For Smedley the ten-day march from Yan'an to Xi'an went badly. The back injury she had sustained in August flared up; she collapsed and at times had to be carried on a stretcher. Heavy rains had washed away whole sides of hills, making passage through the loess country unusually slow and dangerous. The conditions of famine she saw along the way depressed her. She was also unhappy with Mr. Zou, the translator assigned to accompany her now that Lily Wu was gone.

After the Xi'an Incident, the Red Army moved into the mountain citadel of Yan'an, an ancient county seat and traditionally the most important marketing and administrative center in impoverished, mountainous northern Shaanxi province. Lying about one hundred miles south of the Great Wall, it had long been the gateway through which trader or invader would pass to Xi'an. It was through Yan'an, for example, that Genghis Khan and his Mongol cavalry swept into China proper in the thirteenth century.

In 1936 Xi'an was a poor, dusty city in a forgotten corner of China. During the Tang dynasty (686-906 a.d.), as the eastern terminus of the Silk Road across Central Asia, it was the biggest, richest, and most cosmopolitan capital in the world. In the tenth century it was sacked and demolished and thereafter grew very slowly over the centuries to the condition in which Smedley found it in the autumn of 1936: a sprawling, dingy, windswept trade center, protected by thick medieval walls from the rugged, impoverished countryside of Shaanxi province.

Smedley spent ten months in the Soviet Union, from June, 1933, until April, 1934. Soon after she arrived in Moscow, doctors advised her to go to a sanitorium for heart patients in the Caucasus Mountains at Kislovodsk. She paid for the summer's stay there by using the advance from her Moscow publisher and by selling over a thousand of the photographs she had taken in China.

When Agnes Smedley crossed the Soviet-Manchurian border into China in late December of 1928, British intelligence officers sprang into action. They informed the U.S. consul in Harbin that she was an undesirable who had forfeited her U.S. citizenship by marrying a British subject, Virendranath Chattopadhyaya. Convinced that her purpose in coming to China was to incite Sikh soldiers and police to rebellion in the treaty ports, they asked the U.S. consul to declare her passport invalid so that they could deport her. When questioned at the U.S.

During 1927 Smedley became convinced that within a year or so Britain would go to war against the Soviet Union in order to stop Bolshevik influence from spreading across the British Empire in Asia.[1] On June 29 she reported to Florence: »I am writing ... for the Indian press,, counteracting British propaganda against Russia, for ... if another war breaks-and it is bound to within a year at the latest-[we hope that] India will strike for its freedom and that all Asia will at last be free.«

Smedley returned to Berlin in December of 1925, full of unrealistic expectations: she would quickly polish the first draft of Daughter of Earth, find German and American publishers for it, and begin to experience financial independence at last. But almost immediately she found herself preoccupied with the practical problems of earning a living. To support herself, she resumed teaching English, not only at the University of Berlin, but also privately. And one of her private students, Tilla Durieux, quickly assumed a major role in her life.

By late 1923, Smedley's »revolutionary marriage«  was disintegrating, even though in many ways Chatto was a better match for her than Ernest Brundin. She shared Chatto's revolutionary goals; they agreed to make political work, and not childrearing, their cementing concern. Both had been married and had come together only after separately establishing their credentials within the independence movement. Emotionally, both were intense and moralistic, with a burning need to exert themselves in the larger body politic.

Armed with a typewriter and briefcase, Agnes Smedley jumped ship at Danzig in late December of 1920. Held up at customs because she had no passport and no visa, she telegrammed Virendranath Chattopadhyaya of the Berlin Indian Revolutionary Committee. The committee promptly contacted the German Foreign Office, which interceded with customs officials at Danzig and eased Smedley's way to Berlin.