X.
IN THE SHANTUNG PROVINCE.
On May 10th we left Shanghai by one of the coastwise
steamers for Tsingtao, some three hundred miles farther
north, in the Shantung Province, our object being to keep
in touch with methods of tillage and fertilization,
corresponding phases of which would occur later in the season
there.
The Shantung province is in the latitude of North Carolina and Kentucky, or lies between that of San Francisco and Los Angeles. It has an area of nearly 56,000 square miles, about that of Wisconsin. Less than one-half of this area is cultivated land yet it is at the present time sup- porting a population exceeding 38,000,000 of people. New York state has today less than ten millions and more than half of these are in New York city.
It was in this province that Confucius was born 2461 years ago, and that Mencius, his disciple, lived. Here, too, seventeen hundred years before Confucius' time, after one of the great floods of the Yellow river, 2297 B. C, and more than 4100 years ago, the Great Yu was appointed “Superintendent of Public Works” and entrusted with draining off the flood waters and canalizing the rivers.
Here also was the beginning of the Boxer uprising. Tsingtao sits at the entrance of Kiaochow Bay. Following the war of Japan with China this was seized by Germany, November 14, 1897, nominally to indemnify for the murder of two German missionaries which had occurred in Shantung, and March 6th, 1898, this bay, to the high water
