SINO-MONGOLIAN FRONTIER 
timber, large or small, if they can get a good price, 
and as young pines are in continual demand for 
rafters and small beams in building operations, 
the young trees are ruthlessly cut down, leaving 
the once-smiling hillside denuded of spinneys and 
copses—weary wastes of trampled under-brush, 
dotted over with stumps, and littered with lopped 
off branches and bark slivers. 
Once while spending a week in the wooded 
area of Shéng-yeh in the hills west of T’ai-yiian 
Fu, I made a rough estimate of the number of 
young pines that were daily being taken out to be 
sold in T’ai-yiian Fu for rafters. Two hundred 
donkeys and mules, carrying on an average 
thirty sapling pines apiece, passed our camp each 
day. This had been going on for a month, and 
would go on for another, so that about three 
hundred and sixty thousand young trees were 
cut down in that district alone that summer. 
There is no reason why the rafters should not 
have been cut from stout planks of large timber, 
leaving the young pines to attain a reasonable size 
before being cut down. This instance serves to 
show the utter thriftlessness and waste of Nature’s 
resources indulged in by the Chinese in regard to 
their timber supplies. It is strange that such 
should be the case with the Chinese, who in other 
respects get the very most out of the soil they 
cultivate; but this sad state of affairs must be 
attributed to bad government, rather than to 
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