A Letter From The Publisher, Oct. 20, 1947

Don’t go to Sinkiang. It’s a very hard trip—even dangerous. And when you come back, no one will believe what you find there.

Despite this friendly admonition from K. P. Chen, Shanghai banker and nonpartisan State Councillor, and similar advice from other well-informed Chinese, Time Inc.’s Nanking correspondent, Frederick Gruin, went (by air, truck and afoot) to China’s huge, little-known, mineral-and-oil-rich Sin kiang province on the borders of Outer Mongolia and, with luck, came back with his story. Those of you who read TIME’S account of it in the October 6 issue know that the story turned out to be another important piece in the pattern of Soviet encirclement of China. As for the trip itself, here are some excerpts from Gruin’s account:

“There are many aspects of tracking down the news, and the Sinkiang story — geographically, at any rate — was one of the tougher ones. It was as if our Rome correspondent had heard vaguely about a troubled situation, not within biking distance of Rome but 2,000 miles away, and, after getting there, found that he not only had to wrestle with a language (Uighur) in which even the U.S. State Department has no expert but also had to gather correct information about an overall situation with which neither he nor almost anyone else was familiar.”

To try to overcome the language barrier, Gruin took Colin-Ho, his interpreter, along. They got a lift in a Chinese Army C-47, of which Gruin says “The pilot was a cocky, young, U.S.-trained Chinese who had never flown this remote, desolate route, tricky with fierce dust storms, violent thermal drafts rising from the upland deserts, snow-toothed mountains that bite more than 20,000 feet into the sky. He got us through with nothing worse than airsickness to Tihua, dusty, dirty, crossroads capital of Sinkiang, where the racial blood of all Central Asia mingles in the faces on the street. We planned to fly back with our pilot but, luckily, chance intervened.”

In Tihua, Gruin and Colin-Ho set about interviewing everybody who could help unravel the Sinkiang story. Most of their informants were as effusively evasive as the stocky Russian manager of Tihua’s Sino-Soviet airport who said he wanted no pictures taken because “the airport is in bad repair and it would give a bad impression if printed in the magazine.” After considerable argument Gruin was allowed to take two shots, carefully outlined before snapping. Then, for a firsthand view of the area where Chinese and Mongolian troops had been having a border fracas, they trucked across the gravel wasteland north of Tihua to Peitashan, a mountain oasis. Of this journey, Gruin wrote :

“The desert is mirage-haunted and the track through it is marked by carcasses and bleached bones of camels slaughtered by Kazak wanderers for the water in their stomachs. Tough Moslem soldiers with us shot down desert antelope and huang yang, or yellow sheep. One marksman quickly slashed his quarry’s jugular and guzzled the hot blood in the belief that this conveyed to him huang yang’s keen eyesight. We preferred to quench our thirst more prosaically with Sinkiang’s wonderfully succulent melons, bought at oasis towns along the way.”

According to Gruin, this excursion saved his and Colin-Ho’s lives because “we missed the plane back — and thereby missed its fate. We were somewhere beneath it when its young, impulsive pilot tried to buck a blinding storm in the wild ranges between Hami and Lanchow. The plane radioed a distress message, then vanished, and search has not yet found a trace of it. There were 27 passengers aboard.”

It took Gruin 12 arduous days by truck over the northwest highway (“mostly an unpaved track”) to get back to Lanchow. He wrote most of his report by flashlight on the floor of his lurching Chinese Army GMC ten-wheeler. The portions of it which TIME’S editors could not use immediately repose in our Morgue as solid background material for the inevitable time when Sinkiang again makes news.

Cordially,