lished in Chinese, but nothing was afterwards heard of any such publication. A suggestion by Lufthansa that a correspondent from NANA (North American Newspaper Association) should accompany the expedition was turned down by the committee, doubtless a wise measure on their part. The committee's decision that all reports and articles written by me should first be published in China was never applied in practice, and in the following years no objection was raised when such reports were sent direct to the Swedish newspapers and circulated in the world press. Finally, it was resolved that Professor AMADEUs GRABAU should in my absence act as my representative in all dealings with the committee.
In several European quarters I had been told that the Chinese contingent would follow me as far as the railway reached or to Pao-t'ou, upon which they would return to Peking. Others knew of old that the Chinese, who are an agricultural people and live on the products of the good earth, have always felt a horror of the desolation, sterility, dryness and terrible loneliness of the desert. Not one of the Chinese left us. All without exception followed us into the desert. The Europeans who talk of the Chinese horror of the desert have themselves never set foot outside the pale of civilization. Their description of the Chinese in this respect is contradicted by the lessons of history, by the armies that have been led through the desert, by the merchant caravans, pilgrimages, colonization etc. When the Great Wall was erected as the frontier between the desert and the middle Kingdom this was directed against barbarians, not against the desert.
THE CONTRACT
I have in the foregoing touched upon the course and development of the tedious debate that went on during March and April of 1927 and that finally, on April 26th, led to the signing of the contract between the opposition and myself. In a History of the Expedition this important agreement should not be forgotten, for without it the expedition could never have started. The points of view and the nationalistic demands that find expression in this document are of a more general historical interest and illustrate the Chinese attitude at the dawn of the new epoch that was ushered in by Kuomintang and CHIANG KAI-SHEK's great work of consolidation in China.
Our agreement is in any case the first and probably the last of its kind, and its numerous paragraphs with their far-reaching and ungenerous demands give an interesting picture of the Chinese standpoint of this period.
It is reproduced here in the English version and followed by a number of comments and explanations by me.
IIIF Color HighRes
