Claude William Kinder, ( zh, p=Jin Da, t=金達, s=金达; 10 August 1852 – 9 August 1936 in

Churt Churt is a village and civil parish in the borough of Waverley in Surrey, England, about south of the town of Farnham on the A287 road towards Hindhead. A clustered settlement is set in areas acting as its green buffers, which include the ...

, England) was an English engineer. For over thirty years he was engineer-in-chief of the

Kaiping Tramway and Imperial Railways of North China The first railway to be built and survive in China was the Kaiping (開平) colliery tramway located at Tangshan in Hebei province. However, this was not the very first railway in China. An earlier attempt to introduce railways had been made in 18 ...

. Claude William Kinder was the third son of Major Thomas William Kinder, who served as Master of the Hong Kong Mint from 1863 to 1868 and the director of the Imperial Japanese Mint in

Osaka is a Cities designated by government ordinance of Japan, designated city in the Kansai region of Honshu in Japan. It is the capital of and most populous city in Osaka Prefecture, and the List of cities in Japan, third-most populous city in J ...

between 1870 and 1875."Mr. C.W. Kinder – Pioneer of Railways in China" in

The Times ''The Times'' is a British Newspaper#Daily, daily Newspaper#National, national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its modern name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its si ...

, 10 August 1936 Tutored by his father, Claude later studied railway engineering in

Saint Petersburg Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the List of cities and towns in Russia by population, second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the Neva, River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland ...

before obtaining his first professional appointment as an assistant engineer with Imperial Japanese Railways in 1873. Forced to leave Japan because of civil war in 1878 he moved to Shanghai where he met Tong King-sing who appointed him as an engineer with the

Chinese Engineering and Mining Company 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. English mining engineer Robe ...

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 ...

near to the ancient walled city of

Kaiping Kaiping (), postal map romanization, alternately romanization of Chinese, romanized in Cantonese as Hoiping, in local dialect as Hoihen, is a county-level city in Guangdong provinces of China, Province, China. It is located in the western secti ...

. Kinder's initial brief was to help with the sinking of coal mine shafts at the new colliery and to construct a railway from the mines to the nearest navigable river. Chinese politics initially prevented the building of this railway and in consequence Kinder surveyed and built a canal for coal barges to operate between the river at Lutai and Hsukochuang (''Xugezhuang'') from where a short tramway was constructed to Tangshan. The government authority for the tramway had intended that only mules were to be used for hauling coal wagons but Kinder (with Tong King Sing's connivance) secretly constructed a home-built steam locomotive which was christened " The Rocket of China", the first steam locomotive ever made in China. From these early beginnings the 'Kaiping Tramway' evolved into China's first major railway line and administration known as ''Imperial Railways of North China'' and later, after the overthrow of the

Qing dynasty The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing, was a Manchu-led Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China and an early modern empire in East Asia. The last imperial dynasty in Chinese history, the Qing dynasty was preceded by the ...

, the ''Peking-

Mukden Shenyang,; ; Mandarin pronunciation: ; formerly known as Fengtian formerly known by its Manchu name Mukden, is a sub-provincial city in China and the provincial capital of Liaoning province. It is the province's most populous city with a p ...

Railway''. Kinder served this railway as Engineer-in-Chief for some thirty years until retirement in 1909. The Chinese Government appointed Kinder as an Honorary Chinese official and he was decorated with the Imperial Order of the Double Dragon. In 1900 Kinder was made a

Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George The Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George is a British order of chivalry founded on 28 April 1818 by George, Prince of Wales (the future King George IV), while he was acting as prince regent for his father, King George I ...

by the British Government in recognition of his services to the development of railways (and British financial interests) in China. He died in

, England on 9 August 1936, a day short of his eighty-fourth year. Some of the Claude William Kinder PapersClaude William Kinder Papers
/ref> are held by the

University of Manchester Library The University of Manchester Library is the library system and information service of the University of Manchester. The main library is on the Oxford Road campus of the university, with its entrance on Burlington Street. There are also ten other ...

Special Collections. These are mainly diaries of business meetings and correspondence books which have carbon copies of handwritten letters, mainly pertaining to company business dealings and suppliers. Kinder's personal documents and photographs are retained by his descendants. These have been catalogued in the book ''Imperial Railways of North China''.

References

Further reading