Abstract: Russell and Zhai(1987:21) point out that,"Although Eocene and Oligocene localities were known in China south of the Gobi in the 1920's, very little augmentation of the collections occurred until approximately the 1960's, when increased field activity on the part of crews directed by Minchen Chow was responsible for much new material collected and described."Minchen Chow's own report of the late Eocene to early Oligocene mammals from Yunnan and Guangxi provinces began to appear in 1957(Chow,1957). In the following three years, Chow published more than half a dozen papers on Paleogene mammals from Yunnan, Henan, Jiangxi, and Xinjiang. These works set the stage for the discoveries mentioned above by Russell and Zhai. Paradoxically, this sudden surge of interest in Chinese Paleogene mammals was not accidental, given the fact that during the 1950s and early 1960s, the Chinese government promoted geological investigations and Chinese vertebrate paleontologists seized this opportunity to expand their scope of exploration and research. It is, however,a historical accident that Minchen Chow, the principal organizer and a major player in these increased research activities, learned his trade in the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming from Glenn Jepsen,a vertebrate paleontologist at Princeton University. Chow spent the summer of 1950 with Jepsen's Princeton field crew, where he familiarized himself with North American Paleogene mammalian faunas. Before that, Chow had focused on the Pennsylvanian freshwater bivalves of Pennsylvania, as his PhD dissertation at Lehigh University. Thus, the seeds of passion for mammalian paleontology were sowed in remote Wyoming, and the harvest began only a few years later across the Pacific.