HIDDEN ASIA

Evening Post, Issue 149, 20 December 1935, Page 6

HIDDEN ASIA

V.-INTERLUDE AT KASHGAR

THE LAST 0E CHINESE TERRITORY

(By Peter Fleming.) (World Copyright Reserved.) By ordinary standards Kaahgar, which is a minimum of 35 pony-stages (over 15,000 ft passes) from the nearest motor-road in India, must seem a place barbarously remote; but to us it felt like the last word in civilisation. We spent a fortnight at the Consulate as the guests of Colonel and Mrs. Thom-son-Glover, who 'showed us the very greatest kindness. It was a delightful interlude of country-house life with an exotic setting. The atmosphere of Kashgar can only be described as "early John Buchan." The bazaar rumours, the "secret" wireless transmitter installed, as the whole province know*, at the Soviet Consulate, the sudden disappearances of the wealthy or the indiscreet, the mysterious, aloof figure of the principal Russian "adviser," General Riibalkoff, : the eternal and fascinating problem of who is in whose pay; all this paw material for melodrama is superimposed on a background which is almost a melodrama in itself. A huddle of flat roofs, varied here and'thereby the'sweeping and bedevilled eaves of a Chinese yamen, lies in the middle of a green island in the sands beneath the snows of the Tien Shan and Pamirs. Through the dusty, sun-lit streets donkeys loaded with grey lumps of salt or bundles of fodder or of fuel are encouraged by their drivers with a sound approximating to an angry sneeze; strings of camels, their head-ropes fixed not ta nose-pegs but to gaily decorated halters, stalk through the city westwards, carrying bales of wool to the Russian railhead over the passes, at Osh in Andijan. Slant-eyed Kirghiz and bearded Tadjiks from the hills move with a hint of swagger among the selfeffacing Turkis; here and there a stiff black horsehair veil and a brightlystriped robe betray a woman from Samarkand or Andijan. An occasional Russian lorry bumps in from Urumchi, to scatter the knots of philosophers gathered in an open space before the principal mosque. The bazaar, liberally stocked with the fruits of the earth, is flooded with,, cheap. Russian goods; but the rich Chinese and Turki officials, who want and can afford good stuff, do their shopping with the Hindu merchants who sell British goods. Nine months before I had been in Russian Central Asia; the profusion of Soviet products.'in Kashgar was an odd rider to my memory of empty.shops in Samarkand and long!cigarette queues in the tobacco-growing districts of Georgia. Russia is so determined to capture and monopolise the Sinkiang market that she is .even importing British goods (notably, when we were there, sweaters) into the province via Moscow ,'and Tashkent. Some reference to less legitimate methods of competition will be made in a further series of articles. ' : The expedition idled shamelessly in Kashgar, playing football with the Hunza guard of Gilgit Scouts, watching the fearsome polo organised—a Tungan bullet wound in the shoulder notwithstanding—by Mrs. Thomson-Glover, and.malring the most of the swimming pool in the grounds of the Russian Consulate, with which is incorporated a trade agency with a large staff.. The Soviet Consular staff were charming, but appeared to find us disconcerting. (Your special correspondent's G.P.U. dossier, part of which I was once privileged to see, states that "this young man is a favourite writer of the capitalist aristocracy. He has served as a volunteer in the Japanese Army." The Russian. Press, equally flattering and equally inaccurate, usually refers to your special correspondent as "the veteran journalist.") SOVIET AEROPLANES ARRIVE. Only one incident of interest occurred while we were in Kashgar. Shortly before our arrival there had been, an outbreak of pneumonic plague in the oasis, the infection originating (it was thought) among the marmots on the Soviet frontier. Both ConsulatesBritish, and Russian—offered the municipal authorities the services of their doctors, and both sent for anti-plague serum. In, our case the serum was flown up to Gilgit by air and brought thence over the passes by relays of runners; but even by runners the journey from Gilgit can hardly be done in less than fifteen days, which, is roughly four times as long as it takes to fly from Moscow to Kashgar via Tashkent. (The mountain barrier on the Russian side is of course considerably lower and considerably narrower than on the Indian; with no landing place between Gilgit and Kashgar a flight over the Himalayas could only be undertaken with very great risk). It was therefore a matter for congratulation, ihat the British serum arrived only 48 hours behind the Russian. The two aeroplanes "which brought the latter, together withtwo specially-qualified doctors, circled several times over the greatly-impressed city, a perhaps prophetic portent in the Central Asian sky; a third, which was said to have started with1 them, "never arrived. It was typical of the disingenuous attitude, of official circles in Sinkiang on all matters relating to Soviet influence that a prominent Chinese official assured us that the aeroplanes had been sent by the Provincial Government from Urumchi; whereas even the non* committal Russian Consulate admitted that they came from Moscow. The slow process of procuring ponies and passports for the men in charge of them, was eventually completed. On our last night in Kashgar we attended a banquet given by the officials in our honour. The more important assassination of Sinkiang, whose traditions of hospitality are all its own, usually take place at banquets, and we did not know whether to be reassured or not by the bristling automatics of the various bodyguards. However, all went well. Brandy from the Caucasus, and coloured vodka imported under the misleading label of "English Bitters," flowed freely; and General Liv Pin the Manchurian Commander-in-Chief,' made a long speech in which both "The Times" and the League of Nations (Maillart was known to come from Geneva) were complimented with a warmth which might have seemed excessive had not the General admitted in his peroration that he had not the remotest recollection' of what he. had been saying or why he had said it. On the following day August 8, we took the road for India. THE GILGIT ROAD. -In the past the main trade route between India and Sinkiang has been by way of Leh over the Karakoram passes to Yarkand. Although longer, higher, and in every way more arduous for men and beasts, this road has the advantage of being open for more than half the year; whereas the lowest and most southerly of the three principal passes on the Gilgit Hoad—the Burzil Pass between Gilgit and Srinagar—is closed to pack-animals for eight menths in-the year, because the snow drifts very badly on it. From June to October, however, the Gilgit road is much the better of the two, and, if the negotiations now being conducted in Urumchi by Colonel Thomson-Glover, and

Sir Eric Teichman are successful in removing the more scandalously illegitimate obstacles in the path of British trade, its importance should increase rapidly—particularly when the Kagan Valley route from Gilgit to Rawalpindi is developed.

For two blazing hot days we retraced our steps to Yangi Hissar. Our small caravan consisted of four pack ponies and three Turkis, who had with them an additional three ponies of their own, loaded with embroidered saddlebags and such-like wares which they were going to sell at'Gilgit. Carriers from Kashgar have, a bad reputation, and these men lived up to it. Their ponies were poor beasts, and they persistently mixed up the loads so that the animals they had hired to us were carrying part of their own loads; a majority of the ponies had badly galled backs after a 'few days' march, and all finished the journey in a sorry state. The authorities in Kashgar had attached to us an escort of two charming Manchurian soldiers, armed with German carbines; there was a striking contrast between their courtesy and comparative sophistication and the less sympathetic but perhaps more effective boorishness of the Tungan soldiers to whom we were accustomed. Maillart rode a local pony, and I a big Badakshani stallion which the Consul-General wished to present to the Mir of Nagar, whose territory is skirted by the Gilgit. road. From Yangi Hissar we branched south into the desert and began Ito climb through^ a'barren rolling country of loess and piedmont gravel. On. the fourth day out of Kashgar we entered the mountains by a pleasant green valley whose mouth was guarded by a half-ruined fort. That night we pitched the tent for almost the first time since entering the. province and rejoiced to find ourselves once more in the hills, where the air was keen, the water clear, and the horizon no longer a straight line hidden in a haze. We followed the valley for three 1 days, then on August 14 did a long double stage over two steep little passes, where marmots whistled petulantly on the high pastures. It is the custom of the country.that travellers on official business may requisition animals, but only for a stage at a time; up here horses ceased to be available, and our

two soldiers sat apprehensively 'on yaks, which ground their teeth in an alarming way and occasionally bucked their riders off. A swift and rocky river which we followed up a narrow gorge had to be forded six times in one march; otherwise there were no difficulties., But it must not be thought that the ."Gilgit road", bears, on the Chinese side of the frontier, the faintest resemblance to a road; it is simply the' only practicable route for animals, and exceptionally agile animals at that.' AFTER SIX MONTHS. On August 15 it was exactly six months since we had left Peking, and we celebrated the occasion' with a feast of vodka and macaroni. Next day, labouring up a steep slope of screes under a, wall of snow beaten ice-hard and polished by the wind, we crossed the Chichiklik Pass, oyer 15,000 ft above sea level, and dropped down into the" valley of Sarikol, which forms part of the Tagdumbash Pamir. Here the indigenous population consists of Tadjiks (who preponderate) and JCirghiz; it was strange to see yurts again after all these months. On August 17 we reached Tashkurgan, of which (according to Skrine) "Ptolemy speaks as having been the extreme western emporium of Serike (China)." The small town, and indeed the whole valley, is dominated by a large and excessively romantic fort, which in Tsarist days was garrisoned, quite unwarrantably, by a detachment of Cossacks. The locality is today controlled by the commander of the Soviet frontier post at Kizil Robat. From Tashkurgan our escort, suitably rewarded, returned to K'ashgar; their successors, a Turki- and a Tadjik soldier, were a plausible brace of bullies with a talent fpr petty larceny. Our men were importunate for,a delay in Tashkurgan, but we pressed on and on August 24 reached half-a-dozen scattered yurts, the last habitations in Chinese, territory, situated within an easy march of the Russian, Indian, and Afghan frontiers. The official in charge of this frontier post was a crafty Tadjik, expressing in excellent Russian an abhorrence of the Soviet regime which would have been more convincing if his black serge uniform had not been of Russian cut and if he had not smoked that brand of tobacco, called Makhorka, which is issued only to the Soviet fighting forces and police. He attempted, In the most charming manner imaginable, to confiscate my rook-rifle; but in the.end we escaped from1 his clutches with this formidable weapon still in our possession. From that place we" rode on between the snow peaks of a deep valley to attack the Mintaka Pass, the Pass of a Thousand Ibex, which separates India from China.

(To be concluded.)