At the end of January, in acoordance with Article XIX of the Hukuang Railways Loan agreement, the Chinese Government concluded an arrangement with the banks of Great Britain, Germany, France and the United States for the extension of the Hupeh-Szechuan Railway from Kueichowfu, vie Chungking, to Chengtu, an extension involving over 500 miles of line, cording to this arrangement, financial participation is to be equally shared by the four groups, the French, however, benefiting principally in the matter of construction, as no share of the construction system provided for by the Hukuang agreement was allotted to them.
The line is to be built on "Canton-Kowloon terms", by which the railway itself constitutes the security, together with the usual guarantees relating to expenditure and account-
The Nanking to Changsha Line.
Early in February, the Banque Industrielle de Chine signed a preliminary agreement to construct a line from Yamchow, west of Pakhoi, though the Nanning passes and Singyifu to Yunnan and thence - vid Weining to Chungking, a total distance of, roughly, 1,000 miles.
The news of this agreement, as our Peking correspondent pointed out at the time, caused some surprise for two reasons, one being that! the Yamchow-Yunnan section, if built, will compete with the Yunnan line into Indo-China; the other that according to the Anglo-French agreement of January 1806, the French undertook to share equally with the British concessions obtained by the former in Yunnan and Szechuan.
The event par excellence of the railway history of the year, however, was the signature on March 31 of an agreement between the Chinese Government and the British and Chines" Corporation involving the construction of 1,000 miles of rai way from Nanking to Changsha with branches. The line will run
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.