Maillart and Fleming met the Hui Muslim forces of General Ma Hushan. Their objective was to ascertain what was happening in Xinjiang (then also known as Sinkiang or Chinese Turkestan) where the Kumul Rebellion had just ended. The journey started in February 1935 and took seven months to complete, involving travel by train, on lorries, on foot, horse and camelback. It was there that she met Peter Fleming, a well-known writer and correspondent of The Times, with whom she would team up to cross China from Peking to Srinagar (3,500 miles), much of the route being through hostile desert regions and steep Himalayan passes. In 1934, the French daily Le Petit Parisien sent her to Manchuria to report on the situation under the Japanese occupation. Photos from this journey are now displayed in the Ella Maillart wing of the Karakol Historical Museum. Turkestan Solo describes a journey in 1932 in Soviet Turkestan. Her early books were written in French but later she began to write in English. From the 1930s onwards she spent years exploring Muslim republics of the USSR, as well as other parts of Asia, and published a rich series of books which, just as her photographs, are today considered valuable historical testimonies.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |