"Railroad Game"

A year before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war, the Chinese completed the great Canton-Hankow Railway, linking South and Middle China--1,095 kilometers of arterial steel. To delay the Japanese advance, China's defenders wrecked much of the precious railroad. They dynamited one or two major bridges, collapsed five tunnels by exploding TNT-laden trains inside them, sent 95% of the line's equipment rolling off into the Kweichow gorges, where it still rusts. The Japanese never fully repaired this damage, never ran a train between Canton and Hankow.

Early in 1946, with the Japanese gone, the Chinese Government realistically decided that repair of the railroad was China's No. 1 reconstruction need. To direct the monumental job, it assigned 56-year-old Tu Chung-yuan, a Cornell-trained, driving and determined veteran of China's railways, who has always admired the American "railroad game" (as well as American strawberry shortcake and pie a la mode).

To assist him, Builder Tu called on S. P. Lin (Purdue) and K. T. Fung (Princeton and Harvard). They had virtually no modern machinery, few tools, no new girders to repair bridge spans still lying twisted in river beds. But they made shift with what they had. And in six amazing months, the job was done.

Bitter Strength. Last week, TIME Correspondent Frederick Gruin cabled from Hankow an account of this dogged engineering miracle:

"From distant forests as far away as 400 kilometers, floated downriver wherever possible and carried on coolies' shoulders elsewhere, came timbers. What the bitter strength of Chinese labor did with these timbers is still an amazing sight to see: trestle bridges, often several tiers high, provide temporary crossings. Beside them rise the concrete foundations of permanent structures.

"When sudden spring floods washed out two of the longest temporary bridges north of Changsha last April, Director Tu put on three shifts of laborers, working day & night. The engineers managed to sink heavy loads of log piles, through unprecedentedly high water. Somehow, without modern diving equipment, timber superstructure had to be fastened to piles as much as 30 feet under water. Again the coolies' bitter strength saved the day. Local rivermen dove in, swam down for 80 seconds, drove spikes with hand hammers, a blow or two at each dive, until all were securely in place.

"Tunnels as long as 470 yards were dug out by pick & shovel. Roadbeds were rebuilt by men carrying soil in baskets. Ballast--300,000 cubic meters of it--was made by men with steel hammers cracking big stones into little ones. As many as 80,000 laborers daily toiled to put the line through. Meanwhile, through UNRRA and CNRRA came desperately needed equipment to eke out the little on hand: almost a quarter-million ties from the U.S. and Canada, a few used locomotives and worn boxcars from Persia and Iraq, old rails of any weight, from any source."

Out of Torpor. "Thus, by mansweat and makeshift, on schedule in mid-1946, the first through train in eight years made the Canton-Hankow run. By November, Director Tu had three expresses going each week. Now he has one daily leaving both north and south terminals. In half a year passenger and freight (rice, relief goods, tung oil, coal) mileage has doubled. Along the right of way, at every station, aswarm with people on the move, and ashrill with vendors of rice, cabbage, noodles and pig's ears, you can see a region's economic life, however shabby and stunted by American standards, stirring out of torpor."

This reawakening was typical of most of the South China areas ravished or neglected by the Japanese invader. In the hour of victory, starving people in such Fukien province ports as Amoy lay down to die in coffins waiting for them in the streets. But now overseas Chinese are again sending money from the Philippines and Southeast Asia to rehabilitate the coastal trade, and on the Chinese New Year nearly every Amoy citizen boasted the traditional (but in recent years unobtainable) new suit or dress. Inland, such cities as Hengyang and Changsha, once 98% destroyed, are 30% rebuilt. Pot-holed Canton streets are being repaired, and are expected to be shipshape in three months.

"China's bloodless battle of reconstruction," Gruin wrote, "has not been as spectacular or headline-catching as the bloody fight for unity north of the Yangtze. But it has been steady, heroic in its way, progressive, with wonder not so much over what has been done in itself, but over what has been done with so little for doing."

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