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again there is no official and accurate statistics), there are more than 36,600 families engaged in this business. The cocoons raised amount to more than 635,680 piculs (one picul is 133.3 pounds), yielding more than 3,089,200 pounds of raw silk.

Wild silk worms feed on the leaves of various trees of the oak family. They are left out in the open, with no artificial protection or care such as the Japanese give to their cultivated worms. Naturally the climatic conditions and the exposure to sun and wind in any location chosen for the cultivation of the worms have a good deal to do with the success of tussah silk production. This is the reason why the enterprise is centered mostly at Antung, where there are more than 10,500 families, at Chuangho with 5,300, Kaiping with its 4,470 families, and Hsiuyen with 3,780 families, all engaged in the production of the wild silk. The same reasons which make these places famous for tussah silk bar out the two northern Provinces of Kirin and Amur for this particular industry. Practically the entire production of the wild silk is for export. The domestic consumption of it is less than 10 per cent. One authority puts the total production of wild silk cocoons in Mukden Province at 230,000 baskets a year, valued at about $4,000,000 in American money, of which about 70,000 baskets are credited to Antung district.

It is to Shantung that the greater part of the wild silk is exported. There it is manufactured into the familiar Shantung pongee famous throughout the world.

[graphic]

Weaving Tussah silk at the South Manchuria Railway Central Laboratory at Dairen

CHAPTER IX

FORESTRY AND FOREST PRODUCTS

THE Chinese have been chopping down their forests for more years than history can remember. They have been using wood for fuel and for building materials and a hundred other things for more than three-thousand years. Wherever and whenever Chinese population-centers shifted into virgin country they acted like a withering curse on the forest lands nearby. Shockingly baldheaded hills in sterile nudity are the dominating feature of Chinese landscapes.

There was one place where the forest stood in stately splendor-where the Chinese could not get at it. The Great and Little Khingan ranges on the northwest, north, and northeast, and the Changpai mountains in the upper reaches of the Yalu, the Tumen, and the Sungari, and the district round about Sansing happened to be just that sort of places. If Manchuria is "the Granary of Asia," she is in a more emphatic sense the treasure house of China's forest wealth.

GREAT AND LITTLE KHINGANS

In the Aigun, Wuyun, Nunkiang, Lunkiang, Hulun Districts over the Great and Little Khingan Mountains in Amur Province, one estimate puts the number of trees near five and a half billions of more than 108 billion cubic feet. No doubt more romance than scientific data must have entered into the fashioning of this estimate. Yet this is the closest thing to an official figure on the

subject; for the estimate was taken from a table prepared by the Civil Administration of the Kwantung Leased Territory. This is the greatest forest wealth of Manchuria : it takes in something like four-fifths of the total. But it should always be kept in mind that all this is in an unexplored region.

YALU BASIN

By far the most famous timber district of Manchuria is located on the right or Manchurian bank of the Yalu and on both banks of the Hun River, which flows into the Yalu. It covers the forest area of more than 3,000,000 acres with the estimated timber wealth of more than five billion cubic feet.

There are two other forest areas in Mukden Province -one that of Sungling and the other covering the mountains Tailing, Fensuiling, and Hamaling, which together are estimated to have something more than one billion cubic feet of timber.

CHANGPAI RANGE

In Kirin Province, over the Changpai range, in the upper reaches of the Sungari, the Hurka, and the Tumen rivers is the great area of more than 4,800,000 acres of forest with sixteen billion cubic feet of timber.

In the Sansing District, stretching away from the Sungari on both banks, there is the area of some 10,000,000 acres with fifteen billion cubic feet of timber.

Then there is still another rich area along the Chinese Eastern Railway, and for that reason well known to the outside world, stretching eastward from Harbin to Pogranichnaia over the Changkwangsai mountains, some 5,000,000 acres with about ten billion cubic feet of timber.

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