CO129-453 - Acting Governor Claud Severn - 1919 [1-3] — Page 81

A

COPY.

RALPH V. WEYMOUTH.

Enclosure 1.

78

HONG KONG, Nov. 1st, 1918.

Superintendent of Exports and Imports,

sir.

Hongkong.

CO

12233

RECE

Rec 24 FLB 19

Replying to yours of the second of

October I am pleased to give you the following results of my

prospecting for minerals in the new territory.

In my opinion the most valuable deposits

are the iron deposits. Only one of these has been surveyed

for quantity and that one contains some five million tons of

high grade magnetite. The smelting of iron in Hongkong will

of course be dependent upon cheap coke, which is not an

impossibility of the near future. I can inform you that

investigation is being made of the advisability of starting

such an undertaking by persons amply independent of outside

financial assistance.

We have located four deposits of wolfram

for which mining licences have been granted or are under

consideration. From those we have worked we have extracted

approximately sixty tons of ore average sixty five percent

tungstic acid since the beginning of our operations last

January. While this tonnage may sound inconsiderable it must

be remembered that this return is only the result of develop-

ment work. We are now producing at the rate of eight tone per

month which is equivalent to more than one quarter of the

production in England.

As an associated mineral we are getting

some bismuth and some molybdenite but the amounts are not yet

worth recording.

We are working on a placer tin proposition

near Un Long from which we have extracted approximately one

ton of concentrates containing seventy percent metallic tin;

but