be in the interior? We had an opportunity to see at first hand when we began our overland trip to Hankow. A few typical towns along the route will give a picture of the general conditions.
Namyung is the last town on the Pei Kiang, or North River, northern Kwantung Province, near the Tayu mountains bordering Kiangsi Province. It is reached by boat, drawn by ropes and pushed by poles against the current for six days from Shiuchow, the present terminus of the railroad eventually to continue to Hankow. The men and women who perform this labor are strongly organized in the Water Transport Union (originally the Seamen only), and their Union controls all transport on this river. They are therefore among the better-off; they receive 40 to 60 cents a day, working from dawn until dark, and sometimes till ten o'clock at night, stopping 20 minutes twice during the day for food.
Arrived in Namyung, we are lodged as the guests of the city in the public gardens on top of the great old city walls which in former times protected the commerce that flowed here from the North thru Meiling Pass from Kiangsi. These walls, typical of Chinese cities, are still in good repair but in the era of modern artillery useless for anything more serious than parks and tea houses. In the quaint tea houses perched over the city we met a dozen trade union leaders who spent hours with us answering our interminable questions.
Here we learned a peculiarity of most Chinese inland towns; a sort of rough division of labor has, in the course of time, developed between them, so that one town makes a specialty of one line of business, another town of another line, so that almost in each town will be found an industry predominating over the others. Namyung is a tobacco town, a market center for the tobacco raised thru a large district, where it is dried, packed, and shipped to the big cities to be made into cigarettes.
These tobacco packers and shippers in Namyung number 1,300, of whom 500 are women. Their work is seasonal, lasting only six months in the year. How they live for the other six months we could not learn, but when
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