a Chinese be appointed as co-director of the expedition and that all of the collections be given to the Chinese. In addition he was forced to accept ten Chinese students and 'professors' as members of his party.
Rather than abandon his entire expedition, Doctor HEDIN at last agreed to these extraordinary demands. While I thoroughly understood and sympathized with Doctor HEDIN'S position, it was obvious that his acceptance of such preposterous conditions would make it extremely difficult for other expeditions to carry on their work. My predictions were amply justified by future events. By the time Doctor HEDIN was allowed to leave, conditions in the interior had improved sufficiently to make it safe to go with a large party such as his. It was then much too late for our expedition to start, since our working period was of necessity limited to the summer months. »
The pessimism to which ANDREWS here gives expression proved, as I have already related, to be much exaggerated, and none of the »preposterous conditions », that were laid down in Peking was actually applied in practice. I had thus judged the situation correctly, and on my return to Peking the Chinese offered of themselves to give me duplicates of the palaeontological and historical-archaeological collections. That in the future it would be »extremely difficult for other expeditions to carry out their work » was none of my fault but a consequence of the wave of nationalism that marked the inception of the new epoch and came sweeping up from the South over the whole of China, bringing in its wake the fanatical hatred of foreigners of which ANDREWS himself speaks. If I had not accepted the Chinese conditions, but broken off all negotiations and gone home, this would simply have meant that if not ANDREWS'S then some-one else's expedition would have been the first to meet the demands of the Chinese academic opposition. It is possible that the conditions would then have been made even more stringent than those laid down in the contract between the opposition and myself. The story, insignificant enough in itself, that ANDREWS had given away a dinosaurus egg in the United States as a quid pro quo for the contribution of a considerable sum towards the costs of his expedition, was unfortunately retailed by the American press; this was of course pounced upon with delight by the opposition in Peking, and undoubtedly damaged ANDREWS a good deal more than my contract did.
On his 1928 expedition ANDREWS followed our route to the West, but did not get as far as half way to the Edsen-gol.
In March 1929 ANDREWS entered into negotiations with »The Commission for the Preservation of Ancient Objects » of which the chairman was Professor MA HENG and members Dr WONG WEN-HAO and Professor Liu Pu. The conditions this committee sought to impose on ANDREWS were on the whole the same as those I accepted. An extra demand was that Chinese experts should co-operate with the American experts in The American Museum of Natural History and that the travelling expenses of these Chinese to and from New York as well as their living expenses during their stay in the States should be met by the same museum. ANDREWS says (p. 421 op. cit.): »These conditions we could not accept, and after weeks of negotiations the expedition had to be abandoned ».
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