Edgar Snow exemplary in journalism
(China Daily)
Updated: 2005-07-22 09:16

Road to Yan'an

Born in Kansas City in the State of Missouri, a small hinterland city where people had "little knowledge about foreign lands," Snow decided to travel around the world.

After taking his undergraduate studies in journalism at the University of Missouri, Snow came to Shanghai at the age of 23.

He planned to stay in Shanghai for six weeks, but then found a job writing for the English language newspaper, The China Weekly Review.

Maybe the most important factor in Sonw's decision to stay in China was his employer, US journalist John Powell. Powell told Snow that China was to experience a tremendous change and it would become the world's biggest news story, said Zhao Yuming, president of China Society of Journalism History.

In 1929, invited by the then Minister of Railways Sun Ke of the Kuomintang (KMT) government, Snow travelled along 8,000-miles of railways in China, writing reports on his experiences.

But in Saraqi, a small town in Suiyuan Province, part of today's Inner Mongolia, Snow was shocked to see farm fields covered with corpses, due to three consecutive years of drought.

He wrote: "Have you seen a man who has gone hungry for a month? Poor Children are just bags of bones. Their bellies, filled with bark and saw dust, look like tumours" in his famous feature "Save 250,000 lives" published in The China Weekly Review.

In an essay published in 1958, Snow recalled that his trip to Saraqi was a key turning point in his life.

From that time on, he began to write and work towards improving the welfare of the Chinese people.

In 1931, Snow met the talented US travel writer Helen Foster and the two soon fell in love. They married and moved to Peiping, then name of Beijing in 1933. While working as a journalist for several US newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times, Snow was hired by Yenching University which was merged into the Peking University in the 1950s as a lecturer of journalism.

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