and warm Chinese beer. Not bad, but it would be better cold.

  Dinner is usual Chinese fare and included one dish that had sections of something the size of your little finger. The sections had a backbone. Our host said it was eel but I suspect snake.

  We bedded down for a second night and by now we are getting quite disheveled.