Page:Ling-Nam; or, Interior views of southern China, including explorations in the hitherto untraversed island of Hainan (IA cu31924023225307).pdf/71

 Through the Delta, 67

six crops in a year, the second and third, oceurring in May and June, being considered the best. ‘The mulberry leaves vary in price from twenty-five cents to one dollar und a half per hundredweight.

The silk cocoons, when ready to be unwound, are first plunged into hot water, and then set out to dry, afler which the silk is unwound. Hundreds of women may be seen sitting by their doors winding the gossamer threads from the cocoons, This thread is hung up in dry, airy places, until all trace of moisture disappears. Some- times, on clear. warm days, boats will be seen moving up and down the streams with rows of men and women winding off the silk, of which quantities will be sus- pended from frames along the top of the boat, that the wind blowing through may dry it. After this process it is ready for the market, and is bought up by companies and shipped to the centres of trade, a tax of one dollar per hundredweight being levied by the town corporation on all the vaw silk exported from that district. In silk culture everything is done by hand, and everything is utilised. The refuse of the silkworms and cocoons is cast. into the ponds to feed the fish, and the silkworm chrysalis, whose house has been appropriated, becomes an artiele of food, one of the delicacies of the season.

The people in the silk district. are the most conceited, turbulent, and bitterly anti-foreign, and at the same time the most enterprising of all the people in south China, An attempt was made a few years ago to introduce machinery into one of the great sitk establishments near Sai-tsin, but the place was twice mobbed within a short time and the owners compelled to remove the machinery. The