ABSTRACT
The 510-mile railway between Peiping and Paotow—the end of the line in Inner Mongolia—cuts through four Chinese provinces, and is flanked by some of the most spectacular mountain scenery in north China. The Peiping-Suiyuan Railway is, in many respects, the most efficient and comfortable railway in China. It has had fewer civil-war interruptions than any other railway in north China, and its service is unusually good. In a nation engulfed by civil war, one tends to be continually preoccupied by the military situation, but there is more to life in Suiyuan—as elsewhere in China—than pillboxes and troops. Suiyuan Province, interestingly enough, is also one of the strongholds of the Catholic Church in China. Paotow is the main trading center of Suiyuan; Kweisui is its political center. Over-all, Suiyuan gives one the impression, of being a frontier area, the potentialities of which are only partially developed.
