FORESTS AND TIMBER TRADE OF THE CHINESE 



EMPIRE. 



By R. Rosenbluth, M. F., 



Director or Forest Investigations, New York State Conservation 



Commission. 



[This report was written in the winter of 1909-10, based on extensive 

 studies made for the Philippine Government, with the purpose of ascertain- 

 ing conditions in China, and of developing there a market for Philip- 

 pine timbers. In some respects, especially market prices, it may be behind 

 the times.] 



"It is the duty of the sovereign to protect the forests!" 



Mencius, the great Chinese lawgiver and philosopher, 300 years 

 before Christ, wrote this ; and perhaps, therefore, the Chinese may 

 have been the first people to recognize the duty of the State in 

 junction has been observed mainly in the breach. Just when the 

 connection with its forests. But for some centuries past the in- 

 wholesale destruction of forests in China began is hard to say. 

 Marco Polo, in his wonderful, and truthful description of his 

 travels about the year 1300 A. D., notes great forests on moun- 

 tains now barren and deeply eroded. There is some evidence to 

 show that the most serious and widely spread destruction and 

 annihilation of the mountain forests took place in the troubled 

 times of the 17th century, when finally the Manchu conquerors 

 seized control of the government. This, however, I have in no 

 way verified. 



At the present the destruction of forests is for the most part 

 completed and the effects have been most disastrous. There is 

 no other country which teaches so thoroughly the lesson of the 

 influence of forests on soil and waterflow ; for here, for thousands 

 of years the many extensive mountain ranges in the South, and 

 plains and mountains in the North have been deforested; desert 

 conditions and appalling floods in the rivers are the result.* 



The rivers run always muddy with the yellow "loess" soil, 

 carrying enormous masses of fertile earth to the sea, assisted by 



*For a brief but graphic description of these conditions, see H. Mayr, 

 "Fremdlandische Wald- und Parkbaume," 1906. 



