Word: turkestan
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From an air base in China New York Timesman Brooks Atkinson reported that a U.S. flyer, cutting across the mountains to Chinese Turkestan, had taken his plane up through a soupy overcast to 31,000 ft. Said the unnamed pilot: "I was surprised to find I was flying parallel with a mountain, between 2,000 and 3,000 ft. below its peak...
...Chung-ying. Britain, whose Indian empire verged on the area of revolt, watched with interest. Within the Great Wall, Chiang Kai-shek was simultaneously fighting a half-dozen civil wars, trying to bring his bleeding country into readiness for war with Japan. He had no strength to spare for Turkestan...
More interested than any other power was the Soviet Union. "We do not mind," said a Soviet diplomat to a Chinese diplomat a decade ago, "if you Chinese develop Turkestan. But if you permit Turkestan to become a second Manchuria, we must act to protect ourselves." The Soviet Union suspected Japanese designs on Soviet Central Asia itself. Also, in Russia's mind there lingered the ancient Czarist fear of British influence working out from India. To the Russians, it seemed that the British Consulate at Kashgar might be almost as dangerous as the reported Japanese advisers of Ma Chung...
Probably no similar stretch of land in all the world is so crowded with historic ruins, sterile and clean beneath the desert dust. Through oases in Turkestan, over one of the master roads of history, wound caravans and pack trains that linked the West and East. To Europe went silks from the Orient; to China came furs, jade and treasured goods from lands beyond the Wall. From these lands burst out great nomad hordes (Huns, Mongols, Turks) that time & again had devastated both civilized Europe and the capitals of China...
...Turks, who form 60% of the population, to be steamrollered into the Chinese pattern or inundated and absorbed by tidal waves of Chinese immigration? Or will China try to preserve the minority languages, schools and courts and let the natives participate in their own Government ? Upon her record in Turkestan, China's claim for trusteeship for other retarded racial groups in Asia may stand or fall...