The first time he applied for service abroad, he was refused, and focused his attention on serving God at home in places like the YMCA.
When the Boxer Rebellion broke out the governor of Gansu helped his missionaries to get safely out of China, and then Hunter took his one and only visit back to Scotland.
During his travels he preached in Kazakh, Uyghur, Manchu, Mongolian, Nogai, Arabic, and Chinese, and distributed gospel literature in those languages.
[2][3] Under Sheng Shicai's regime, he was arrested under false charges, and locked up in a Soviet prison cell in Ürümqi for thirteen months and subjected to various tortures.
He then went to Lanzhou, Gansu, and later on farther west to Ganzhou, hoping that when Xinjiang opened up again, he would be ready to go back.
He also published a small book of collected Qazaq, Tatar, Uzbek, Uyghur, Azerbaijani, Kirghiz, Turkish and Astrakhan Turkic literature with English translations by himself.