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 during their travels. It remains a record of great hardship and danger, but also of the courage of conviction evidenced in the life of pioneer missionaries. 'They penetrated country where persons of English nationality had never been seen before … [resulting in] a travel-book of absorbing interest and great geographical and ethnological significance' (blurb inside front flap). - By 1947 the book had reached the eleventh edition or printing.
Loosely inserted: A folded small leaflet advertising other titles by French and Cable, and details of a lecture which was held on the 23rd March 1933, and with a photograph of the women alongside a review from The Spectator.
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