The government in Berlin regarded these lines as vehicles for the projection of German influence into the hinterland of the naval base. During the talks on the Sino-German convention Edmund von Heyking, the brusque new German minister at Peking since 1896, insisted on Germany's special position in the area. As he impressed upon the German government engineer currently surveying at Hankow, Heinrich Hildebrand, 'Germany regarded the economic development of Shantung province as her sphere of interest.' To his British colleague, Sir Claude MacDonald, he confided that 'commercially Shantung was intended to be a German province'.13 The soldier-turned-diplomat MacDonald and his first secretary at the Peking legation, Henry Bax-Ironside, warned London that the object of German diplomacy was the creation of 'an "imperium in imperio" , in northern China; any difficulties raised by Chinese central or local authorities would be met with a display of 'the same high-handed methods already employed ... in order to coerce the weak Government in Peking'. Such views were echoed in Whitehall by George Nathaniel Curzon. the Parliamentary Undersecretary at the Foreign Office, an advocate of a more forward policy in China: 'The Germans are now asserting a complete monopoly of Shantung.'14