Minister MacMurray Ordered Back to Peking as Hankow Situation Turns Serious

American Minister MacMurray, on his way home for conferences, was intercepted by cable and ordered back to Peking by Secretary of State Kellogg because of increasingly serious anti-foreign rioting in China, the Associated Press reported on Friday in both the Evening Star and the New Britain Herald. He had left Peking on Jan. 18 with his wife and two children.

The Associated Press said a telegram from unofficial foreign sources at Hankow reported that about 1,000 American and British men who had stayed there after sending their women and children away were leaving, though there was no official confirmation. The British concession has stayed under Cantonese control since the coolie mob swept over it early in the month, and American and British warships lie in the Yangtze opposite the city.

Both papers added that the American chargé at Peking, Ferdinand Mayer, was arranging a code of day or night signals to warn American residents and gather them in the legation compound under the Marine guard, and that the destroyer Parrott had gone from Shanghai to Foochow, where foreigners had been threatened and churches looted.