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also reported, had tried their hands at it just before the Russo-Japanese war-time. Since the Russo-Japanese War the Okura-gumi interests of Tokyo have entered the field and are working it in co-operation with Chinese interests. Like the Anshan deposit, the Miaoerhshan ore-field has both rich and poor ores. The richer ore deposit shows iron from 68.09 to as high as 70.69 per cent., manganese 0.24 to 0.28, sulphur 0.02 to 0.15, phosphorus 0.02, and water 0.3 to 1.3. The poorer ore shows iron from 34.5 to 37.78 per cent., manganese from 0.13 to 0.17, sulphur 0.005 to 0.049, and water 0.40 to 0.55. In 1919 the ore mined amounted to more than 106,000 tons. Since then, with the sudden fall of the price of iron and steel, the mining operations have slowed down considerably.

Besides these, there are a number of minor iron-fields in South Manchuria. One field some twenty-five miles east of Liaoyang is now being worked as a Sino-Japanese enterprise capitalized at 1,000,000 yen. It is also known that there are some iron deposits along the Yalu in the northeastern corner of South Manchuria. Some of these minor iron-mines have been and a few are being worked by the natives by an old primitive method of theirs, smelting the ore with wood fires. The products are just about enough to make farm implements, pots for the farmers' wives, and a few other things needed about the village. Many of these small native iron works have been put entirely out of business since the coming of the modern establishments.

OTHER MINERALS

Quite extensive copper-fields exist in Kirin and Mukden Provinces. More than 6,980 acres of the copperfields in Kirin Province have been given out in concessions. The copper-acreage of the Province of Mukden

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covered by concessions is 2,259. Of the copper-fields of Kirin Province that of Tienpao-shan, situated a little to the south of the highway from the city of Kirin to Chutzechieh, is perhaps the best known. The field is nearly two miles in length. It was opened by a Chinese in 1891, and is being worked now as a Sino-Japanese joint enterprise.

Whenever China thinks of wealth it is in terms of silver. She is one of the greatest consumers of it. It is rather singular, therefore, to see how little of that metal she produces out of her own soil. And Manchuria is no exception in this matter. There is a small quantity of silver, which comes with copper and lead, in the southern portion of Kirin Province; but it is nothing to raise one's voice about. Outside of that one can hardly see silver at all. There is a little lead in Mukden Province, a small quantity of antimony and manganese, as well as talc, mica, asbestos, fluorspar, sulphur, nitre, feldspar, silica, and graphite. Recently a considerable deposit of magnesite was found near Tashihchiao. But Manchuria has nothing much to complain of when she considers her wealth in the Fushun coal-field and the promise that is locked up in her iron-fields. For these minerals are the two missionaries of civilization. Empires have been built upon them largely; and they have ever been the foundation of commercial dominion in the world.

OIL FROM SHALES

Then there is another mineral product, and it gives promise of overshadowing even her two great basic minerals, iron and coal. Petroleum does not spout out of oil-wells in Manchuria, but her store of oil shales is quite enough to make the Chinese abacus dizzy. Though that is a sweeping statement, the deposit at Fushun makes

it look rather modest if anything. The amount is esti mated at 5,500 million tons.

It was the South Manchuria Railway Company which found the way to work the low-grade iron-ore at Anshan at a profit, which achievement has a lot to do with the economic life and destiny of Japan for many trying years just ahead of her. And it is the same South Manchuria Company which has turned its attention to the shale deposit at Fushun. After many tests and experiments, and as the result of them, the company is confident that it can get 79,000,000 gallons of oil a year by working daily 2,000 tons of shale through the mill. If realized, this means the solution for a most trying problem for Japan.

Ways of taking oil out of shale have been known of old, but the business has proved a failure commercially wherever it has been tried, except in Scotland. There the work has been carried on for over seventy years at a profit. Before the war the cost of extracting the oil from a ton of shale in Scotland was $2. At that there was a profit of 80 cents a ton to be made. The Scotch shales yield on an average less than thirty gallons of oil to a ton of shale. That is far less than the yield of the American shales, which varies between forty and fifty gallons. Yet very few people bothered about the shales in the United States, for the sane and sufficient reason that it is so easy to get oil out of the ground—much cheaper than getting it out of shale. An experiment was indeed tried near De Beque, Colorado, with a Scotch shale-retort of the Henderson type, but it did not work out very well. Not because there was anything wrong with the idea or the plant, but because the shale from that particular section happened to fuse in the process of carbonization and stuck to the retort. An estimate of actual working costs of refining shale was made in the United States not long ago, based on a small plant costing about $220,000 and handling about 90,000 tons of

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