LONELIEST ENGLISHWOMAN.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 71, 24 March 1928, Page 6 (Supplement)

LONELIEST ENGLISHWOMAN.

IN HEART OF SNOW-LOCKED I ASIA. | VOLUNTARY EXILE. Miss Rachel Wingate, eldest daughter of Colonel G. Wingate, of Godalming, Surrey, is the only Englishwoman in Chinese Turkestan. She left England four years ago, when she was 22 years' old, and is now attached to the Swedish mission at Kashgar, a city further off from the ocean than any other in the world, and cut off from civilisation by mountains and a vast desert. This city, where the only white people are three Swedish men and three Swedish women, she has described in letters to her father. "Kashgar, told me in one letter," said Colonel Wingate in an interview, "consists of one-third Chinese and twothirds Mohammedans. One section is completely cut off from the other. Insurrections have broken out between the rival factions—the Chinese are the rulers—but, so far, my daughter has escaped bloodshed. "There, in the heart of Asia, it snows hard, but it is very rare that any rain is seen." Miss Wingate is the only Englishwoman who has been to Aksu, a Turki city, 140 miles from Kashgar. She made the journey by marching over mountain passes on snow that was frozen as hard as iron. "After Rachel took her degree at Cambridge," Btated her father, "she looked around for mission work. She had learnt Arabic and Persian. "She sailed for Bombay. It was then that her adventures really began. A train journey lasting three days and two nights took her to Rawal Pindi. From there she went by road to Srinagar, in Cashmere, through the loveliest country [in the world. "It took her three weeks to travel by road from Srinagar to Leh, over the great Zojila Pass. At Leh she had to change her caravans for yaks and ponies. No wheel traffic has ever been over the three mountain passes which lay before her. "Her journey took three weeks. They crossed the Karakorum Pass, the highest which is negotiable in the world, and the Sarsala Pass, where the •now always lies thickest. The inestimable value of a woman missionary out there is that no man can teach Mohammedan women. If a man attempted to talk to a Mohammedan's 21 £ -7* da ?Bhtw. he would probably be knifed. It takes 54 days for a letter to reach her, and for long intervals she never hears from home when the passes arq blocked."