of this small Tibetan kingdom, and his explorations included visits to the great Kumbum, Labrang and Rakya Tibetan monasteries. The entire region was wracked by warlordism and ferocious Tibetan-Muslim conflicts. Rock witnessed some of the brutal consequences of the Golok rebellions when the Warlord general Ma Qi's Chinese Muslim army campaigned against the fiercely independent nomadic Goloks and ravaged the Labrang Monastery. Rock finally left Choni in March 1927, but not before acquiring from Choni's famous printing press complete sets of the Kanjur and Tanjur canon of Tibetan Buddhist scriptures, 317 volumes in total, printed from 18th century wood blocks considered among the very finest quality. The following year Choni was sacked, the monastery and its ancient press burnt to the ground in the Muslim conflict in Gansu (1927–1930) by a Muslim army. This was the most important of a number of significant Tibetan texts Rock acquired for the Library of Congress collection. When the Arnold Arboretum declined to finance a return expedition, Rock found sponsorship from the National Geographic Society to make a number of trips to southwest Sichuan to explore both the Konkaling range and Minya Konka (Mount Gongga). The latter is among the highest mountains outside of the Himalayas and was particularly difficult of access, not least because of the purported hostility of the local tribes. Rock approached closer to Minya Konka than any other Westerner and with characteristic romantic exaggeration declared it to be higher than Everest, although at the time he was not alone in this wishful miscalculation. During these explorations, Rock based himself in the lama kingdom of Muli, which he had first visited in 1924. Another small kingdom that he often visited, also in southwest Sichuan, was Yongning on the beautiful Lugu Lake, center of the Mosuo people. These explorations produced a series of articles for the National Geographic magazine, although the editors were hard pressed to reshape them, much to his annoyance, for their more popular readership and to off-set Rock's propensity for accumulative detail over coherent presentation. Nonetheless, he published a significant number of articles on little known areas and exotic peoples and customs of Western China accompanied by his excellent photographs. Studies of the Nakhi Despite the scale of his botanical collecting, for which he primarily received his funding, Rock published nothing on the flora of China (although later he did work on a large phytogeographical study, partially published posthumously).