National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

forget them next time I undertook a journey to the interior of Asia. I promised to remember them and thanked them for their faithfulness, patience and courage in the innumerable difficult and dangerous situations we had been through. I assured them that the expedition could never have been carried out without them.

In the faint gleam of the lamps we watched the trusty and well-tried little group moving off to the Peking train.'

FRIENDS AND FOES IN NANKING

At nine o'clock on February 14th we reached Pukow, and an hour later the train rolled onto the ferry that took us over the Yang-tze in a quarter of an hour. In Nanking we put up at the Bridge House Hotel.

Our Chinese were annoyed that only one room had been reserved for the six of us and a servant. Certainly, we were not exactly spoiled on our car-journey; but now we had arrived, in spite of everything, in the Chinese capital, and could look forward to civilized conditions again.

The first person to visit me in Nanking was, significantly enough, the Japanese Consul-General SUMA. He left a hand-written letter from Prince TOKUGAWA, inviting me to go to Tokyo and give lectures on our expedition. Interest in us and our journey thus seemed to be greater on the Japanese side than in China itself. The Japanese knew that the aim of the expedition had been to investigate the suitability of the country for the building of motor-roads to Central Asia, and they now hastened to apply to me personally for a report of our results.

I told Mr SUMA that I could not give any final answer before I had reported to the government in whose service I had undertaken the journey.

On February 15th we received a telegram that had been sent off on the 14th. It was a peremptorily worded communication to the effect that we were not authorized to journey to Shanghai or anywhere else before we had first come to Nanking and submitted the whole of our baggage, »including personal effects », to a thorough examination by experts in the Ministry of Education.

On February 16th the Vice-Minister for Railways, TSENG CHUNG-MING, desired a conversation with me. He was a kind and polite man. We spoke of the shame-

1 TSERAT, who had first entered my service as a camel-man during the 1927-28 expedition, acted as guide during 1929-30 and as chauffeur from 1933 to 1935. Like JOMCHA, he took part in the year 1935 in the car-journey from Peking to Kashgar that was so successfully and skilfully performed by Sir ERIC TRICHMAN. He was only 4o years old when he died, a couple of years after his home-coming to Chakhar. Blessed and honoured be his memory!

The lorry I had received as a present from EDSEL FORD and that I gave to GEORG at our parting was once more, despite the severe knocking about it had already had, destined to cross steppe and desert to the extreme west of China, for it was taken over by Sir ERIC TRICHMAN. As Sir ERIC relates in his interesting account Journey to Turkistan (London 1937), it did service all the way to Qumush, between Toqsun and Qara-shahr, where it finally broke down like a worn-out camel.

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