Chinese Engineering and Mining Company

English mining engineer Robert Reginald Burnett, MICE, directed the first shaft at Kaiping near Tangshan, Hebei Province, in 1879.

The tram line between the mine and its canal to the Hai He eventually developed into the Imperial Railway of North China and the modern Jingha Railway, the civil engineering partnership Sir John Wolfe-Barry and Lt Col Arthur John Barry being appointed Joint Consulting Engineers to the Company at the end of the nineteenth century.

[1] At various times there were organized riots against the railway; in one instance, thousands of dollars worth of damage was done to mining equipment at the Tongshan colliery when a violent feud erupted between Cantonese and northern Chinese workers.

The company's activities were completely halted by the victory of the Communists in the Chinese Civil War and it was finally dissolved in 1984.

The first few chapters of this book describe in detail the creation of the first coal mine at Tangshan in China which used imported Western technology.