Leaving the New Frontier

The United States has not had an official diplomatic presence in Xinjiang for 60 years now. In fact, for many years Xinjiang was closed off not just to Americans but to all foreigners entirely, experiencing a resurgence in tourism and foreign trade only after the onset of Deng Xiaoping’s opening and reform policy. We can imagine the clerks at the China desk at Main State sulking that the U.S. no longer has an office in the capital Urumqi, particularly in light of the violence that occurred in Urumqi this past summer (See here for a parallel idea on Tibet). While opening up a new consulate in Urumqi would be a long negotiating process with the Chinese (who in all likelihood would not permit this), closing the consulate in 1949 occurred much more rapidly and haphazardly than anyone anticipated.

The U.S. Consulate Urumqi opened only in 1943, when provincial warlord Sheng Shicai reoriented his government more towards the Guomindang than the Soviet Union. With the effective transfer of power to the GMD, the United States was invited to Urumqi. Time’s report on this event is worth quoting in full for its vivid, passionate description of Xinjiang:

Across the central Asiatic wastes in China’s far Northwest hinterland is fabulous, remote Sinkiang province (Chinese Turkestan), once a wild and bloody tribal battleground, now a virtual Russian buffer state. To Chiang Kai-shek this had long been an undeveloped treasure house, a possible last refuge for Free China; to Russia it was a cushion against Japanese-infiltrated Mongolia, against British influence from India. Last week the U.S. planned a consulate there—deeper inside Asia and Asiatic politics than this Government had ever penetrated before.

While the Consulate was welcomed with great fanfare, the closing of the Consulate was problematic. When the U.S. Department of State made the decision to close the U.S. Consulate in Urumqi (contemporarily known as Dihua) on August 16, 1949, the local staff was immediately encumbered with numerous logistical challenges. U.S. planes were barred from flying in the province, so how were staff to be evacuated out of Xinjiang? Shelves were overflowing with papers stamped T.S., or top-secret, but who was going to stay behind to destroy classified cables and materials, sensitive equipment, and otherwise ensure nothing compromising fell into the hands of the arriving PLA troops? These questions and others weighed on the Consulate staff, but time was of the essence.

On Novemeber 14, 1949, Time reported that most of the U.S. Consulate staff had arrived safely in India from Xinjiang. The American public heard for the first time the miraculous details of the journey, and John Hall Paxton, U.S. Consul General, and his wife Vincoe garnered a bit of fame for their brave exploits on the trip. Paxton was credited with engineering the escape of his group of sixteen Foreign Service Officers, family members, and local staff:

Old China Hand Paxton, who had come to the Orient first with his missionary parents at the age of two, called his staff together for a conference. They decided to trek out of embattled Tihwa by truck and jeep, over the age-old route across the mighty Himalayas to India.

The first leg of their journey was to leave Urumqi and head southwest for Kashgar, a cultural and religious center for Uyghurs. In jeeps and trucks, the team drove through the Turfan Depression and the Taklamakan Desert for 1000 miles before arriving finally in Kashgar.

View Larger Map 1000 mile journey from Urumqi to Kashgar, passing through the Turfan Depression and the Taklamakan Desert.

Once they arrived in Kashgar,  they spent several weeks haggling over caravan prices to lead them into India. In another instance of spectacular journalistic writing, Time wrote:

At teeming, primitive Kashgar the party was held up for three weeks, haggling for a caravan to take them into India. On from Kashgar, the route led 500 miles to Kargalik, through the walled, rug-making, Moslem town of Yarkand. Mutinous Chinese Nationalist troops, who had not been paid for seven months, were in possession of Yarkand, and it took Paxton’s smoothest Chinese to talk his party’s way through. Paxton dismissed the truck and the jeeps, and hired ten caravan men with 33 horses and a handful of camels and donkeys. A white mongrel dog named It (Turki dialect for dog) decided to join the caravan for pot luck.

The modern day Karakorom Highway. The delegation abandoned their jeeps for horses and camels in Kashgar and left for Yarkand. For weeks they tip-toed around Karakorom's high peaks

It would take several weeks before Paxton and his crew arrived in India. They first arrived in Ladakh province, where they were received well and hosted by Indian officials. When they arrived in Delhi on or around October 27, it had been 71-days since they left Urumqi.

Paxton’s responsibility was only to lead his crew out of the province. Responsibility for documents, equipment, and Consulate property was left behind for Douglas Mackiernan (Chinese: 马克南), ostensibly a Vice-Consul but in fact an agent of the nascent Central Intelligence Agency. As the only U.S. official left at the Consulate after August 20, Mackiernan thus prioritized the work that lay ahead as:

Destroy: All archives, cryptographic material and motion picture films
Sell if possible: Expendable Government supplies such as stationery supplies and gasoline.
Turn over to British Consulate General: US Government real estate and nonexpendable property.

Douglas Mackiernan

However, the sensitive radio equipment handed over to the British Consulate in Urumqi eventually fell into the hands of the PLA and the new provincial government in Xinjiang in November, becoming a bit of a diplomatic quagmire between the British and the Americans. Mackiernan nonetheless persisted in his work, and kept Main State in Washington, D.C. aware of the ominous situation developing in Xinjiang. Mackiernan left Xinjiang on September 27, after provincial leaders Tao Zhiyue and Burhan Shahidi initiated their “peaceful revolt” and turned over to the CCP. On October 3, an internal memorandum in the State Department noted that all diplomatic officials in Xinjiang were on their way out of the province.

Frank B. Bessac, Professor-Emeritus at the University of Montana

But Mackiernan would not be as lucky as Paxton, and he ended up losing his life on his way out of Xinjiang. On April 29, 1950, after a long journey to Tibet, Mackiernan and his fellow travelers encountered several hostile Tibetan border guards. Unsure of just who these men were, the Tibetans shot, killed, and decapitated Mackiernan and several others. Frank Bessac, a surviving member of the motley crew, was finally picked up by U.S. officials in July 1950. His day-by-day log from the trek into Tibet has been declassified and posted online.

Sources:

• “U.S. At War: Shangri-La Mission. Time, February 01, 1943.
• “Over the Hump.” Time, November 14, 1949.
• Foreign Relations of the United States , 1949. The Far East: China, Volumes VIII and IX and 1950. East Asia and the Pacific, Volume VI.
• Gup, Ted. The Book of Honor: Covert Lives & Classified Deaths at the CIA, chapter 1.
• “Transmitting the Log of Mr. Frank Bessac’s Journey from Tihwa, Sinkiang,” September 21, 1950.

See also:

• John Hall Paxton papers at Yale University
• Frank Bessac. Death on the Chang Tang, Tibet 1950: The Education of an Anthropologist.
• Clubb, O. Edmund. China and Russia: “The Great Game.”

Tags: Douglas Mackiernan, Frank Bessac, John Hall Paxton, Turkestan, U.S. Consulate Urumqi, Xinjiang