[citation needed] In 1922 Hotchkis travelled to China via the United States, Japan and Korea to visit her sister Catherine in Mukden (now Shenyang), where since 1915 she had established and worked in a girls’ school for the YWCA.

While painting child labourers at a cotton factory there she caught a severe infection, which caused her to return to Mukden and then move to Peking for treatment.

[citation needed] Hotchkis 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.

[citation needed] In July 1924, while in convalescence at her sister's holiday house at the seaside resort of Beidaihe, Hotchkis had met the American painter Mary Augusta Mullikin.

Meanwhile, a planned trip to Kaifeng and Luoyang in 1934 had to be cancelled because of fighting between warlords in the area, but in October 1934 the two artists managed to spend a week painting on Mount Tai in Shandong province, the pre-eminent sacred peak of the Taoists and one of the mountains Vetch suggested.

On the steep slopes of Hua Shan in Shanxi province, the 50 year old Hotchkis suffered heart strain, but after resting in Beijing through the winter of 1935-36 was fit to continue.

[citation needed] In July 1937 the Japanese Army, which had occupied the northern Chinese province of Manchuria since 1932, invaded the rest of China, taking Peking in August.

Hotchkis reluctantly decided to leave China, returning by ship via Japan, then Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, India and Iraq to Greece.

[11] Back in Scotland during the war, she worked as a supervisor in a cordite factory in Dalbeattie for ten months, before retiring due to ill health and return to Kirkcudbright to paint.

[12] After the war she travelled extensively in Europe and North America, and made two trips to Hong Kong where Henri Vetch had re-established his publishing business.