I’m currently reading a book about the strange fate of Gareth Jones, the young Welsh journalist who did what Walter Duranty wouldn’t, and told the truth about the Ukrainian famine. A year or two later he traveled to Manchuria, where he came to a mysterious and tragic end in August 1935.

Here’s an extract from the letter he wrote to his family on July 14th the same year:

” …we came to a huge collection of mud houses, with some stone in the middle surrounded by hills. It was Kalgan, the outpost for trade between the Mongols and China. There, two magnificent cars were waiting for us. We were to be the guests of Mr. Purpis, a Latvian, the “King of Kalgan” who is the chief trader in Inner Mongolia and sells about 30,000 horses each year to the Chinese Army. Our chauffeur was the former chauffeur of the Panchen Lama, who with the Dala Lama is the chief lama of Tibet and Mongolia. He drove us through the dirty town to a kind of mud-wall fortress on the outskirts of the town. It was Wostwag, the company for trading with the Mongols, a German firm…”

Indiana Jones was, rather surprisingly, no relation.