In 1911, Adolphe Kegresse, head of the garage of the Russian Czar in St. Petersburg, modified the Czar’s Rolls Royce with tracks in order to go hunting in snow. In the 1920s and 1930s, Andre Citroën put his marketing expertise to use and sponsored three expeditions to showcase the marriage of his body design with Kegresse’s track system. These expeditions also demonstrated the ability of a half-track to cross extremely inhospitable land.
The first expedition (1922-1923) involved 12 people crossing the Sahara Desert from Toggourt, Algeria, to Timbuktu, Mali. It was the first exploration of that desert by motorcar. The second, also known as La Croisière Noire, traversed Africa from north to south, beginning on October 28th, 1924, and ending on June 26th, 1925. The third, and most famous expedition, known both as the Citroën-Haardt Expedition and La Croisière Jaune, commenced on April 4, 1931 in Beirut, Lebanon, and followed Marco Polo’s Silk Road route to Beijing. At the same time, seven other half-tracks left the Yellow Sea City of Tianjin to meet them half-way. The expedition was covered by many publications, including National Geographic.
The half-tracks survived just about everything they could have; Russian bureaucracy, arrest, bandits, rebels, severe weather, extremely difficult terrain, and the death of Georges-Marie Haardt (who succumbed to pneumonia at the end of the journey), but the vehicles finally arrived in Beijing on February 12, 1932, more than ten months after they started out.
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