The Chinese Engineering and Mining Company, Limited, was established with foreign capital around 1879 to mine coal for the steamships of the Chinese Merchants' Steam Navigation Company and the

Imperial Chinese Navy The Imperial Chinese Navy was the modern navy of the Qing dynasty of China established in 1875. An Imperial naval force in China first came into existence from 1132 during the Song dynasty and existed in some form until the end of the Qing dynasty ...

. English mining engineer Robert Reginald Burnett, MICE, directed the first shaft at Kaiping near

Tangshan Tangshan () is a coastal, industrial prefecture-level city in the northeast of Hebei province. It is located in the eastern part of Hebei Province and the northeastern part of the North China Plain. It is located in the central area of the Boha ...

Hebei Hebei or , (; alternately Hopeh) is a northern province of China. Hebei is China's sixth most populous province, with over 75 million people. Shijiazhuang is the capital city. The province is 96% Han Chinese, 3% Manchu, 0.8% Hui, and 0 ...

Province, in 1879. The tram line between the mine and its canal to the Hai He eventually developed into the Imperial Railway of North China and the modern

Jingha Railway Jingha may refer to: * Jingha Expressway, expressway in China that links Beijing to Harbin * Jingha railway, railway in China that connects Beijing with Harbin {{Disambig ...

, the civil engineering partnership Sir

John Wolfe-Barry Sir John Wolfe Barry (7 December 1836 – 22 January 1918), the youngest son of famous architect Sir Charles Barry, was an English civil engineer of the late 19th and early 20th century. His most famous project is Tower Bridge over the River ...

and Lt Col

Arthur John Barry Lieutenant Colonel Arthur John Barry (1859-1943) was an English civil engineer and architect of the late 19th and early 20th century. Early life Arthur John Barry was the fourth child of the architect Charles Barry, Jr. and his wife Harrie ...

being appointed Joint Consulting Engineers to the Company at the end of the nineteenth century. At various times there were organized riots against the railway; in one instance, thousands of dollars worth of damage was done to mining equipment at the Tongshan colliery when a violent feud erupted between Cantonese and northern Chinese workers.Extracts from the personal diary of William Bulmer, 1881-1884 (who was employed by CE&MC at Tangshan as a boiler maker) from “ P. A. Crush Chinese Railway Collection”, Hong Kong Railway Society The company was formally chartered in 1900 and then reformed in 1912 as a public company listed in

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

. Together with the Lanchow Mining Company, it formed the Kailuan Mining Administration to oversee its coal mines, which were producing about 4.5 million tons annually during the 1920s. The company's activities were completely halted by the victory of the

Communists Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a s ...

in the

Chinese Civil War The Chinese Civil War was fought between the Kuomintang-led government of the Republic of China and forces of the Chinese Communist Party, continuing intermittently since 1 August 1927 until 7 December 1949 with a Communist victory on m ...

and it was finally dissolved in 1984. Its records between 1900 and 1951 are stored at the London Metropolitan Archives.AIM25.
Chinese Engineering and Mining Company Limited
. Accessed 13 Oct 2011. The rest of the company became the

Kailuan Group The Kailuan (Group) Co., Ltd. () is a major Chinese coal mining company. Chinese Engineering and Mining Company was its predecessor. In 2009, Kailuan Group planned to build a coal reserve base on the northeast coast to store 50 million tonnes of ...

, which is one of the largest coal mining companies in Mainland China.

References

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*
Mining companies of China {{UK-company-stub

See also

References

Further reading

External links