the fund then at disposal. They asked straight out who it was that met the expenses of the expedition, and if it were true, as they had heard, that a German air-line company was behind the enterprise. I considered the financing of the expedition to be a private matter that did not concern them at all. The main thing was that funds for the execution of our plans actually did exist. As I was the leader of the expedition and as several Swedish scientists were taking part, so that we thus had a purely Swedish scientific program of work, I did not feel called upon to give this preliminary meeting an account of our co-operation with Deutsche Lufthansa. Decisive for me in this connection was the promise I had given, at their urgent request, to the two ministers, WELLINGTON Koo and WANG YIN-T'AI, and especially to the Chief of the General Staff, General YANG YÜ-TING, who had promised to lend me his support, after the preliminary caravan expedition, in carrying out our flying plans on the express condition that nothing was to be mentioned about aeroplanes until after the return to Peking after one or one and a half years. I was thus bound to silence by my relations with the leading men in the Government, and this made my position vis-à-vis the delegation ambiguous. However, the very fact that the question of flying was brought up at the
IIIF Color HighRes
