An English Lady in Chinese Turkestan

"I don’t know how I came across this book but I read it when my husband was posted to Kazakhstan , which, initially, I absolutely hated. In her book Lady Macartney describes going through Russian-controlled territory on her way to China, accompanying her husband. She describes her loneliness on finding that no one speaks English and then the shock of finding that all the street signs and road signs are in Russian. I found this a problem myself when I arrived in the ex-Soviet territories – one of the main reasons I didn’t like Kazakhstan was because I couldn’t speak Russian (the main language) and this put me at a big disadvantage as very few people spoke English. The book was reassuring because Lady Macartney seemed to face all the same difficulties and homesickness as me. She did her journey to China in the 19th century though, and they didn’t have anything then, of course – no e-mail, no phones – to help her on her journey into the unknown. She helped me pull myself through Kazakhstan, because I thought that if she could do it a hundred years ago without any help, then I must be able to do it with all the help in the world."