When one considers that the roads are new, having been opened only some two years or less, and then at tremendous expense incurred by the specially difficult nature of this country of mountains and waterways, one feels appalled at the colossal waste that must be going on similarly elsewhere. In this instance One wonders, why all this hurry?
Tens of thousands of labourers were called out, working at night, and within a few days the destructive work to airfield, and roads had been completed. Was it panic? The roads have been very useful to the Chinese—at any rate to civilians, and could still have been used if preparations had been made to destroy them at the last minute before an invasion by the use of mines, even had there been evidence that an invasion was contemplated.
Foreign ships still call here, the two or three largest being, s. Hsin Peking, s. Tembien and occasionally the s. Hai. Yang from Hongkong. These vessels call in order to fill in their time-table, there being no other ports; the cargo here is insufficient to keep such large vessels busy. There is restriction on the number of boats entering and leaving the port. There is also stricter regulation of travellers, Passes must be obtained by those Chinese or foreigners who desire to leave Wenchow for Shanghai. -Fortunately there is promise of a good rice harvest this year. countryside remains free of bandits. though bands of pirates in Wenchow Bay have increased alarmingly, making travel by small boat perilous. There are very few sounds or signs of wer even in the city, and certainly nane at all outside, In the city there are scarcely more soldiers than in peace time, possibly even fewer. fore the task of straightening out this money and subsidiary notes are to circulate indefinitely, The shopper comes across ten and twenty cent notes of all kinds of banks from the Central Bank, Bank of China and Bank of Communications downwards. Then there is a series of small notes issued by the Hopei Provincial Bank to represent copper coins. These range from notes representing 100 coppeðcoińs to four copper coins, the intermediary ones being 40, 20, 10 and 6. The value of a four copper bank note at par is precisely one cent, while the six copper one is worth one cent and a half,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.