The daily morning journal and courier., 1894-08-03
CHINESE RAILR0ADING.
Notes of an Intelligent Traveller. tyrank Carpenter in tho st. Louis Globe
 Demoorat,l

The first railroad In china was ron Shanghai to woosung. distance oi
 about twelve miles. woosung is the
 bar at the mouth of the Whampoa river, and this road did big business till some of the Chinese thought it was injuring their luck. and they com plained to the authorities, The ofti- cials bought the road at high price from the foreigners owned it. and threw the locomotive. which they said contained a devil. into the river.
 Some of the rails are still left. and it
 may be that the road will be again
 built in the future. One thing is very certain. and that Is the moment the Chinese learn that they can make and run roads of their own their supersti-
 ton will not stand in the way of mak- Ing them. and many of the officials are experimenting to see what they can do. saw a locomotive which had been re- gently built by the Chinese machinists at the Kiagnan arsenal. near Shang- hal, and 1t runs as we'll as any of our engines was shown railroad iron mean steel rails-which they had made there with Chinese iron, and there seems to be no doubt but that they can manage rolling mill very
 we'll There Is vast deal of waste now, 1t Is true. and this will continue as long as the work Is done by the of- hcials, who expect to get a big living out of their stealings; but 1t will be different when factories of this kind
 rf A1 .n.lxta NA ns.NA -l
 Just now the chief movements in the direction of railroads are from the government. and the idea Is to render China impregnable In case of war. This Is the purpose of the viceroy here. He hates the foreigners. and he wants to drive them out of the country. He Is using them to build factories and he has a cotton mill run by steam and filled with modern machinery. which is one of the largest in the world. It contains a thousand looms, and 1t is To- cated on the banks of the Yangtse. in the city of Wuchang. It Is now mak- ing money. am told, and 1t Is profit ing off the rise in foreign cottons through the fall in the value of silver
 Speaking of extravaganza In rail- road building. doubt whether there has ever been erected a more costly plant than. that which is now being building of cars, the making of rails and the turning out of full equipment for the line (which Is at some future time to run from here to Peking. The works are being put up by Belgians as foremen, and about fifty high-priced men are now employed here on sala- ries. I visited the works yesterday. They are located at the foot of a hnl just above the mouth of the Yangtse Kiang. Accompanied by the Ameri- can consul and Mir. Burnett. an Ameri- can who has lived here for thirty years in the center of China, rode in long Chinese boat, sculled by a ragged haired Celestial, up the Yangtse banks under the shadow of the Hankow wharves. We passed thousands of boats loaded. with all sorts of freight, from Standard oil cans and cotton bales to baskets of oil, boat loads of peanuts, rafts of poles with bamboo houses upon them, and through hun dreds of great junks of white pine. sometimes oiled to rich yellow and in other cases black with age Every wharf was filled with workers, and the coolies, with great loads on their backs, swarmed up and down them like gigan- tic ants. The men on the boats and on shore grunted or sang as they worked, and the air was filled with noise as great and as undistinguishable as that of the Tower of Babel at the time of fln >f Hankow, we reached the ship-building yards of Hanyang, where men perched in little bamboo huts, built upon four poles at least fifty feet above the ground were twisting ropes of plait-
 ed bamboo. Each hut was not more than four feet square, and was just large enough to contain the ropemaker,
 who twisted at the coil which lay in
 beneath. Here and all. along the rings within the poles on the ground
 banks of the river there were hun dreds of bamboo huts, many of them no larger than the top of canvas covered wagon, and of exactly the same shape. NThese were the homes of some of the poorest of the million of Hankow and of many beggars. | stopped and photographed some of these as we went by, much to the con- sternation of their owners, who ran from the camera and called me @ for eign devil at the top of their voices.
 One attempted to grab my camera, but gave him shove backward and Jumped into the boat. Similar cries greeted us as we landed at the wharf, where score of Chinese coolies were unloading the great ingots of steel which have been brought here from Europe to make the first rails and to use until the Chinese shall be able to turn out their own steel from their own Iron. Other coolies were unloading thousands Of bushels of coke, also from Europe, and this carrying of steel in- gots, coke and machinery has been so- ing on for months. One of the ships on which sailed op my way up the river had about one hundred tons of these ingots, and it's hold was packed with big boxes of heavy machinery. It carried two thousand bushels of coke. and the captain told me he sell dom made a trip without a lot of mate rial for the Hankowl rolling mill. Money, in fact. has been flowing out here almost as fast as the current of the Yangtse river, and the viceroy has spent somewhere between five ana ten million dollars already. The evil | dences are apparent that he, will have to spend q number of millions more be- fore he gets through, and at the pres ent rate of extravagant mistakes he |