United States or Cabo Verde ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Every year for ten years the importation of British opium into China was to decrease in proportion to the decrease of native-grown Chinese opium, until at the expiration of the ten years the vanishing-point would be reached. During these ten years each side has lived up to its part of the bargain.
Transportation is expensive, and rates for a short haul on the rivers are high, out of all proportion to rates for the long haul from the outside, so that potatoes from the Pacific coast are brought in and sold in competition with the native-grown.
Of the eighteen provinces of China four only, Kiangsu, Cheh-kiang, Fuhkien, and Kuangtung use Indian opium, the remaining fourteen provinces use exclusively home-grown opium. Native-grown opium has entirely driven the imported opium from the markets of the Yangtse Valley; no Indian opium, except an insignificant quantity, comes up the river even as far as Hankow.
In the latter country the native-grown hemp and flax were again substituted for cotton, and the resulting linen paper was used considerably in Castile in the thirteenth century and thence penetrated across the Pyrenees into France and gradually all over western and central Europe.
Native-grown spun and woven silk forms such an important part in the national costumes of the people that it has attained to great perfection without attracting much foreign notice.
Word Of The Day