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gland to write the rest of his magnum opus, the five-volume work The Naturalist in Manchuria, and, as we shall see, kept in touch with the nursing sister who had looked after his brother in the military hospital in France.
In 1921 he returned to China by way of the United States and visited the National Museum in Washington where so many of the specimens he had collected were exhibited. Once back in China he could not wait to get on with his next expedition, to southeast China. From Peking he travelled first to Shanghai and then on to Foochow in the spring of 1922 where he met Harry Caldwell, the American missionary famous for his book on the 'blue tiger of Fukien province' but, as luck would have it, the blue tiger eluded him. From Fukien, Sowerby decided to move on to southwest China, to Yunnan province in particular, a place he had long wished and planned to visit. It was not to be as Clark telegraphed an order that he should not risk his life as the bandit situation in Yunnan was extremely bad. And as Clark was funding Sowerby, he obeyed and to his everlasting regret never made it to the southwest. China was unstable for several decades following the Revolution of 1911, during which time banditry was endemic. A generic term for some of the bandits was Red Beards, hung hu-tzu, and Sowerby's own red beard, which he had during his expeditions, was quite an asset and rarely was he trifled with.
By the early part of the 1920s, Arthur found that his chronic arthritis was preventing him from making any more major expeditions and, therefore, when he met and married Clarice Moise in 1922, during her stay in Shanghai on her world tour, they settled in Shanghai where they decided to found the China Journal.
What Sowerby later described as the most tense moment in his life happened immediately after the 30 May incident in 1925 when the Shanghai police had to resort to the use of firearms to prevent the over-running of a police station and to quell a student riot during which some students were killed. This led to a major strike against all foreigners and the city came to a standstill. The expatriate Volunteer Corps was called out and organised into specialist units. Sowerby was placed in charge of the 'Sniper' unit with the sole role of covering the Chinese policemen to ensure that they carried out orders. The 'Sniper' unit had orders to pick off any policeman who failed to obey orders and, though