He had now his opportunity really to do something in China in line with his own ideas of doing things in connection with mines, and not with those of Chinese mining tradition. As consulting engineer, and later general manager of the "Chinese Engineering and Mining Company" he attacked the job of making Chang's great Tongshan coal properties a going concern. This job involved building railways, handling a fleet of ocean-going steamers, developing large cement works, and superintending altogether the work of about 20,000 employees. A special one among the undertakings of the twelve months or more given to this
enterprise was the building of Ching Wang Tow harbor to give his coal a proper sea outlet. Altogether it was a "mining" job of all the variety and hugeness of extent that the twenty-seven-year-old miner and organizer found most to his liking. And despite obstacles and complications due both to his Chinese and Caucasian company associates he did it successfully, enjoyed it immensely, and got from it much education and experience. But he was ready after about a year of it to turn his attention to the rest of the world.
CHAPTER VI
LONDON AND THE REST OF THE WORLD
In 1902, now twenty-eight years old, Herbert Hoover returned to London as a junior partner in the great English firm with which he had been earlier associated as its star field man in West Australia. But, though with an actual headquarters office in London, he was mostly anywhere else in the world but there. He was still the firm's chief engineer and principal field expert and upon him fell much of the responsibility of the firm's actual mining operations in the field as distinguished from its financial operations in the "city." He probably spent little more than a tenth of his time in London, and this was also true in his later career when he had given up his connection with the firm and was wholly "on his own" as independent consulting engineer and mine-organizer. And this explains what has often puzzled many of the people who came to know him and his household in London. He and
it were so little "English." His home in London seemed always to be a bit of transplanted America, and, in particular, a bit of transplanted California. As a matter of fact, in all his years of London connections there was hardly one that did not see him and his family in America including an inevitable stay in California. He maintained offices in New York and San Francisco and had no slightest temptation, much less desire, ever to become an expatriate.
But this is getting ahead of the story. There is one outstanding happening in his London experience that insistently demands telling. It is the happening that meant for him the greatest setback in his otherwise almost monotonously successful career. And yet, although this happening meant temporary financial ruin for him, it was, in its way, only another success, a success of revealing significance to those who would like to know the real man that Herbert Hoover is.
After one of his returns to London, and in the absence of the head of the firm in China, he discovered a defalcation of staggering pro