Hydrographic Department Beginnings Outlined:
Charting the Coast A task of amazing interest to the commercial and shipping communi les of China is being dally carried by the Hydrographic Department of the Chinese Navy—"China's Silent Service." Twenty-four hours of the day for 985 days each year, some members of this "department are plotting out the positions of the many different and changing shoals along the China coast, making for the frst time an ageurate and aclentife geodetic survey' of the coast, and preparing warnings to shipping of the hitherto unknown dangers they have discovered.
The department has been in exist. ence for just over fourteen years, and it has not yet had time or the funds to make a complete geodetic survey of the longest national coast Une in the world. Even tonday there are sections of the seas surrounding China that are almost. unknown to foreign shippers, Many Sandbanks and rocks are uncharted. There is no safe. sea-road through them, though reconnaissance efforts have been made by different navies to point out their principal features.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.