In 1922 Anna travelled to China via the US, Japan and Korea to visit her sister Catherine in Mukden (now Shenyang), where she had been since 1915 setting up and running a girls' school for the YWCA.
Anna taught at Yenching for a year and then returned to Scotland in 1924, travelling on the Trans-Siberian Express to Moscow, where she stayed with the Quaker mission, then home to London via Berlin.