Name/Title
StereographEntry/Object ID
2023.055.3.0310Description
A black and white stereograph. Image is of two men using a saw to cut blocks of wood. Above the image "T539 (Star)" is printed, below the image "23980 Primi(unreadable) Lumber Sawing in Peiping, China." is printed, to the left of the image "Keystone View Company COPYRIGHTED Manufacturers MADE IN U.S.A. Publishers" is printed, to the right of the image "Meadville, Pa., New York, N. Y., Chicago, Ill., London, England." is printed. On the reverse the following is printed:
23980
SAWING LUMBER BY HAND IN A LUMBER YARD ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF PEIPING, CHINAG
In China there are no great forests form which to make lumber such as we know in America. The few logs avaliable are ripped out with a crude hand saw like the one we see in use here. Labor in China is so cheap that it is more economical to employ such a primitive method than it is to use modern machinery. Moreover it is said that in places where machinery has been installed, the coolies have destoryed it becuase it deprived them of their jobs; a simple and effective way of forestalling unemployment. Because of the scarcity of lumber, other materials are much more generally found in buildings. Stone, brick, mud, and bamboo, all are extensively utilized, the last two, because of their cheapness, being most commonly used by the mass of people. The brick piled upon this lumberyard in the outskirts of Peiping are of the kind ordinarly employed in the city, and in northern China generally, for the more permanent types of construction.
The almost innumerable palaces, temples, shrines, tombs, and other magnificient memorials of the city's imperial past are, of course, constructed of more durable and infinitely more costly and beautiful materials than those to which the multitude resort for their short-lived buildings. The superb examples of Chinese architecture scatterd throughout the Tartar City and over a wide circuti around it, particualry those of the Forbidden City, which have been famed in the Western world ever since the days of Marco Polo, are built in large part of marbles, precious metals, and semi-precious stones, bronzes, gilded and painted tiles, rare imported woods, and other materials whose aggregate value is utterly beyond computation. The ruin into which many of thse matchless structures are fallin is one of the deplorale results of China's present era of anarchy and bloodshed.
Copyright by Keystone View CompanyCollection
Photograph Collection