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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

we should need. None of us saw anything like an omen in the news of the cancelling of the permit that had been granted to the Englishman, Captain Mc CALLUM, to travel by car through Kansu and Sinkiang to Kashgar.1

BEGINNING OF CHINESE OPPOSITION

March 6th was a critical day in the history of the expedition. On the afternoon of this day Professor ANDERSSON came to call on me, and it was not difficult to see that he was the bearer of anything but good news. He told me that a large number of learned men, professors, students, directors of museums and others had had a stormy meeting on the previous evening, the subject of the discussion being the activity of Occidental explorers and scientific expeditions in China. The most energetic action against all enterprises of this sort had been resolved upon. Above all, foreigners were to be forbidden to carry out archaeological excavations and to take away palaeontological collections. As the expedition of which I was the leader happened to be in Peking at that time, and on the point of setting out for the interior, it was made the object of the first attack. It was known that the use of aeroplanes was an integral part of our program, and the meeting had therefore also expressed its disapproval of foreign flights over Chinese territory.

Professor ANDERSSON had got his information from our friends Dr V. K. TING and Dr WONG WEN-HAO, who were also targets of the opposition in so far as it was hostile to The Geological Survey of China, which now ran the risk of losing its annual subsidy from The Boxer Indemnity Fund. The insurgent scientists could not forgive TING and WONG for the great sympathy and active spirit of helpfulness with which they had embraced the cause of Swedish scientific enterprises in China.

As Professor ANDERSSON was the representative of the Swedish China Committee, his work also was singled out by the opposition; and I regret that I was thus involuntarily the cause of the inconveniences and risks to which the China Committee was exposed. On the same day we heard that Roy CHAPMAN ANDREWS'S expedition had also been inhibited. The blow was thus not directed only against us, but against all occidental expeditions.

During the whole winter, from November loth to March 6th, our plans had gone forward almost without a hitch, and it was not without justice that someone had remarked: »This is just a bit too good to be true ! » We had, in fact, not met

1 This cancelling of the journey was caused by the British Legation. The planned motor trip has a certain bearing on our expedition in so far as the petrol transport to Ning-hsia by camel was to be entrusted to a young German, Herr MANFRED BöKENKAMP, who joined us in 193o. A description of Captain MCCALLUM's subsequent journey from Peking via Indochina and overland from India to Calais by motor car is to be found in the Journal of the Central Asiatic Society, Vol. XVI: II, London 1929. F. B.

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