The shooting of Charles Coltman by Chinese soldiers at the Kalgan gate of the Great Wall has thrown light on the financial sianipulations of the Tutung, Chang Hsi-yuan, which were in sense directly responsible for the shooting. Chinese merchants la Kalan have, since the Coltman incident, hastened to bring these conditions to the knowledge of the Tt would appear that the Tutung has been playing the old game of issuing an endless number of unsecured copper and dollar notes end relying upon his troops to keep them up to par. He pays the sol-tiers in paper and the soldiers force the merchants to accept them ti face val At the same time the various Government offices collect silver so that the Tutung ets silver for paper, his profit or every dollar taken ' in being the difference between the cost printing a paper dollar and the tual silver value of ore dollar Thi is an old game and a very ye one while it Inets, but it cannot last tong,—beea the inevitable result of these tactics is that all good metal in a community goes into hiding and the Tutung shortly finds himself in the painful position of having to accept his Chang Hsi-yuan began e some little time ago that the rich harvest was peteriag cut and in trying to devise some vay of perpetuating the good thing, he came to the conclusion that the good money in Kalgan wag being spent elsewhere and that his own paper was all that was being spent in the community. The logical thing for a greedy autocrat to do was to prohibit the export of good money. Orders were given accordingly but: they not announced to foreign merchants nor to foreign authorities, Mr. Coltmen and Mr. Wooden were held up at the ga because they were taking silver dollars into Mongolia with whi ta buy Mongol products. This is about the only possible line left to those who wish to traffic with the Mongols, because the Reds object ta the sale of anything to the Mongols which takes money out of Mongolia. If the Chinese persist objecting to the purchase of anything from the Mongols which takes money out of Kalgan then trade is impossible. The American Consul, Mr. Sokobin, who had received no notice of this ruling and refused to recognize the right of the guards at the gate to bar the export of dollars, insisted that his nationals, if they had a right to
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.