They will raise surprising crops of vegetables on a sand pile.

They waste nothing.

What is rubbish to a Christian, a Chinaman carefully preserves and makes useful in one way or another.

He gathers up all the old oyster and sardine cans that white people throw away, and procures marketable tin and solder from them by melting.

He gathers up old bones and turns them into manure.
In California he gets a living out of old mining claims that white men have abandoned as exhausted and worthless--and then the officers come down on him once a month with an exorbitant swindle to which the legislature has given the broad, general name of "foreign" mining tax, but it is usually inflicted on no foreigners but Chinamen.