Mildred, and Francesca FRENCH. Through Jade Gate and Central Asia. An Account of Journeys in Kansu, Turkestan and the Gobi Desert.

by CABLE

£1,000 · Offered by Henry Sotheran Ltd

CABLE, Mildred, and Francesca FRENCH. Through Jade Gate and Central Asia. An Account of Journeys in Kansu, Turkestan and the Gobi Desert. London: Constable Co Ltd. 1927. 8vo. Original cloth with illustrated dust-wrappers (not price-clipped, but with marginal flaws); pp. xvi, 304, large folding map and plates after photographs; light offsetting to endpapers, otherwise internally very good. Very fare first edition, first printing. This is the travelogue of Mildred Cable and Francesca French who, together with French's sister Eva, undertook the hazardous journey across the largely untracked spaces of North-Western China and Central Asia, across the Gobi Desert. Cable joined the China Inland Mission in 1901, where she met Eva French and later, in 1910, her sister Francesca. Stationed for 20 years in Huozhou, Shanxi, the women, who by that time had become known as 'the trio' applied to work in Western China, and for the following twelve years they travelled across the continent, evangelising, building churches, handing out bibles and, on one occasion, controversially giving communion. Pioneering for their travels as independent women without guides or guards, they were the first Western women to traverse that part of the world. They left China in 1936, and retired in Dorset. Through Jade Gate was one of a number of titles Cable published during this time, in conjunction with French, in which they wrote extensively on the landscapes, people, and natural phenomena they encountered d

• Binding: Hardcover

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