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

hand the poor ragged reality they had witnessed and on the other the storm of accusations that the Minister of Education, The North China Daily News and some other papers had levelled at our heads.

We were very soon invited to exchange our provisional residence at the hotel for a villa intended for guests in the domain of the Ministry of Railways. In our

nearest vicinity was the magnificent premises of the Ministry of Communications,

built in the Chinese style — a most charming and elegant piece of architecture. Quite near were also the occidental villa of the premier, WANG CHING-wEI, and

the villa in which General v. SEECKT and his wife lived. In June, 1933, as I related at the end of Part II, he had visited me in Peking. He was acting as military adviser to Marshal CHIANG KAI-SHEK. During the eleven days of my stay in Nanking I spent many hours in his hospitable house.

On February 17th NoRIN arrived from Peking, where he had been staying for nearly a year.

From Premier WANG CHING-WEI I received a valuable gift in the form of a tall silver tripod, embraced by two lions and provided with a polite Chinese inscrip-

tion and dedication wishing me long life. He also invited us to a splendid dinner at his private home, on which occasion he held a more than polite and flattering speech for our expedition.

In Nanking we thus met with two diametrically opposed receptions — the one marked by the most overflowing amiability, hospitality and honourable recogni-

tion, while the other represented dark powers that did not dare to come out

into the open, but that worked underground and aimed at arousing suspicions against us by false accusation. YEW, who was extremely indignant about this

monomaniacal and morbid mania for persecution, succeeded in tracing it to our

strange quondam fellow-traveller HUANG WEN-PI. This fellow, who had found out about the »experts' » examination of our poor finds, had communicated with

the Ministers of Railways and Education, warning them against paying the slightest attention to the contents of the chests we had shown the six »experts ». The really valuable finds we had made, he alleged, had already been sent from Urumchi to Stockholm with HUMMEL and BERGMAN, when in the summer of 1934. they had returned home on account of HUMMEL's illness. YEW now proposed that we

ought to demand that the Chinese Ambassador in Moscow and the Chinese Minister in Stockholm be commissioned to examine the baggage that HUMMEL, and

BERGMAN had taken home from Sinkiang. It was, meantime, a part of the story

that the Minister of Railways, to whom the expedition had been accountable, had on two occasions requested HUANG WEN-PI to visit him personally, but that

HUANG had ignored the summons. I had no reason for paying a visit to the Minister of Education, a quondam professor at the University of Wuchang and a familiar friend of HUANG WEN-PL's. HUANG made use of this Minister to further his miserable plan of persecution against us; and the Minister, who seems to have

302