CHAPTER X

MINING AND MINERAL WEALTH

IN the days of Tai-Hao, at least 3,000 years before Rome was even a village-just about the time when Cheops was building his first Pyramid at Gizeh-the Chinese had metal coins. That is, if you put your faith in the chroniclers of the Middle Kingdom. Toward the close of Hsia Dynasty, about 1990-1818 B.C., the Chinese had three kinds of coins, yellow, white, and red, or as we should say in our modern lingo, gold, silver, and copper coins. They were not imported: the metals had been mined from Chinese soil.

Mining, as almost all enterprises answering basic lifeneeds, was an old, old story in China. The reigning family almost always had a monopoly over mines of all sorts. This was based on the venerable doctrine, hoary as the divine right of kings, that "the profit of mountains and rivers under the heavens" should be the exclusive possession of the sovereign. The Chinese thought it bad for the common people to take to mining, because whenever and wherever a mine is opened there was bound to be a gathering of all sorts of adventurers and sinners excited with greed, as the openings of treasure trove have proved in the story of man. A famous minister of Emperor Yuan of the Han Dynasty opposed the opening of mines on three grounds: it makes people shift from farms to mines to the detriment of agriculture, it offends and obstructs the spirit of Wind-and-Water, and it encourages the wanton felling of forests, bringing about floods and droughts.

Still all the king's ministers and all their wisdom did not keep the Chinese from going right ahead to dig out the buried wealth. In the days of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. to 120 A.D.) some people in Kiangsi uncovered "rocks which burnt quite as well as wood"; and in the days of the Wei Dynasty (220-264 A.D.), it is recorded, more than 1,000 miners were crowding into a district in Shansi to wash gold from a river-bed. In the days of the Han mining had prospered to such an extent that iron and salt were looked upon as the two great assets of the state.

GOLD IN MANCHURIA

For centuries the Chinese have known Amur Province under the name of the "World of Gold," or "GoldProducing Land." To-day there are no less than 113 gold mines being exploited in the Province. Most of them are alluvial gold and are governmental enterprises. Concessions for more than 10,513 acres of gold-fields have been given out by the Province. That is nearly ten times the gold area in the Province of Kirin covered by concessions, and a good deal more than eleven times that of Mukden Province.

Gold fever in Amur Province has quieted down considerably of late. The rise of the price of silver, the standard of value in China, in the post-war days lowered the price of gold violently. That is perhaps the chief reason. But not so many years ago the goldfields of Amur Province were exceedingly active.

MOHO GOLD FIELD

Perhaps the most famous of them all was the Moho gold-field. It is located on a small stream, a branch of a river which empties into the Amur near the Russian

town of Albazan. It is some forty miles from where the Shilka joins the Argun. It has been worked since 1888. In its early days it yielded quite a handsome revenue for the Peking court and was often the theme of Imperial Edict. Its alluvial bed is extensive: eight to ten miles in length and from 50 to 230 yards in width. It straddles the streamlet. The depth of the alluvial bed measures from seven to twenty-three yards. In earlier days the gold was found in large nuggets and made the work of mining both simple and profitable; but of late, as the richer sections have been worked out, the gold dust found is getting finer and finer in size. The bed is divided into the Great Creek and the Small Creek. The Great Creek is the old field, which has been worked since 1888. Both sections have shown signs of exhaustion for years. At the time of the Boxer Uprising of 1900 the Russians occupied the field and went through the choicest sections; but even in the years following the Russo-Japanese War there were more than 8,000 miners at work in the field at one time. Since then, however, the fields have been on a steady decline. By 1916, the number of miners was down to 4,000; the following year it fell to one half of the number, and in 1918 there were no more than 262 miners operating there.

In the Taipingkou section along the right bank of the Amur, between the mouth of the Sungari and Blagoveschensk, Kuanyin-shan gold-field has been famous as a rich deposit. At the time of the Boxer trouble the Russians drove out Chinese miners there and took it over and worked its richest portions with feverish haste. In the same district, along the stream of Tulu-ho, there was discovered a large field over 100 miles from east to west and thirty miles from north to south. It was opened in 1903 but was abandoned for a time as being too poor for commercial exploitation. Then in 1908 a new section was opened up in the same district, whose