ABSTRACT
A number of goods were economically significant to the highlanders. Making preserved vegetables or salt, gathering herbs or fungi, and mining or quarrying were handicrafts the highlanders sometimes did side by side with farming. These and other nonagrarian productive activities should have provided a livelihood for over 28 percent of the inhabitants of western Hubei, 31 percent of those of eastern Sichuan, and 13 percent of those of western Hunan. Tong oil had been used for centuries in China to mix paint and varnish for protecting wood, metal, cloth, and even paper against water and for other purposes. But foreign traders in China did not see its wide marketability until after 1895. A business as profitable as the tong oil one was bound to attract modern entrepreneurs to invest in it, to enlarge its scale of production and improve its efficiency and profit. In 1929 Yirui Corporation acquired land in Wanxian and planted 8,000 tong trees.
