Taking heart of grace by the kind reception of my former book on China, I determined to visit Manchuria and Korea, and to try and describe them by pen and brush as I had described the Face of China. My former fellow-traveller was willing and eager to repeat our wanderings, so we set out on February 1st of this year, 1910, via the Trans-Siberian Railway. Much has been written by various travellers about this part of the journey, but the questions that I wanted answered are mostly ignored by them. Baedeker is wholly inadequate. I begin therefore my tale from the point where we crossed the border into Manchuria, so as to give more continuity to the narrative and avoid repetition. On our return journey across Siberia I give details which may possibly be of service to those who intend travelling on that line, and also the general information about the condition of the country at the present time, which I have gathered from reliable sources since my return. When we started for our four months’ tour we had no intention of extending it to Turkestan, but finding that a railway line connected it with the one on which we were travelling, and that it could be reached in three days from Samara on the Trans-Siberian line, we decided to include it in our programme and so vary the journey home. It proved to be of extraordinary artistic interest, not to mention its historical importance both as the centre of Moslem learning and of Russian experiments in civilizing Central Asia. Russia looks with a jealous eye upon the traveller, and a special permit has to be obtained in order to travel through Turkestan, even on the railway line. Not only is it necessary to apply for this through the British Embassy at St. Petersburg, but several weeks elapse before a notification can be received that the Russian Government graciously permits the traveller to cross Turkestan. We were informed also that when all these formalities had been duly observed, the traveller was still liable to be stopped by the police on the ground that they (the police) had not received official notice of the traveller’s coming, and in that case he would be ordered to return by the way he came. Despite this discouraging information we determined to try our luck, and in due course received a “note verbale” from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at St. Petersburg, addressed to the British Embassy, permitting us to visit Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bokhara. In point of fact our difficulty proved to be not that of getting _in_, but that of getting _out_ of Russian territory, as will be seen later on.