This of course is only a beginning. On account of poor transportation by rail and canal, China imports about 2,000,000 tons of Japanese coal, and Hongkong and Shanghai import Australian and Welsh coal, some of it for admiralty purposes. The largest anthracite mines now open are, in their order, in Shansi, Honan, Pechili and Shangtung provinces; the bituminous as far as mined, in their order, in Pechili, Kiangsi, Shensi, Kansu, Shangtung, Szechuen, Yunnan, Kweichou, Hunan and Kwangsi provinces. Over a million tons of lignite are mined yearly in Manchuria. England has a coal supply for only one hundred and fifty years, and America’s supply will not last much longer. This means that China will step full-panoplied into the coal and iron arena with plethoric supplies which, with her population, will make her probably the world’s richest nation, in material resources, if not in brains. The first shipment of Chinese coal for America occurred in July, 1910, when the steamer _Inverkip_ called at Ching Wang Tao on the Gulf of Pechili and loaded the famous Kaiping coal for San Francisco. The British Peking Syndicate, mining anthracite coal in Shansi province, purposes to build colliers to take coal to America. Coal costs at the mines only seventy-five cents a ton, and with machinery opulent China could reduce this cost. It is a knowledge of the potentiality of this great wealth that kindled some of the fire of the October, 1911, revolution, and led the provincial assemblies of Szechuen and Hupeh to say: “China’s mines and transportation franchises shall not be passed over to foreigners.” The Peking Syndicate, mainly British, operating hard coal and iron mines in Shansi, is capitalized at $6,000,000. The Chinese Engineering and Mining Company has a capital of $5,000,000. It has for many years operated the famous Kaiping coal mines north of Tientsin. This is the company which employed Mr. Kinder, the British engineer, who surreptitiously built the “Rocket,” the first locomotive used continuously in China.