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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



THi; GIANT MIIvIvE;T F'IEII.DS OF MANCHURIA LOOK LIKE; OUR OWN PRAIRIi; STATES 



their childlike frankness and directness, 

 call them "kitchen cars" — for one may 

 dine, i. e., eat, in any and every car, but 

 you can only cook in a kitchen car. 



like; our PRAIRIL COUNTRY 



Nearly all of Manchuria that one sees 

 from the railway is covered with crops of 

 giant millet, and the short millet, which is 

 the same as our sorghum. The giant mil- 

 let, under the primitive culture employed, 

 repeats itself 3,000 times and the short 

 millet 800 times, so that even scientific 

 agriculture can teach little to the Man- 

 chus. Giant millet grows 10 and 12 feet 

 high, and can conceal a man and a man 

 on horseback. This kaoliang furnishes 

 food and fuel and distilled drink, mats 

 for the floors and for a thousand econo- 

 mies of farm life, and the stalks, daubed 

 over with clay, provide a good building 

 material. When stacked in the autumn, 

 kaoliang gives the landscape much the 

 look of our prairie country. In fact, 

 these vast flat fields of kaoliang stalks 

 need only the pumpkins and James Whit- 

 comb Riley to be exactly Indiana. 



The poppy fields of Manchuria, cov- 

 ered for solid acres with billows of soft 



pink or white blossoms, are more beau- 

 tiful than the tulip fields of Holland; but, 

 with the growing moral sense and the 

 rule of reform, the poppy must now dis- 

 appear and the ground will be given up 

 to the harmless and profitable soy bean. 

 As one journeys across the prairies of 

 Manchuria, past Haicheng, Liaoyang, 

 Shaho, and Hunho — names of burning 

 interest five years ago, when the great 

 armies were halted before Mukden — no 

 sign of war or battle remains. As far 

 as one sees are luxuriant fields of beans 

 and sorghum and newly-built houses, the 

 very newness of their mud walls sig- 

 nificent of the utter waste and desolation 

 left on that same plain when the two 

 armies had gone by. In such vast levels 

 one cannot understand how any one could 

 know, not seeing, where the battle was 

 going on or what the combatants were 

 doing — a battle-field of all-out-doors, 

 with no strategic point greater than a 

 gully. 



A CITY OP DIRT 



Liaoyang- is the oldest capital of the 

 Manchus, but the war has given Liao- 

 yang its only interest for the tourist. 



