The Chinese Engineering and Mining Company, Limited, was established with foreign capital around 1879 to mine coal for the steamships of the Chinese Merchants' Steam Navigation Company and the

Imperial Chinese Navy The Imperial Chinese Navy was the modern navy of the Qing dynasty of China established in 1875. An Imperial naval force in China first came into existence from 1132 during the Song dynasty and existed in some form until the end of the Qing dynast ...

. English mining engineer Robert Reginald Burnett, MICE, directed the first shaft at Kaiping near

Tangshan Tangshan ( zh, c=唐山 , p=Tángshān) is a coastal, industrial prefecture-level city in the northeast of Hebei province. It is located in the eastern part of Hebei Province and the northeastern part of the North China Plain. It is located in t ...

Hebei Hebei is a Provinces of China, province in North China. It is China's List of Chinese administrative divisions by population, sixth-most populous province, with a population of over 75 million people. Shijiazhuang is the capital city. It bor ...

Province, in 1879. The tram line between the mine and its canal to the

Hai He The Hai River (海河, lit. "Sea River"), Postal Map Romanization, also known as the Peiho, ("White River"), or Hai Ho, is a Chinese rivers of China, river connecting Beijing to Tianjin and the Bohai Sea. During the Song dynasty, the main st ...

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. 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.Extracts from the personal diary of William Bulmer, 1881-1884 (who was employed by CE&MC at Tangshan as a boiler maker) from “ P. A. Crush Chinese Railway Collection”, Hong Kong Railway Society The company was formally chartered in 1900 and then reformed in 1912 as a public company listed in

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

. Together with the Lanchow Mining Company, it formed the Kailuan Mining Administration to oversee its coal mines, which were producing about 4.5 million tons annually during the 1920s. The company's activities were completely halted by the victory of the

Communists Communism () is a sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered on common ownership of the means of production, d ...

in the

Chinese Civil War The Chinese Civil War was fought between the Kuomintang-led Nationalist government, government of the Republic of China (1912–1949), Republic of China and the forces of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Armed conflict continued intermitt ...

and it was finally dissolved in 1984. Its records between 1900 and 1951 are stored at the London Metropolitan Archives.AIM25.
Chinese Engineering and Mining Company Limited
. Accessed 13 Oct 2011. The rest of the company became the Kailuan Group at

, which is one of the largest coal mining companies in Mainland China.

References

External links

* Mining companies of China {{UK-company-stub

See also

References

Further reading

External links