Word: sian
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...there, he flew from Chungking to Sian (400 miles) in five hours. Thence it took him five days by train to get to the Yellow River (70 miles)-his train jumped the track once, a bridge washed out under it once. He was given a horse, and for three solid weeks (rising at five, riding ten hours a day, sleeping wherever night caught him) he followed precarious mountain passes until he came to the Chin Valley...
When at last the correspondents coaxed skeptical Chinese to take them to the front in a quiet sector, "we found ourselves discussing the poetry of Robert Bridges. The Testament of Beauty can seldom have been quoted in less appropriate surroundings." In China's wildwest Sian, they met a Swiss doctor who had attended D. H. Lawrence. Back in Hankow, a Chinese lady gave them a lacquer box containing an ivory skull for Virginia Woolf...
Unconquered is by the correspondent who was the first to get the full story of Chiang Kai-shek's kidnapping at Sian (First Act in China). He saw the debacle of the 29th Route Army at Peiping, spent nearly a year in Soviet territory. His book gives detailed descriptions of guerrilla fighting and of the Red Army's famed "short attack." Best testimony to the guerrillists' deadly effectiveness are Author Bertram's quotations from the gloomy diaries of the Japanese soldiers who fought them...
First of these was the ancient Silk Road, running 2,000 miles from Sian through Sinkiang (once part of China proper but now almost completely under Soviet dominance) to the Russian centres of Alma Ata and Sergiopol, on Russia's new Turk-Sib railroad. Over this Silk Road, then called the Imperial Highway, some 2,000 years ago camel caravans, loaded with silk, jade and lacquer, plodded their way to Samarkand, where the goods were shipped to Byzantium, Tyre, Rome. Seven centuries ago Marco Polo pushed his way down the Silk Road from the West to reach the court...
...other three routes, none as heavily-used as the Silk Road, are: 1) the 1,800-mile Sian-Urga motor road, once a caravan trail across the limitless sands of the Gobi Desert, 2) the 1,350-mile rail and road route from Kunming down to British Burma, and 3) the newly-built Chinese railroad from Kunming to Laokai, which connects with the French Indo-China railroad. Hundreds of miles of other new roads connecting these main routes to many parts of the new "New China" have also been built...