own ideas of doing things in connection with mines, and not with
those of Chinese mining tradition. As consulting engineer, and later
general manager of the "Chinese Engineering and Mining Company" he
attacked the job of making Chang's great Tongshan coal properties a
going concern. This job involved building railways, handling a fleet of
ocean-going steamers, developing large cement works, and superintending
altogether the work of about 20,000 employees. A special one among the
undertakings of the twelve months or more given to this enterprise was
the building of Ching Wang Tow harbor to give his coal a proper sea
outlet. Altogether it was a "mining" job of all the variety and hugeness
of extent that the twenty-seven-year-old miner and organizer found most
to his liking. And despite obstacles and complications due both to his
Chinese and Caucasian company associates he did it successfully, enjoyed
it immensely, and got from it much education and experience. But he was
ready after about a year of it to turn his attention to the rest of the
world.

CHAPTER VI

LONDON AND THE REST OF THE WORLD

In 1902, now twenty-eight years old, Herbert Hoover returned to London
as a junior partner in the great English firm with which he had been
earlier associated as its star field man in West Australia. But, though
with an actual headquarters office in London, he was mostly anywhere
else in the world but there. He was still the firm's chief engineer and
principal field expert and upon him fell much of the responsibility of
the firm's actual mining operations in the field as distinguished from
its financial operations in the "city." He probably spent little more
than a tenth of his time in London, and this was also true in his later
career when he had given up his connection with the firm and was wholly
"on his own" as independent consulting engineer and mine-organizer. And
this explains what has often puzzled many of the people who came to know
him and his household in London. He and it were so little "English."
His home in London seemed always to be a bit of transplanted America,
and, in particular, a bit of transplanted California. As a matter of
fact, in all his years of London connections there was hardly one that
did not see him and his family in America including an inevitable stay
in California. He maintained offices in New York and San Francisco and
had no slightest temptation, much less desire, ever to become an
ex