IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| History of the Expedition in Asia, 1927-1935 : vol.3 |
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Citation Information
and among the Europeans Mc DONALD, BOSSHARD and BÖKENKAMP and the Swedes SIREN, NYSTRÖM, KULLGREN and LAURELL. But taller than all the others, either from the old or the new world, stood GEORG SÖDERBOM, the friendly giant who had saved so many difficult situations and whose maxim in fair weather or foul was always: »Are we down-hearted? No! Shall we win? Yes!» These words were also the last we heard him shout out over the heads of white and yellow as the train slowly glided out from the station in Peking.
HOME
On our way through Manchuria the last carriage on the train was an armoured car, and in the middle of the train was a military carriage. Attacks by bandits were not infrequent. However, the journey home was without incident. We went via Siberia, Moscow and Berlin, by which route NORIN and I reached Stockholm safely on April 15th 1935.
The expedition as a whole had thus lasted eight and a half years.
The whole of our field-work had now been carried to a successful conclusion, and all the members of the expedition had returned home. Collections, diaries, notes, maps and photographs had all, with only a few exceptions, been saved. As for the fate of the collections that were left behind in Peking to be studied by Chinese scholars, we are still quite in the dark.
I returned to my dear old home and my sisters in Stockholm with a profound feeling that the Almighty had with infinite patience held His protecting hand over us all and over the enterprise for which I had borne the responsibility.
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The European voices in China that had been lifted to warn us against launching such a big undertaking at a time when the Chinese war-lords were at each other's throats both in China and Inner Mongolia were certainly in the right; and still more justified were the voices that warned us against entering Sinkiang just when the Tungan general MA CHUNG-YING was carrying out his bloody invasion of this province.
The greatest tact and wisdom on our part was always called for to avoid in any way wounding the national feelings of the Chinese, and as far as it lay in our power to escape being crushed between the shields of the warring parties. In this respect, as has been seen from my descriptions in the foregoing narrative, we had great good luck.
Our relations with the Chinese seemed, in the spring of 1927, anything but promising. But with the passage of time we were welded together in a closer and
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