These expeditions were elaborate affairs, contrasting strangely with Hoover's earlier experiences in America and Australia. The Chinese major-domo in charge insisted that the make-up and appearance of the outfit should reflect the high estate of the Director of Mines, so that every movement involved the organization of a veritable caravan of ponies, mules, carts, men on foot, and sedan chairs carried by coolies. These chairs were for the Director and his wife, who, however, would not use them, preferring saddle horses. But the proud manager of the expedition insisted that they be carried along, empty, to show the admiring populace that even if the strange foreign potentates amazingly preferred to ride in a rather common way on horseback they could at least afford to have sedan chairs. Imagine a prospecting outfit in the California Sierra or the West Australian bush with sedan chairs! And there were cooks and valets and cot beds and folding chairs and mosquito bed curtains and charcoal stoves and an array of pans and pots like Oscar's in the Waldorf kitchens, and often a cavalry guard of twenty-five or fifty men, superfluous but insistent and always hungry. Whether the expedition found any mines or not it was at least an impressive object lesson to the Celestial myriads that the new Imperial Department of Mines knew how to hunt for them in proper style. When Mrs. Hoover once remonstrated with one of the interpreters of the cavalcade about such an unnecessary outfit, the answer was: "Mr. Hoover is such expensive man to my country we cannot afford to let him die for want of small things."