Gansu

And I have to make this distinction between what I consider the Northwest is two different areas.

There's the Hexi Corridor, which is what's modern day Gansu.

And then you have the areas further west, like Xinjiang, Marlin, Xinjiang.

That's like a region called Xiyu.

So you can't just travel.

So for instance, in my case, I could not travel to the province, Gansu, where we used to live.

There's no port in Gansu that's open to this project, to this program.

And if I did travel there from a neighboring province, Sichuan, let's say, from the south, and they caught me there and found me there without the proper permission, I could be, again, arrested, deported again, blacklisted again.

So there are certain places you cannot go.

And if there's 24 provinces included, that means there's six or seven that are not included.

And I think just by looking at the list here and glancing, I could probably name most of those.

It'd be Gansu province in the It'd be Xinjiang province in the far northwest.

The very difficulties attracted him.

Kansu, for example, that lonely, far-off province in northwest China, with its three million Moslems among a hardy population of Mongols, Tibetans, and Chinese, was the sphere in which he hoped to labor.

Peking was much more central, strategic, some would have said.

There were not a few mosques in the capital, and a post as organizing secretary for work among Mohammedans throughout China could easily have been arranged.

But Borden was looking for a harder billet.

Just because Kansu was isolated, thrust out between Mongolia and Tibet, because the missionaries were few and the work difficult, because the people he longed to reach were there in multitudes and no one was set apart for work among them, Kansu was the place of his choice.

Ho Chow was there with its bigoted, proud race of Moslems, Arab by descent.

There, too, were the Tangxiang, remnants of the old Hun tribes in the mountains, long since converted to Islam at the point of the sword.

Dan in a sexy

gansu? I'm going

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stop watching this.

They populated the area around Bactria, which historically was the eastern edge of Iran, but now it's part of Afghanistan.

Anyways, prior to being pushed out of their turf around Dunhuang and all along the Gansu-Qinghai border around there, they had just gone down in defeat to the Xiongnu from Mongolia, and their king had been killed.

And these captured Xiongnu under interrogation revealed their king had used the Yuezhi king's skull as a drinking vessel from which to drink wine.

So it was here that Han Wudi and his closest advisors pondered the opportunities.

They made us chocolate milk.

They gave us loads of water, loads of noodles, um, lots of random stuff to bring with us, and that got us the next 150 kilometers to get in to that night to the first town in a new province, in Gansu Province.

And I remember getting in, it was 2:00, 3:00 AM.

We got into a little noodle bar that it was so cold, the steam, like, you couldn't even see into the restaurant.

And I remember thinking, oh, gosh, OK, like how lucky I am to be able to speak and chat and just get on with folk and enjoy the trip.

Whilst my friend was like totally none because we were in like rural Gansu on these like 14 hour train journeys, just shooting shit with someone in the bunk above us.

And Karis had to listen and being like, what are they saying?

What are they saying?

The easternmost observation was done in today's Korea.

In the west, observations were taken in Gansu in the north and Yunnan in the south.

And the farthest south that the astronomers went, the history of the Yuan tells us, was farther south than Zhuhai.

Zhuhai at this time was a name for the island of Hainan, a Chinese province today on the northern end of the South China Sea.