Journey to Turkistan

Sir Eric Teichman's book tells of his travel in 1935 from Peking to Delhi, over a period of four months. At the time, he was a British diplomat in Peking, and at the outset of the book he explains that he was sent on a “special mission” to Chinese Turkistan, but he never elaborates or writes about anything other than his journey.

For the most part, Teichman's journey is by V8 Ford trucks - one new, and one which had been a part of Sven Hedin's previous expedition. In these, Teichman and his team travelled 2543 miles from Suiyuan ( a short train journey from Peking) to Kashgar, where the vehicle road ends, reverting to a narrow track.
From Kashgar to Gigit, a pony caravan was the method of travel. Delayed around 10 days beyond what he deemed this ‘latest departure date' due to sickness, Teichman now travelled over the high passes in winter, undoubtedly a much tougher prospect than he had wanted after an already taxing three month truck journey.
From Gilgit, due to the amount of snow blocking routes south to Indian ‘civilization', a plane was sent to collect the author. Almost to the day, four months after departing Peking, Teichman arrived in Delhi, and was some months later joined by his team. Made up of men from Mongolia, Chinese Turkistan and China, they were repatriated, and the journey was at an end.

So, the positives. There are a lot of photos which, despite the quality we would expect from the 1930's, are excellent and very interesting. Teichman provides a very detailed itinerary of the motor leg of the trip carefully describing all features of the journey. And, some of the passages in the book are very well written, and very interesting.

However overall, I found the narrative was often too dry (no desert-related pun intended). Teichman came across as obsessed with geographical accuracy - every village or town passed through was carefully described, its local name and Chinese name, and often translated to provide a meaning. Some paragraphs became unmanageable and break up the flow of the narrative.

The best of this book were Teichman describing in detail the challenging travel in the trucks in the desert, some of the dangerous river crossings and his interactions with some of the interesting characters he met on the way.

On balance this sits somewhere between 3 and 4 stars, but gets rounded down to 3 stars.