Page:Chinese Pictures.djvu/36

 WHEELBARROW TRAFFIC ON THE CHENGTU PLAIN.

Chengtu Plain, with its 2,500 square miles of country and 4,000,000 population, is perhaps the best cultivated and most fertile spot in the world. It owes its fertility to the work of two engineers, who, more than two thousand years ago (250 years B.C.), designed and carried out the most perfect system of irrigation. They were Li Ping, the father, and his son, and are familiarly known to-day as the first and second gentlemen of China. The land bears four crops in the year. With all this produce and population the traffic is enormous, and it is mainly carried on by means of wheelbarrows, which are so contrived, by placing the wheel in the centre and platforms at the side and behind it, as to enable one man to wheel five hundredweight with ease. The narrow roads of the plain are covered by an almost endless procession of these wheelbarrows, which are often preceded by one man pulling in addition to the man behind.