Local farmers grew cotton, and every household owned an old-fashioned spinning wheel (see Figure 1). Women spun thread, which was then woven into cloth. Farmers typically dyed the cloth black and blue in their own cooking pots before making clothes. Women also dyed the thread in various colors and used it for embroidery on women’s shoes and children’s clothes and hats, creating simple patterns with needle and thread. My grandmother was a self-taught calligrapher and painter; she could print various patterns on cloth and also provided embroidery patterns for the women in the surrounding area.

My grandmother usually used a brush to draw the desired pattern on paper. I once visited a local papermaking workshop where they chopped up wheat straw, added lime, and soaked it in water to create a soup of fine fibers. They then used a rectangular sieve to scoop up a thin layer of fibers, peeled it off, and let it dry to make a sheet of paper.

In the local rural areas, there’s a saying: “New clothes for three years, old clothes for three years, and patched-up clothes for another three years,” meaning a piece of clothing is worn for over ten years. After ten years, it’s taken apart, washed, and used to make clothes for children. Since children grow taller as they grow, the older brother wears it and then passes it on to the younger brother. Finally, when the clothes have begun to rot, they are glued together with paste to form a two- or three-millimeter-thick fabric called “laminated fabric,” which the local farmers use to make shoes.

Local farmers make a paste from cornmeal or wheat flour for their own use. They occasionally use it to paste pictures on walls and repair paper windows. They use a small iron spoon to make the paste, which can last for many days, but it quickly molds. Therefore, this paste is shared among neighbors. When they need paste, they first go to their neighbors to borrow some, asking if they have any. If they don’t have any, they make a small spoonful themselves.

Besides paste, other items shared by neighbors included less frequently used looms, mills, threshing grounds, and the aforementioned threshing yards. The usage rate of these shared facilities was also very low; my family’s mill was rarely used even on a single day. While the use of the threshing yard was highly seasonal, the other uses could be adjusted in terms of timing. In other words, with the vision of a secondary society, a flour mill or rice mill could be opened to serve the local farmers.

Judging from the farmers’ idleness during winter and rainy days, they were much like the wild deer I saw in Canada. Rural areas at that time were so wealthy in terms of manpower and resources that they didn’t consider efficiency. Farmers who worshipped their grain and tools as gods also didn’t consider efficiency, just as Western Christians don’t consider the efficiency of using God. I often saw wild deer near my home in Canada; they roamed all day, their feet on endless grasslands, rarely lowering their heads to nibble on a blade of grass.

As mentioned above, Mencius said, “If one man tills the land, a family of eight will have enough to eat.” The local farmers’ productivity was roughly the same, though this man only needed to work for about three or four months a year. A local person who once begged for a living told me: one person (male or female) begging for food for one day is enough to feed a family of four or five for two or three days. The vast majority of farmers fell somewhere in between, and their working hours were far fewer than those of today’s office workers.

As for food, the farmers grind the grain into flour, steam it into buns and cornbread in a large pot about a meter in diameter, and then put it in a basket woven from wicker, which is hung on the roof of the main room. Adults can reach in to take food, but children cannot, so this is said to prevent children from stealing food. From my observation, the local farmers do not have the habit of eating snacks, and they do not eat anything other than three meals a day, so the high-hanging food basket is to help children develop the habit of eating three meals a day.

Their diet is extensive and healthy. They mix various bean flours into millet and cornmeal, making the dough as elastic as wheat flour and increasing its protein content. They typically make porridge with cornmeal and thin porridge with millet and beans. As for vegetables, they usually cultivate gardens next to their houses and harvest them directly for the table. Only cabbage, radishes, and sweet potatoes can be stored in cellars for the winter, so winter vegetables are relatively limited, except for salted and dried vegetables.

As for housing, local farmers built single-story houses with flat roofs, which could be used to dry grains and dates. Each family had a three-room house, arranged in a row. A door in the middle led to the main hall, used for cooking and eating—essentially a dining room. On either side of this main hall were bedrooms, and the bedrooms with windows had a raised platform bed (kang) that could sleep four people. (Figure 2)

This type of house typically faces south. Depending on the family’s financial situation and size, a row of three-room houses is built on the east and west sides to serve as granaries and thatched huts, and of course, for living quarters. My family belonged to a relatively wealthy minority because my grandfather made money doing business in Tianjin and built the house back home. It consisted of four houses forming a typical courtyard house. (Figure 3, based on my house)

On the Hebei Plain, where the land is flat, farmers would take soil from the surrounding area and fill it in to create a foundation one or two meters higher than the surrounding ground. The places where the soil was taken formed ponds of varying sizes along the edges of the Hebei countryside. Reeds and willows were planted around the ponds, and the land around the ponds was cultivated into vegetable gardens. Farmers used the pond water to irrigate the vegetables; most of the vegetable leaves were edible and required more water than the crops. This pond was also where farmers bathed and where children swam; that’s where I learned to swim. There were naturally occurring fish in the ponds, and no one knew where they came from. Local farmers said, “Rainwater naturally breeds fish!” They even said that a small fish, locally called “wheat ear fish,” was spawned from grass seeds falling into the water. The ponds were also used to raise geese and crows, providing drinking water for humans and livestock. Farmers usually dug wells beside the ponds to get water.

When I was a child, that pond never dried up. But modern agriculture uses groundwater for irrigation, which means the groundwater level has dropped drastically, and we have to extract water from hundreds of meters underground for drinking and irrigation.

The local farmers’ houses are all mud-brick structures. The roofs and walls need to be re-plastered with mud mixed with wheat straw every year to prevent leaks. A few families add a layer of bricks to the outside of the mud walls, eliminating the need for annual mud plastering. These mud houses have very thick walls, at least half a meter thick, which provide insulation, keeping the house warm in winter and cool in summer. Furthermore, because the roof beams are made of local timber, the rooms are only a little over three meters wide.

As for walking, farmers have always walked. Their relatives and friends are all within a few miles, so they can walk back and forth in a day. For transporting crops, they use wooden-wheeled carts pulled by oxen or horses. These carts are made entirely of wood, even the axles. Farmers embed iron bars into the axles to prevent wear, and similarly, the wheels are surrounded by iron hoops. Local farmers also use human-powered wooden-wheeled carts, which are smaller than those pulled by oxen or horses.

At that time, all peasant women had bound feet, a practice that began in the Song Dynasty. Girls would begin binding their feet with white cloth around the age of four or five to restrict their growth, causing them to become deformed and small. As a result, women could not work in the fields or travel far. At most, they would go to the vegetable gardens near the village to pick vegetables, and during busy farming seasons, they would bring meals to the men in the fields. Therefore, when peasant women returned to their parents’ home, or for other long-distance travel, they always traveled by cart, either pulled by oxen or horses, or by human labor.

There is a river near my home that leads to the emerging city of Tianjin. Farmers can take a sailboat to Tianjin, which takes three days. My uncle once went to Tianjin to sell fireworks around the Lunar New Year in 1953. It took him five or six days to walk to Tianjin.

Before the collectivization of rural China in 1956, bicycles already existed in the local villages, but their price was similar to that of an ox, so few people used them, which was frowned upon by the local farmers. Initially, the following folk rhyme circulated in the area, satirizing and mocking those who rode bicycles:

bike,

Three ridges

There was a dung beetle sitting on it.

He didn’t avoid his father when he saw him.

There are people around, but nobody’s making any noise.

Here, the triangular iron pipes on the bicycle frame are called “three beams,” ringing the bicycle bell is called “loud rattle,” and the cyclist is cursed as a “shit beetle,” a type of beetle commonly found in the excrement of local toilets.

In short, rural life in northern China in the 1950s was still close to a primitive, natural existence, akin to that of wild animals. They faced abundant leisure time and relatively plentiful material resources, yet, influenced by animistic tendencies, they worshipped food and tools as divine entities, pushing the use of resources to an unprecedented level. For example, cooking smoke was used for heating and as fertilizer; soil from house construction was used to dig ponds for raising fish, shrimp, and geese, while the pond water was used to irrigate vegetables. Agricultural products, from grain to stalks, were entirely utilized, becoming food for humans and livestock, as well as dye for cooking; and the excrement and ash were used as fertilizer. In short, everything was recycled, leaving nothing behind and generating no waste.

Local farmers rarely travel far; even the artisans who provide pot mending services come from rural areas within a ten-mile radius. My village of three thousand people has one artisan each specializing in porcelain and blacksmithing. They travel from village to village, taking on jobs, not full-time; they spend most of their time farming. Blacksmithing includes pot mending, repairing plows and harrows, and forging new plows and harrows from melted scrap iron. Porcelain mending involves repairing ceramic objects, stitching broken ceramic bowls and pots together with nails for reuse. They also sell the ceramic bowls and pots they make themselves. Broken bricks are used by farmers to build earthen walls, mixed in with other materials. Ceramic shards are the only type of waste that doesn’t decay quickly and is difficult to reuse; they can be crushed and used as foundations, or even scattered in farmland, where they may help with soil aeration.

The amateur professionals providing services in the nearby rural areas are mostly arts and entertainment personnel, including storytellers, puppeteers, and theatrical performers. They usually rely on charity, that is, they do not ask for a price but rely on donations from the audience.

These itinerant puppeteers and storytellers attract large crowds, but I’ve observed a maximum of twenty or thirty people. Similarly, those making iron and porcelain also draw a large audience, sometimes as many as ten or so.

My village, with a population of 3,000, has two amateur opera troupes. Their rehearsals and practice sessions attract many viewers. Each year, in spring and autumn, my village holds a theatrical performance, much like the village opera described by Lu Xun. Before the performance, a chicken is sacrificed on a temporary stage. These performances attract large audiences, including people from neighboring villages, and merchants selling miscellaneous goods linger around the stage.

By the 1950s, local farmers still relied entirely on locally produced goods for their food, clothing, shelter, and transportation. Even durable stone and iron were sourced from the mountains, a hundred or two miles away. While a few urban industrial goods had entered the countryside, they hadn’t yet replaced traditional items. For example, the so-called “foreign cloth” produced by a small number of urban textile factories couldn’t immediately replace the homespun cloth. Even when most farmers switched to foreign cloth, it merely changed their everyday items; it didn’t alter their attitudes towards life or their way of life.

Only after collectivization in 1956 did the docile nature of the simple farmers become a victim of the misguided directives of social power, leading to the three-year period of widespread food shortages. A shoe factory from Tianjin came to my village demanding vegetables and fruits that were scarce in the city at the time. In return, they built a shoe material manufacturing plant for my village, using local wood to make shoe soles, and so on.

I personally heard my village officials say at a village-wide meeting: “Selling shoe materials this way will bring in money faster than robbery!”

This is the difference between the natural life in rural China and the secondary social life in cities; the latter appears as a magical robbery in the eyes of the former. For thousands of years, simple, traditional farmers have had no motivation to become robbers.

author By Dr. You-Sheng Li

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