On this day 124 years ago, on February 19, 1901 (January 1, 1901 lunar calendar), Kaiping Mining Bureau changed hands. Kaiping Mining Bureau was a large new coal mining enterprise run by officials, supervisors and merchants at the end of the Qing Dynasty. In September of the second year of Guangxu (1876), Li Hongzhang sent Tang Tingshu, the general manager of the ship China Merchants Group, to Kaiping, Tangshan, to investigate and found that there were rich minerals in this area, and the texture was excellent. Li then sent Tang to prepare in August of the following year, and drew up the "Constitution of Zhili Kaiping Mining Bureau" to attract shares. On June 25, 1878, the "Kaiping Mining Bureau" was officially established in Kaiping Town, Tangshan, Zhili (now Hebei). In the seventh year of Guangxu (1881), it was officially put into production. After the death of Tang Tingshu in the 18th year of Guangxu (1892), Zhang Yi, a candidate from Jiangsu, took over as the general manager. Due to blind expansion, it cost a lot of money and borrowed a lot of foreign debt, which caused foreign monopolies to infiltrate. On February 19, 1901, Zhang Yi, the supervisor of Kaiping Mining Bureau, was cheated by foreigners to take all the assets of Kaiping Mining Bureau at a very low price. The mastermind of the fraud was Hoover (later the 31st president of the United States), an agent of the British Merlin Company. In 1900, Zhang Yi hid in the British Concession in Tianjin to escape the war between the Boxer Rebellion and the Eight-Power Allied Forces. The British arrested him on the grounds that he often sent carrier pigeons to the Boxer Rebellion. Zhang Yi asked German Detlin, then the Tianjin Customs and Taxation Department, for Detlin conspired with Hoover, who was the chief engineer of the Kaiping Mining Bureau at the time, to set a trap and rescue Zhang Yi on the condition that Detlin was appointed as the "general agent" of the Kaiping Mining Bureau and had full authority to handle the Kaiping mine affairs. Zhang had no choice but to agree. After Zhang Yi was released, Hoover signed a contract with Zhang Yi in Shanghai today to lease the Kaiping Mining Bureau on the grounds that he had full authority to handle the Kaiping mine affairs. However, when the contract was concluded, Hoover privately forced the translator to change the word "rent" to "sell". Zhang Yi did not look carefully and dazed. Later, Hoover announced that all the assets of the Mining Bureau were owned by himself. After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, it was accepted by the Kuomintang government. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, it was nationalized.