Chapter 2933: Tianjin Wei (12)

Han Zhaoxian bowed at once, hands at his sides, and answered respectfully: "Your junior obeys. I shall attend Master Li well on his tour."

Even as the words fell, Xu Guangqi instructed the servants at his side: "Bring that wheelchair here."

In a moment two servants came pushing a wheelchair: the frame forged of fine iron, the seat, the back, and the armrests all woven of close-worked rattan — light and steady of build, the pattern novel and ingenious.

Li Luoyou's eyes fell on it, and his heart gave a violent leap; no small astonishment showed in his face.

The form of that chair, its frame, the workmanship of rattan joined to iron — he could not have known it better: it was plainly the very model that Liu Dalin rode daily in Lingao!

He had assumed it something the Australians made specially for Liu Dalin; never in ten thousand thoughts had he imagined that Xu Guangqi had procured one early at Gegu as well!

He pressed down the surge within; his face never moved a hair.

Ah, but this was Tianjin Wei — Australian enterprises lay scattered here like stars in the sky, Australian goods lay heaped in every hollow; that Xu Guangqi should have one was no great wonder.

Seeing Li Luoyou's gaze fixed upon the chair, Han Zhaoxian said: "It was custom-made in Lingao. Light and easy to push, no labor in it; along the river or the dikes it rolls gently, without jolt. If walking wearies you, sir, you are welcome to ride and rest."

Xu Guangqi nodded slightly. "The clever thought of Australian craftsmen — an ease for the old and the weak in their going. We need not stand on common ceremony; walk and view as the heart pleases. Beside a small sedan or a carrying chair, it is a good deal handier." He shook his head. "My breathlessness is somewhat better now, but a long road is beyond me. Were it not for this chair, I fear half of these farms I should never see at all."

Li Luoyou said quickly: "That the Grand Secretary toils so for the state, giving his all even to the last breath — this junior's admiration is boundless."

Xu Guangqi waved a hand, would hear no more such polite talk; he gave the single word "Let us go," and, leaning on his bamboo staff, led the party out the back gate of the station yamen.

Behind the gate lay a little open ground planted round with willows and poplars. It was late spring; the willow switches had deepened to full green and hung down like curtains of jade, one after another. On the open ground a few colonists were sunning their farm tools; at the sight of Xu Guangqi they set their work down at once and stood aside with hands low, calling out, with the fullest respect, "Grand Secretary." Xu Guangqi nodded to them, said no more, and walked straight off eastward along the field-paths.

Li Luoyou followed behind him, Han Zhaoxian attended at the side, and Saoye and Chen Yujie brought up the rear. The two chair-pushing servants rolled the empty chair along behind the party, the wheels murmuring faintly, a soft hiss on the earthen road.

The field-paths were not broad — two might walk abreast and no more. The surface was paved with crushed brick and rubble, rammed solid, hard underfoot, taking no mud. On either hand ran trim ditches, the water moving slowly; one could see the pebbles at the bottom and the small fish swimming. Moss grew on the ditch slopes, green and velvety, as if each channel had been bordered with a strip of kingfisher jade.

So they walked slowly along the paths. Xu Guangqi did not go fast — every few steps he must halt and take breath — but his spirit was high, and all the way he talked without pause for Li Luoyou's benefit: when this field had been opened, what variety that field was planted in, when this channel had been cut, how many mu that sluice could water. His voice was not loud, but steady and sure, neither hurried nor slow, like some old farmer chatting over his own crops, with contentment and pride in it. Han Zhaoxian, for his part, only smiled faintly as he kept at the side.

"...This field was opened the first time this old man came to Tianjin, in the forty-first year of Wanli." Xu Guangqi stopped and indicated a stretch of paddy on his left. The paddy ran to a hundred mu or so, square and trim, its bunds straight as drawn lines; the water lay still as a mirror, holding the reflections of the clouds. The seedlings were already set out, row upon row, rank upon rank, even as if ruled with a measure, their tender green tips lifting their heads above the water, swaying gently in the breeze.

"In those days this was still a stretch of alkali waste," Xu Guangqi said, his gaze resting on the paddies as if on something very, very far away. "White as frost, like a fall of snow. You stepped on it and it went crack-crack; the skin of the ground was hard as brick. Never mind crops — even tumbleweed and reeds grew thin and scattered. The local people called such land 'alkali scab': save the salt-enduring wormwood, whatever you planted in it, died."

Li Luoyou followed his gaze, imagining that flower-white waste turned into the green paddies before his eyes, and admiration rose unbidden in his heart.

"This old man threw up dikes and cut channels, and led the water of the Haihe in to wash the alkali away," Xu Guangqi went on, his tone level, as of a quite ordinary thing. "The first task was to open the trenches and set out the channels. The land was first ruled into squares of mu; small furrows were dug along the field edges, running at the head of the land into great channels, and these joined outside to the Haihe — so that fresh water could be led in, and the salt water led away. The field surface must besides be shaped high at the center and a little lower at the sides, so that no standing water pockets in the field; for wherever water stands, the alkali beneath climbs the more.

"The first step is to bring in water and wash the salt. Flood the fields deep with river water and let them soak, so that the salt savor in the soil dissolves into the water; then open the trenches and let every drop of the muddy brine run away. This leaching must be done twice or three times over, to carry off first the greater part of the alkali floating in the surface soil.

"After the washing you must not hasten to sow; the land must be plowed deep and the clods given to the sun. Break the surface to a good foot and more of depth; turn the alkaline topsoil down to the bottom and the raw subsoil up on top, and so leave it open to blaze in the sun a month and more. For one thing, the sun burns off the alkali frost at the surface; for another, it bakes the hardened soil crumbly and breathing — else the ground stays hard as stone, and the seedlings can drive down no roots.

"Next comes earthing and silting, and manuring to feed the land. Dig river mud and pond mud close at hand and spread it on the fields, or cart in soil from elsewhere and lay it on thick, to press down the alkali breath beneath and keep it from rising. Work in some river sand and furnace ash to break the clay-heavy temper of the ground; then spread rotted manure, straw, and spoiled grass in plenty, and slowly rear the soil thick and soft, tempering the salt savor away.

"Even when the land has been reared to this point, you dare not sow wheat or grain at once; the planting must go forward by steps. In the first year put in reeds and barnyard grass, which best endure the alkali — with the flooding they press the salt further down and bind the field soil; in the second year, rice, for with water covering the field the year round the salt cannot climb, and besides the harvest the straw returned to the field fattens the land; when the third year comes and the salt has settled, rice and wheat may alternate, and by degrees the field is worked as any ordinary good farmland.

"Weightiest of all is what follows: year after year, keep the channels diligently cleared, water shallow and drain often, and always keep the fields blanketed with straw and cut grass against the sun, so that sun-heat and evaporation do not lift the alkali breath from below. So long as the channels do not clog, the furrows are not abandoned, and the manure does not run short — an alkali waste will stay good farmland forever."

On these bare twenty qing of land, the heart's blood spent before and behind admits no adding. To speak plainly: to reclaim one mu of salt waste costs more thought and sweat than ten years of quiet farming on settled land. Trenching, washing, turning, sun-curing, mudding, manuring — not one step may be shirked, not one season spared.

He raised his hand and swept it over the channels and the villages near and far, and went on with a sigh: "Happily, Tianjin Wei is itself a hub of water and road — merchants gather here from south and north, ships converge upon it, and the market lanes swarm with people. Where men are many and beasts are many, the dung of men and beasts, the firewood stubble and furnace ash, the market's waste and refuse of every kind all gather in plenty; collect it all, rot it into compost, lay it on the land — and it barely suffices for these great stretches of alkali field. Put the same work in some out-of-the-way countryside, thin of people, and I fear even the manure to bed and feed the fields could not be raised at all.

"There is one further great advantage. Each year the Canal is dredged on its schedule, and the black fertile silt lifted from the riverbed is brought here boatload by boatload to blanket the fields. A layer of river mud pressed upon a layer of alkali earth — it holds the alkali breath below from climbing back up, and renews the land's strength besides. Only so, by slow stewing, was this waste strand brewed into good farmland able to bear the five grains."

Li Luoyou gazed over the linked web of channels and the fields new-made from waste, and his heart was full; only now did he understand: Xu Guangqi's farming and soil-reclaiming at Gegu stood not on knowledge of husbandry and mastery of water alone — it borrowed besides the situational gifts of Tianjin Wei, its multitude of people, the convenience of the Canal. Want any one of them, and the whole would fail.

"Though the place itself is favored, without the Grand Secretary's laboring of heart and blood, I doubt today's accomplishment could have been."

"Not so! In the telling of it, this old man was only the one who led. For work to be done, the flame rides high when many hands gather the firewood. And in fact, at the start we made ourselves something of a joke." Xu Guangqi's eyes shone, as if he were living again through those former years. "When we first came here to break the land, manure came easily, and fearing the newly won soil was too lean, we laid the fertilizer on too thick. The rice we planted grew nothing but leaves."

At this he laughed himself. There was no bitterness in the laugh — only the open-heartedness of a man who has been through it, and the self-mockery besides.

"Afterward this old man went to the field-master Sun Biao and the old farmer Han Jingbo to ask, and only then understood — land too rich will not do either; the measure must fall just right. Truly a case of not knowing the five grains apart! Half a lifetime over books, and unable even to plant — shame enough and to spare."

"And afterward?" asked Li Luoyou.

"Afterward? The second year we changed to two dou of hempseed cake to the mu — no more, no less, just the thing. That year each mu brought in eight dou, and the business may be counted a success at last." So saying, Xu Guangqi crouched, dug up a clod of earth with his hand, crumbled it, held it beneath his nose and breathed it in, then passed it before Li Luoyou. "Master Li — smell it. What savor has this soil?"

Li Luoyou took the pinch of earth and held it near. It was damp, bearing a faint raw tang — neither salty nor acrid; rather, it had that clean fragrance peculiar to newly turned soil.

"The alkali savor is gone," he said.

"The alkali savor is gone." Xu Guangqi repeated his words, rose, and clapped the soil from his hands. "That is the hardest thing of all to come by. This soil, twenty years ago, was alkali waste where not a blade of grass grew. Smell it now — it yields nothing even to the soil of Jiangnan."

As he said it his eyes flashed light, like a man watching his own child grown to full stature — a heart's joy no effort could hide.

"One shi?" Li Luoyou was somewhat taken aback. He had seen the harvests of the Jiangnan paddies: even the finest water fields yielded but two shi or so. That this northern alkali land, opened no more than a handful of years, should bring in a full shi was already a rare mark of success.

"One shi was the figure of the first years," Han Zhaoxian supplied at the side. "Afterward, as the land grew riper with each season, and with the wet-dry rotation and the heavy manuring, the best fields have brought in above a shi and a half. The ordinary fields run between one shi and one shi and a dou or two."

Xu Guangqi nodded and went on: "Here this old man has tried the wet-dry rotation — rice and cotton in turns, rice and wheat in turns; all have been tried. Three years of cotton, one of rice: the grass roots rot away, the soil grows fat, and the insect blight lessens. The method has long been used along the Yangzi; this old man only carried it north — and it answers here well enough."

(End of chapter)