This railway is under way, although the debt of the Russo-Japan War has almost destroyed Russian railway building, and postponed Russia’s commercial (and other?) attack in India’s direction. Had it not been for that debt, Russia might to-day be striking for railway entrance to Peking, to Hankau, to Herat and Constantinople, as so many of the British imperialists like Kipling and Sir Gilbert Parker fear. Hongkong has at last beat out Shanghai for the trade of the great western provinces of China. Transshipment is made at Hongkong for Haiphong, where the new French railway takes merchandise five hundred miles northwest to Yunnan as a distributing center. Hongkong also has the West (Si Kiang), Yu, Hong Chu, Eta and Peh Rivers as arteries into the west. Until two hundred miles of Yangtze gorges and rapids are flanked by a railway, Shanghai must lose more and more of the vast western trade which she used to control before the French railway was built. The French finished in 1910 this remarkable railway from Haiphong to Yunnan, five hundred miles, and have thus beat out the British, who, because of Colquhoun’s books, were approaching Yunnan from three points in Burma. This railway attack on Yunnan has been a battle of two imperial minds of the Kipling imperialistic type, Colquhoun and Doumer. Colquhoun, the British governor and author, began urging the construction of British railways in 1881, and followed up his arguments with a further book in 1898. In 1897, the famous Paul Doumer, once a printer, went to French China as governor. In 1898 he began his railway to Yunnan. The line, though narrow gage, has cost $50,000 a mile, even with cheap Oriental labor. Near the coast of Tonquin the country is that of flat rice fields and only requires trestling and banking. From Hung Hoa (Bed River) to Lao Kai no fewer than 180 bridges had to be erected (a fine contract for French structural firms) to cross the wild broken country of stream, marsh, gorge and mountain pass. The line rises from sea level to a pass of 5,000 feet altitude. Much of the Yunnan tin and other exports, which, by pack saddle and shoulder load, formerly went down to Nanning and took the Yu and Si Rivers to Hongkong, are now diverted to Haiphong, from which port the French run branch ship lines to Hongkong and Saigon, connecting with the great subsidized Messageries Maritimes line to Marseilles. The French need subsidies because the foreign trade which their bankers control is not so heavy as is that of Britain and America.