Retirement to His Ancestral Farms: The Best Politics to Make Two Blades of Gra 18s Grow for One Before Mr. Tong Shao-yi's retirement has} Jong been x subject of conversation among his many friends in Shanghai, He is now living at his ancesiral village at Tongkawan in Kuangtung, not far from Macao. It is a beautiful estate, with its orange and bamboo groves, its beautifully Tnid-out gardens and its many acres of farms, which are worked—by awoet-spoken Hakka peasants. In. this peaceful atmosphere, Mr. Tong is spending his old age as a gentl>- man farmer, working among the Peasants, improving the estate, act-he elder among the villagers, writing to Departments of Agriculture of foreign Governments for information with regard to crop and sot improvement.
The village of Tongkawan _has been in the possession of the Tong and Liang families for many con-uries, since the Tong far to Kuangtung from Shansi, 'T. Hung, a classmate of Mr. Tong's half a century ago in the United States and now one of the leading: Chinese in Tientsin, also comes from that village and how one of Mr. Tong's beautiful daughters ts ried to one of Mr, Liang's sons, a physician educated in England. So the two families have always been united in marriage and in their regard for Tongkawan, The Best Oyster One of the principal industries of Tongkawan is the fishing of the best oyster in South China, For many yours, the Tong family rented thes oyster beds to some other clan then there used to be an annual ght between the two families, For occasionally, a Tong would get some oysters and' the others would fight over them and often lives were lost.
Mr. Tong finally got the two clans together, arranged for the cancel tion of the old agreement and since then the Tong family has been looking after the oysters, which has brought considerable revenue to the clan funds and it was largely on his testimony that the Chinese won their case.
"Twice Mr. Hoover saved the Chinese Engineering & Mining Ca. for the Chinese shareholders and in the period immediately preceding connection with the company, during the Boxer uprising, there is no accounting how many' lives he saved. Though T have followed Mr. Hoover's career of international reief work through the long years that have passed since, I have always felt that his first actual relief work began in China.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.