In such calamities the Chinese, of all men on the earth's
surface, will battle along if there is any chance at all. If he is
blessed, he once more becomes a farmer; but if not, he accepts the
position as inevitable and irremediable. The Chinese race has the finest
power in the world to withstand with fortitude the ills of life and the
miseries which follow inability to procure the wherewithal to live.
Their nerves are somehow different from our Western nerves.
In China nothing is wasted, not only in food, but in everything
affecting the common life.
That a beast dies of disease is of no concern. It is eaten all the same
from head to hoof, from skin to entrail, and the remarkable fact is that
they do not seem to suffer from it, either. At Kiang-ti (mentioned in a
previous chapter) I saw a horse being pushed down the hillside to the
river. It was not yet dead, but was dying, so far as I could see, of
inflammation of the bowels. Its body was cut up, and there were several
people waiting to buy it at forty cash the catty.
From Hungay onwards I met a class of people I had not seen before. They
were the Minchia (Pe-tso).
Major H.R. Davies, whose treatise on the tribes of Yuen-nan at the end of
his excellent work on travel in the province, is probably the best yet
written, writes that he met Minchia people only on the plains of Tali-fu
and Chao-chow, and never east of the latter place.
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