I shall say little of the Temple of Heaven, and of the Temple of Agriculture, because they are not interesting. The first especially is unworthy of the exalted name it bears. It is in an immense park surrounded with walls, in which chapels and pretty pavilions, covered with blue porcelain, are distributed, and where a subdued light penetrates through blinds composed of little tubes of blue glass placed parallel. A platform of white marble is raised in the middle of the park, and it is here the Emperor occasionally comes to offer with his own hand sacrifices to the Divinity.
The curious portion of the Temple of Agriculture and its precincts is a field where, every year, on a certain day, the Emperor, holding in his hand a plough, makes a furrow along the ground, as if to give an example to his subjects. The remainder of the field is afterwards ploughed by the mandarins. This ceremony shows how much agriculture, the principal source of the wealth of the country, is honoured in China. With their two annual harvests of corn, the Chinese succeed in providing bread at a moderate price, and by exporting their tea and their rice they draw gold into their country from all parts of the world. Their method of cultivation very much resembles the Egyptian system. They divide their fields into little squares, around which water is conducted for irrigation to all parts. This water flows from numerous canals winding through the country, and is supplied by contrivances worked by Chinese labourers like the Egyptian _shadoufs_. For the cultivation of rice the little squares are surrounded with an embankment high enough to maintain over the field a sheet of water several inches deep. The land thus disappears completely. When I visited the rice fields in the month of May, the seed, lately sown, hardly sprouted above the surface of the water.
The tea is a little shrub, a foot and a half to two feet high. The leaves are gathered from May to August, according to the species, and also according to the quality required. There are in China growths of tea as there are in France growths of wine. The nature of the soil and the different kinds of plants produce the varieties known to the trade. The most esteemed kind is known by the name of yellow tea. It is the ordinary drink of the Emperor of China and the Emperor of Russia.
