AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS. 9 



" tsamba " which is made by roasting barley and then grinding 

 it into flour. Towards the end of my stay in Yunnan there was 

 a large increase in the acreage under wheat owing to the restric- 

 tions which were being placed on the opium crop. Other summer 

 cereals" are maize, millet and buckwheat, Maize and millet are 

 the principal crops in isolated hill tracts. Very little care seems 

 to be needed to grow them and the hill slopes around the aboriginal 

 villages are often devoted to their cultivation. I have seen no 

 oats in Yunnan but Davies mentions that he saw a crop near Ch'-ii- 

 Ching and I was told by missionaries that it is grown between Chao- 

 t'ung Fu and the Kuei-chou frontier. 



After the rice has been harvested on the plains, the fields are 

 again sown with winter crops which until the end of December 

 1907 consisted of roughly, half poppy and the other half peas, 

 beans, wheat and other products". White, yellow, green and black 

 kinds of beans of all sizes were seen. They are largely used as 

 food while the coarser kinds are dried and made into fodder for 

 cattle and mules. Certain varieties of beans are also used for 

 producing oil. Peas are obtainable anywhere throughout the winter. 

 Besides being eaten raw, they are dried and ground into a 

 flour from which a kind of vermicelli is made. This with bean curd 

 forms the chief stock in trade of the food hawkers in the cities. 



At one time poppy fields covered half the available land in the 

 province and the production of opium was the most important 

 industry. Yunnanese opium was declared by experts to be better 

 than any of the Indian kinds and smokers preferred it before any 

 other. In September 1906 the famous edict was issued from Pekin 

 which " commanded that within a period of 10 years the evils 

 arising from native and foreign opium be equally and completely 

 eradicated." In the winter of 1 907-08 I noticed that poppy was 

 still cultivated widely in Yunnan. In the early months of 1909 

 it had to all intents and purposes disappeared except in certain 

 very isolated and mountainous districts. The poppy seed used 

 to be sowti in November either on paddy land in the plains or on 

 the drier soils of the slopes, for it flourished well in both situations. 

 The poppies bloomed in March or early April and the heads were 

 ready for scoring about the end of April ; when this operation was 

 being done a white latex slowly exuded, but it soon dried to a 

 blown syrup which was scraped away and allowed to dry in the 

 sun. 



B 



