Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/301

Note 1.—A very different account has been given by some travellers, but it would appear that the prominence and frequency of burying-places in China have misled these observers into an exaggerated estimate of the space actually devoted to purposes of sepulture. Note 2.—In Japan the extent of cultivated land does not exceed thirteen millions of acres, whereas the population is forty-two millions. Thus, even assuming that a moiety of the land produces two crops yearly—a liberal assumption—it would follow that the ratio is not more than one-half of an acre per head. Yet in Japan there are no evidences of the grinding poverty that force themselves upon the attention of every traveller in China.

Note 3.—Dr. Wells Williams thinks that the tendency to multiply is augmented by the custom of families remaining together through several generations for the sake of the social and local importance they acquire. Cases are on record of nine generations inhabiting one house, and of a family table at which seven hundred mouths were fed daily.

Note 4.—Not really "willow," but Pterecarpa stenoptera.

Note 5.—As an example of the roads within the province of Szchuan, the highway between Chunking and Chingtu (the capital of the province) may be instanced. This, the best, in fact the only dry, road in the province has a width of five feet and is paved with heavy stone slabs laid crosswise.

Note 6.—Similar divisions exist in Japan, namely, the ken, or prefecture; the fu, or urban prefecture, and the do, or circuit. But the fu does not include several ken, being in fact merely a metropolitan prefecture (Tōkyō, Kyōtō, or Ōsaka), neither does