Page:The empire and the century.djvu/785

, and 214,352,467 H.Tls. as to exports, or, together, 540,691,600 H.Tls. (roughly, £70,000,000). Of the imports, 50,603,772 H.Tls. came direct from Great Britain, 33,856,203 H.Tls. direct from India, and 136,520,458 H.Tls. from Hong Kong—a very large proportion of the latter being transhipments from ports of the British Empire. As to exports. Great Britain took 10,024,095 H.Tls.; India, 1,944,043 H.Tls.; and Hong Kong, 89,195,605 H.Tls. The interest of the British Empire in the foreign trade of China amounted, therefore, approximately to over £40,000,000, or, in other words, to four-sevenths of the whole. To take only one staple of British industry, China imported, in 1908, £5,800,244 worth of British cottons. Of the 57,290,389 tons of shipping, including Chinese shipping, entered and cleared at Chinese ports in 1908, 28,122,987 tons, or nearly half, were British. Of railways built, in construction, or projected in China—though British enterprise has been heavily handicapped in this direction—concessions for 683 miles (93 already open for traffic at the end of 1904) are in exclusively British hands, and British interests are represented as to one-third in an Anglo-German concession for 810 miles of railway connecting Shantung with the Yang-Tsze Valley. Moreover, British capital and British control have a very large share in the Northern Chinese Railway system, consisting of 580 miles, already completed, of which Peking, Tientsin, and Niuchwang are the chief termini. Of the very considerable British interests already engaged in the development of the enormous mineral wealth of China, some idea may be gathered from the fact that the shares of the 'Pekin Syndicate' and its offshoot, the 'Pekin Shansi,' which have obtained important concessions for working the coal-fields and petroleum deposits of Shansi and of part of the province of Houan, stand to-day on the London Stock Exchange at quotations representing a valuation of over £2,000,000. The coal-fields of China, it must be remembered, have been estimated to be sufficient to supply