The Chinese, once they were awakened to the possibilities of the railway, were not content to permit their country to be covered with foreign-built lines. They decided to become active participators in the movement--in other words, they acquired all the knowledge they could, and then undertook constructional engineering. Their aptitude for this work finds an excellent expression in the Pekin-Kalgan railway, 125 miles in length. This road was built throughout by Chinese effort, the engineer-in-chief being His Excellency Chang-Tien-Yow, who is to-day the foremost Chinese engineer in this field in China. He was educated in the United States, where he acquired valuable knowledge concerning this branch of engineering, and completed his training under Mr. Kinder, the builder of the oldest railway in the Celestial Kingdom. The road is excellently built, and the engineer displayed his ingenuity in coping with the problem of carrying the line through the Nankow Pass. This pass guards the entrance of the main road through the Great Wall, and to overcome the obstruction a gradient of 1 in 30 had to be introduced for a distance of 13 miles. At the foot of the pass three Mallet locomotives of British construction are maintained, and they crawl to the summit of the pass, at an altitude of about 1,500 feet, in two hours--a speed of about 6½ miles an hour. The alignment of the railway up this pass is noteworthy. The road clings for the most part to the side of the mountains, crossing deep rifts and wide clefts, as well as cutting through spurs and humps and compassing massive crags. Four tunnels were found to be unavoidable, one, 3,580 feet in length, burrowing 200 feet beneath the Great Wall. When the summit is gained, the railway enters a flat plateau, the only difficulty here, as on the flats around Pekin, being the preservation of the road from the attacks of floods. That this is no slight factor is proved from the fact that in the vicinity of Pekin a wash-out which overwhelmed the line cost no less than, £32,000, or $160,000, to repair. The completion of the work, however, offers convincing testimony that the Chinese, under competent supervision, are perfectly capable of building railways without the aid of foreigners, and that no fault can be found with their work so far as solidity and durability are concerned. For centuries the Chinese have been famed for their prowess in matters pertaining to civil engineering. At times this skill pursues a quaint course, but probably the most extraordinary illustration was in connection with the Shanghai-Nangchow-Ningpo railway. By an imperial edict a Chinese official was appointed as engineer-in-chief.