To answer some of the questions subscribers all over the world have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes, and distributes its news.

Teddy White of TIME'S Chungking office was the first American newsman in years to enter the forbidden vastnesses of Chinese Turkestan.

This fabled land lies like a sort of buffer state between the empires of Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek--"far beyond the end of the Great Wall, out over the ancient caravan route, six oases to Baboon pass, six oases to Kami, along the rim of the Celestial Mountains, past the Red Salt Lake and the Blue Salt Lake." It is two days by plane to Urumchi and then two weeks by ancient truck across the drifting, trackless desert to Kashgar near the Russian border.

Teddy is back in New York this week for his first visit home since early in 1942--and perhaps you would be interested in some of the things he has been telling me about his personal experiences on his journey to civilization's oldest and newest frontier.

"At the airport in Urumchi we first met 'the boys'--on hand to greet the incoming planes with appropriate ceremony: tommy guns, rifles, pistols, all sorts of assorted hardware. It's a tough country up there and guns are always handy. Even when we banqueted on sea-slugs with the governor we noticed that the white-aproned waiters carried Mausers on their hips.

"Urumchi is full of bloody touches (like the nice flat place where the Moslems slaughtered 40,000 Chinese in cold blood) and we spent about a week there being entertained royally and well. Then we got another plane across the Tien Shan Mountains to Kuldja in the Hi Valley in a regular land of milk and honey, where we gorged ourselves on chicken and beef and white rolls and fruit.

"Once we rode up into the mountains to spend a weekend with a Tatar family in their hill yurt and had mare's milk and rode Kazak horses. Another day we went out to photograph all the local racial types--Chinese, White Russians, Uzbeks, Tatars, Uigurs, Manchus, Kazaks, So-lun. Each group decided to honor the visitors from America with a groaning banquet of its own foods in absolutely unrestrained Oriental quantities.

We packed in food until we thought we would burst and managed to wade through five races, photographing as we went, but we caved in before the Tatar banquet.

"When we moved on to Kashgar the trip was out of this world. The governor gave us a car but we had to supply our own gasoline (it cost 45,000 Chinese dollars). We started off with a party of nine: myself and LIFE Photographer Bill Vandivert, a crack Chinese documentary film team, a driver, a mechanic and three gendarmes to guard us on the desert. Coming back we had to get a tenth into the car for the driver bought a Turki girl in Kashgar for $200 (rather pretty though unwashed) and perched her high on the topmost mound of baggage.

"The trip to Kashgar and back along the edge of the Taklamakan Desert was one of the great experiences of our lives. We followed a route as old as history itself: Marco Polo passed over it, Tamerlane sacked it, the Chinese built watchtowers to guard it. The ruins are still there, and even the caravans are the same. We photographed everything-- sipped tea and ate melons with all the little officials who came out to meet us --got our story by putting together a hundred fragments that told us what their lives had been.

" 'The timeless deserts' is a phrase of yesterday. They have been subjected to a revolution in the past ten years and are about to face something even greater --the impact of Chinese immigration. Behind us were following the soil experts, the animal husbandry experts, the geologists, the chemists. Whatever it was we saw, we felt it was about to end."

Cordially,

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