Word: hankow
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Broiling sun beat down on Hankow, China last week. It was nearly 100°. On the roofs of their rickety houses, Chinese hoisted scraps of cloth for shade and gazed glumly at muddy water, five to 15 feet deep, that roiled through the streets, stretched as far as they could see. On rafts made of doors, on treasured family coffins, on crude inflated goatskin life-preservers, on junks and sampans, refugees from outlying districts were cruising aimlessly. An Associated Press man went about in a sampan to see what he could see. At one point his boatman nosed...
...floods, not only of the Yangtze but of the Hwai River to the north. Homeless were 30,000,000 people; 10,000,000 were utterly destitute, with hundreds dying daily. Eventually, it was estimated, the death toll would reach 2,000,000. Pestilence was abroad, was to become worse. Hankow (pop. some 800,000) and its sister cities Hanyang and Wuchang were doomed to destruction: houses were collapsing everywhere, mud walls on which refugees perched were slowly sinking into the floodwaters. The three cities had enough cereals for three weeks. A little meat, no vegetables, no ice. The power plants...
...Navy was mobilized for emergency work and to look after U. S. citizens (the New York Times counted 896 in the district, all safe, most of the women leaving for mountain resorts, the men remaining to watch their property). The Navy helped out by keeping Hankow in touch with Shanghai: Chinese telegraph lines were virtually useless. A plan was under consideration to mobilize all foreign navies in Chinese waters. Also, an international river patrol will be formed when the waters begin to subside...
...Hankow was near the center of the flood area. Thousands of frightened, bedraggled peasants poured into the native city that sank lower and lower beneath the Yangtze wraters. With the streets waist-deep in the swirling, dirty flood, fire broke out. There was no way to fight it. A few brave watermen pushed their little sampans from house to house trying to rescue trapped families, but scores died. There was danger of pestilence. Foreign correspondents were less interested in the millions of homeless and thousands of dead than in two U. S. citizens, Mrs. Webb and a Mrs. Fielding...
...trouble in the South, even more violent war broke out to the northward. The "Christian General" Feng Yu-hsiang and Northern Generals Shih Yu-san and Sun Tien-ying moved their combined forces (110,000 men) across Honan Province, threatening the juncture of the Lung-Hai and Peiping-Hankow railways, then started north through Hopei Province, apparently bound for the port of Tientsin. Nationalist Manchurian troops along this front were leaderless, since Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang, Vice Commander-in-Chief of the Nationalist Army, Navy and Air Force, was in a Peiping hospital, officially with pneumonia, which was rumored...