I speak Russ, Manchu, and the Tartar or broken Turkish of the Russian steppes, and have also some knowledge of Chinese, which I might easily improve at Kiachta, half of the inhabitants of which town are Chinamen.

I am therefore not altogether unqualified for such an adventure.[109] The Bible Committee considered this and other plans through the intervening months, and it seems clear that at the end they would have sanctioned some form of missionary work for Borrow in the Chinese Empire; but on 1st June 1835 he wrote to say that the Russian Government, solicitous of maintaining good relations with China, would not grant him a passport across Siberia except on the condition that he carried not one single Manchu Bible thither.[110] And so Borrow's dreams were left unfulfilled.

He was never to see China or the farther East, although, because he was a dreamer and like his hero, Defoe, a bit of a liar, he often said he had.

In September 1835 he was back in England awaiting in his mother's home in Norwich further commissions from his friends of the Bible Society.
* * * * * Work on the Manchu New Testament did not entirely absorb Borrow's activities in St.Petersburg.He seems to have made a proposition to another organisation, as the following letter indicates.

The proposal does not appear to have borne any fruit: PRAYER BOOK AND HOMILY SOCIETY, NO.