CO129-482 - Public Offices - 1923 — Page 398

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Changhat No. 25 of July 23rd., 1923,

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I have the honour to inform you that the report s

given currency last month by the Northern press that civil

war had broken out in West Funan, which were then, as men- tioned in my Political Report for the June Quarter, without foundation in fact, appear to have been intelligent anti- cipations of what has since transpired. General Ts'al

Cha-yu, who has for some time past held the Yan-ling command, has long been known as favourably inclined towards a restoration of Tan Yen-k'ai as governor of Funan and has been more than suspected of flirting with Sun Yat-sen and his party. His power and influence have been growing considerably, partly owing to the remoteness of his command from the headquarters of the provincial government and partly owing to the large revenues drawn by him from th opium traffic as he controla all the routes by which Kweichow opium enters "unan and large areas in the West of Funan which are under poppy cultivation.

Eventually, early in this month Chao Heng-ti det ermin- ed to bring matters to a head and issued a mandate abolish- ing the Yan-ling command as a first step in the the general scheme for reducing the armed forces of Hunan on which the Provincial Assembly had laid great stress on the ground of the necessity of balancing the provincial budget, which it was not possible to effect so long as military expenditure remained on its present scale. General Ts'ai was at the same time appointed Director of the Military Academy at Changhsa, a position of small importante. Chao Heng-ti's real object was to reduce to impotence this dangerous and powerful officer who had long shown himself intolerant of control by the provincial government and had interfered seriously with the civil administration of the district under his command, more than one magistrate having

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