J. Hudson Taylor
CHINA:
“BARBARIANS NOT WELCOME”
The missionary enterprises established in India and Africa during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries found no parallels in China, where isolationism prevailed and Christianity was unwelcome. Despite extreme opposition, Protestant missions began during the first decade of the nineteenth century. During that period only the small area of land known as Canton and the Portuguese colony of Macao were open to foreign residence, and thus missionary work was limited. But it was a start—enough to arouse Christian concern.
The underlying motivation for Chinese isolationism was national pride. The people were proud of their civilization and generally regarded outsiders as barbarians or, worse yet, as “foreign devils.” China could boast an uninterrupted four-thousand-year national history and resented the implied superiority of the West. Both the culture and religion had a distinctly Oriental flavor that proved difficult for Western minds to grasp. Early Chinese religion developed around spirit and ancestor worship and consequently was diverse and disorganized. But with the introduction of the philosophies of Confucianism and Taoism in the sixth century B.C. and later the advance of Buddhism in the first century A.D. (and from there to Korea and Japan), the religious scene dramatically changed. Organized religious teachings and nationalistic pride blended together, and all efforts to introduce Christianity were rebuffed.
Christianity came to China in four stages. Nestorian Christians of the seventh century, who lived in Persia, were the first to come. Persecution was fierce, but the Nestorians maintained a foothold until the fourteenth century. The Roman Catholics entered China at the end of the thirteenth century. In 1293 Friar John, a Franciscan monk, arrived, and in less than a decade he had founded a church in Peking of some six thousand adherents. But soon persecution brought the work to a sudden end. In the sixteenth century the Roman Catholics, inspired by Francis Xavier, reentered China under the banner of the Jesuits. This time the Roman Catholic foothold remained, though the terrors of persecution were not over. The Catholic mission strategy here as elsewhere placed considerable focus on the baptism of infants. In fact, in 1843 the Society of the Holy Infancy was founded—an order that sought to baptize as many babies as possible, particularly those who were sickly and not expected to live. The practice increased the suspicion among Chinese that the infants were being poisoned.
The fourth and final stage of missionary enterprise to China was the Protestant thrust that began with Robert Morrison in the early nineteenth century. But for all practical purposes, China was still closed. Chinese authorities were fiercely resisting opium imports, and the only solution for a time seemed to be to ban all trade and close the coastal ports to foreign merchants—a defiance that Britain would not tolerate.
Opium smuggling was a lucrative business, and little concern was given to ethical matters. Marketing opium grown in India was the most profitable venture for the East India Company, and those profits helped pay for Britain’s colonial administrative expenses. For that reason, British officials ignored the emperor’s ban on opium in the early 1830s, and by 1836 opium production had tripled. The fact that debilitated opium addicts were dying in the streets and that the emperor’s own three sons had died of addiction was conveniently ignored as many Britishers argued that opium was no worse than tobacco.
By 1839 the tense situation erupted into open warfare. At the same time, heated debates broke out in Parliament. The hawks prevailed, and Britain used its military might to subdue China. The Opium War ended with the treaty of Nanking that ceded Hong Kong to Britain and opened five coastal ports to foreign trade. It was an economic victory but hardly a moral one. “We have triumphed,” wrote Lord Shaftesbury, “in one of the most lawless, unnecessary and unfair struggles in the records of history, this cruel and debasing war.”1
There were other voices of protest—some from the missionary ranks—but many church and mission leaders believed that China should be opened to the gospel at all costs, even if it could only be accomplished by military force. Indeed, some missionaries were associated with opium smuggling itself. But smuggling ended in the 1850s when opium was officially legalized following a second Anglo-Chinese military outbreak. With this final humiliation of China, mission societies quickly moved in. Christianity, along with opium, could now be legally marketed in China, but not without paying a high price.
Robert Morrison was the first Protestant missionary to enter China, a noteworthy distinction, considering the formidable obstacles confronting foreigners in that hostile land during the first half of the nineteenth century. His prayer had been that “God would station him in that part of the field where the difficulties are the greatest, and to all human appearance the most insurmountable.”2 His prayer was answered. He persevered for twenty-five years in China, seeing fewer than a dozen converts.
Morrison was born in England in 1782, the youngest of eight children. His interest in missions developed as a youth—particularly as he read articles in missionary magazines. To become a missionary was his dream, but he faced one obstacle—his mother. There was a powerful bond of affection between them, and he promised not to go abroad so long as she lived. The delay was brief. She died in 1802 when he was twenty years old.
Soon after his mother’s death, Morrison went to London for ministerial training. After two years he applied to the London Missionary Society and was accepted. The need for mission work in China weighed heavily on his mind, and he was soon studying with a Chinese scholar residing in London, while waiting to find a suitable colleague to accompany him. A partner was not to be found, so Morrison made plans to go alone. But obtaining passage to China was no simple task. The East India Company would have no part in a mission endeavor.
Finally, in January of 1807, nearly five years after the death of his mother, Morrison set sail on an American vessel to Canton via the United States. While in the United States, Morrison met with Secretary of State James Madison, who gave him a letter of introduction to the American consul in Canton. It was in America also that Morrison had his oft-quoted conversation with the ship’s owner, who probed the young missionary: “And so, Mr. Morrison, you really expect to make an impression on the idolatry of the great Chinese Empire?” To which Morrison responded, “No, sir, but I expect God will.”3
Morrison reached Canton in September of 1807, seven months after he had left England. Only then did his real problems begin. Further study of the Chinese language could be done only in the strictest secrecy, and his presence in Canton was under the scrutiny of the East India Company, whose officials prohibited evangelistic outreach of any kind. To make matters worse, he had little choice but to live in the high style of a company official, a waste that tried him sorely. Loneliness, too, was a grievous trial. Working without a partner was difficult enough, but his lack of communication from home (despite regular mails) only increased his depression. A year after his arrival he wrote to a friend: “I yesterday received your very welcome letter. It is but the second that I have received, after having written at least two hundred.”
In spite of the restrictions placed on him, Morrison was able to secure language tutors and soon after began compiling a dictionary and secretly translating the Bible. So impressed were the East India Company officials with his dictionary that they offered him a position as a translator. He was convinced that such a move was the only way he could come to terms with the company. The generous salary was a further inducement.
At the very time that he was negotiating with the East India Company, Morrison was also negotiating another significant change in his life. After a brief courtship, he married Mary Morton, the daughter of an English doctor who was living in China at the time. Women were not allowed in Canton, so he arranged to live with her in Macao, a Portuguese colony, six months a year and spend the rest of the year in Canton working for the East India Company.
His early years of marriage were not happy ones. His separation from Mary, as well as her poor physical and emotional health, took a toll. To a friend he confided: “Yesterday I arrived in Canton…. I left my dear Mary unwell. Her feeble mind much harassed…. My poor afflicted Mary, the Lord bless her … she ‘walks in darkness and has no light.’”4 Mary’s condition did improve for a time, but in 1815, six years after their marriage, she returned to England with their two small children. After a six-year separation, she and the children returned for a brief reunion before she died unexpectedly in the summer of 1821. The following year Morrison painfully parted with his nine-year-old Rebecca and seven-year-old John. He sent them back to England “to be brought up in a plain way; but above all things, to be taught the fear of the Lord.”5
Morrison’s long separations from his wife and children, as difficult as they were, had allowed him time for Bible translation, a task that he carried out with tireless energy. He begrudged the time he had to devote to the East India Company, always considering himself first and foremost a missionary, though never openly so. His Bible translation work was done in secret. In 1815 when his translation of the New Testament was made public, he was ordered dismissed by company officials—though it was never carried out.
That the East India Company would be irritated by Morrison’s translation work was to be expected, but that other Christians would resent his labors caused him additional anxiety. In 1806, before he arrived in China, Joshua Marshman, Carey’s colleague at Serampore, had begun to study Chinese with a view to translating the Bible. When Morrison heard of Marshman’s plans in 1808, he wrote to Serampore, but there was no response. Marshman apparently wanted to be remembered as the first to have translated the Bible into Chinese. There was a sharp rivalry (though never expressed to each other personally), including an unfair accusation of plagiarism against Marshman by some of Morrison’s colleagues. In the end, Marshman won the race, but his translation, according to his own son, “was necessarily imperfect,” to be valued “chiefly as a memorial to his missionary zeal and literary perseverance”6—and, to his stubborn pride. Morrison’s translation, which was revised before printing (and thus delayed), was the better work. Morrison, rather than Marshman, is generally remembered for pioneering the translation of the Chinese Bible.
Robert Morrison translating the Bible into Chinese with the help of his assistants.
Such competition should not obscure the many instances of goodwill demonstrated among missionaries. Though Morrison, a Presbyterian, was overwhelmed with the immense challenge of reaching China with the gospel, he was not so consumed with his singular vision that he failed to give his attention to other mission endeavors. Indeed, he was so inspired by a sermon, “Asia Must Be Our Care,” by Henry Martyn of the Anglican Church Missionary Society that he raised nearly three hundred dollars from Christians in Macao for Bible translation ministry in Calcutta.7
After completing his translation of the Bible, Morrison returned to England in 1824 for his first furlough in more than seventeen years. Although often overlooked while he was in Canton, he found himself a celebrity in England, continually besieged with invitations to speak. His primary emphasis was recruitment—not limiting his horizons to the male gender only. Morrison was ahead of his time in appealing to single women for mission service. In 1823, long before the advent of the Women’s Missionary Movement, he had written that the ministry of missionary wives and mothers was often limited by domestic duties and poor health. His solution was single women: “Pious young women to acquire the pagan language & teach girls & grown women, would be very useful in the [missionary] Community.”8 So concerned was he for missions and for women’s work that he organized a special class for women in his own home. Interestingly, one of the first to join this class was nineteen-year-old Mary Aldersey, who would later be remembered for her efforts to prevent the courtship and marriage of Hudson Taylor and Maria Dyer.
Old Canton, mission base for Robert Morrison.
In 1826, after two years in England, Morrison returned to Canton, accompanied by his two children and his new wife, Elizabeth. He continued his translation of Christian literature and his clandestine evangelism; but his time was not his own, and there were increasing demands for him to serve as a negotiator between the conflicting commercial interests of England and China, which eventually culminated in war. In the midst of his busy schedule, he fathered five more children and was increasingly burdened by family responsibilities until 1832 when his wife and children returned to England. By this time his own health was failing, and he died in China in 1834. His death coincided with the forced departure of the East India Company from China and with the passing of another great missionary pioneer, William Carey, who had died less than two months earlier in India.
During his twenty-seven years of ministry in China, Morrison could count no more than ten converts. His legacy is associated primarily with his translation work and his role in stirring interest in China missions. Like other China missionaries, his name was associated with the opium trade that led to the Opium War—and some mission enthusiasts would use that association to dismiss the seriousness of Western exploitation in China. For example, A. J. Broomhall writes: “The veteran and godly Robert Morrison remained a senior servant of the Honourable East India company, which controlled opium production in India and was the compelling force in producing it in such quantities. He had no scruples against traveling on Company ships”—or even in traveling with those who were smuggling opium into China.9
Although Morrison’s converts were very few in number, one of those went on to be an extraordinary evangelist and preacher—though his profession of faith actually came while he was working with William Milne, a missionary colleague of Morrison’s. According to Broomhall, he “was to become one of the most notable Chinese Christians of all time and unknowingly the link in the chain of events which led to the devastating Taiping Rebellion against the Manchu dynasty.”10
Born in 1789, Liang Afa was a printer and a devout Buddhist who was employed by Morrison to print his Scripture portions and tracts. But due to a crackdown by local authorities, he was sent away in 1815 for his own security and to assist Milne. As he continued to carve printing blocks for Bible passages, he began to absorb the message of Scripture. “After much internal struggle,” writes Jonathan Spence, “Liang was won over, and on a November Sunday in 1817 he received baptism from Milne’s hands.”11
As a printer, Liang immediately began writing and printing his own literature, which would become his most lasting contribution:
He called his first Chinese tract “An Annotated Reader for Saving the World.” In thirty-seven pages he told of God’s power as creator, and of His Ten Commandments, and used a variety of Paul’s epistles to describe God’s anger and His mercy. Carving the wooden blocks himself, Liang printed two hundred copies, and had just begun distributing them in and around Canton during the spring of 1819 when he was arrested by Chinese authorities, imprisoned, fined, and savagely beaten. The officials confiscated Liang’s house and burned all the wooden printing blocks that he had made. Undeterred, over the ensuing months he converted his wife to Christianity and baptized her in person. Shortly thereafter, the couple prevailed on Robert Morrison to baptize their son.12
Throughout his ministry, Liang endured bitter persecution. He was repeatedly assaulted and robbed and imprisoned, but he was relentless in his determination to preach and to pass out literature. Morrison ordained him as an evangelist, and he later served as the pastor of his own congregation, all the while writing and printing tracts and translating Scripture. He traveled hundreds of miles from Canton, attempting to keep one step ahead of government officials—until he reversed his strategy. “He began to follow the itinerary of the Qing dynasty officials who went from town to town to administer the local Confucian examinations,” writes Spence, “hoping thus that his tracts would reach the hands of the examination candidates, an influential audience—if not necessarily a sympathetic one.” He further modified the strategy by distributing tracts near the hall in Canton where those who had passed local examinations came for their final tests. “In no other place in southeast China could one find a larger gathering of Chinese of proven education and of potential influence in their country’s life.”13
Liang’s itinerant ministry did not go unnoticed by Chinese officials. He was “as intrepid as any of his foreign colleagues,” writes Broomhall. But for him the stakes were higher. As a Chinese citizen, he was “publicly denounced as a traitor in a decree of 1833 which again prohibited the printing or sale of Christian books, those ‘vile and trashy publications of the outside barbarians.’” But despite the decree there was a demand for the books—so much so that they “could not be printed fast enough.”14
IT was every missionary’s fantasy. In 1837 a Chinese national falls ill, slips into a coma, and has a vision in which he is taken up into heaven. Upon recovery he reads a gospel tract that seems to explain his dream. He converts to Christianity and becomes leader of a millennial movement that sweeps through six provinces of China.
It was every missionary’s nightmare. Hon Xiuquan believes himself to be the younger son of Jesus Christ. He rewrites the Bible to fit his own beliefs, and his movement mutates into a regime combining the worst elements of Oliver Cromwell and Chairman Mao. Soldiers must recite the Ten Commandments each day, listen to daily sermons from their sergeants, and abstain from all contact with women.
(Philip Yancey, Untitled sidebar, Christianity Today, 28 April 1997)
Liang’s literature was widely circulated in China, and many people found faith or were influenced by it—not the least of whom was Hong Xiuquan, the man who would become the leader of a vast movement, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and the instigator of the failed Taiping Rebellion against the Manchu dynasty. Though influenced by Liang’s writing and Western missionaries, Hong proclaimed himself the brother of Jesus, and his teachings veered significantly from Christian orthodoxy. Yet the movement gained a foothold, and Chinese Christians—including Liang’s children—joined Hong’s liberation army.
The story of Christian missions in China would not be complete without a discussion of Karl Gutzlaff, who according to historian Stephen Neill “may be variously judged as a saint, a crank, a visionary, a true pioneer, and a deluded fanatic.”15 Gutzlaff was born in Germany in 1803, attended school at Basel and Berlin, and was in his early twenties when he was commissioned by the Netherlands Missionary Society to serve in Indonesia. There he reached out to Chinese refugees, though without board authorization. After two years he left the mission society to work independently.
From Indonesia he went to Bangkok, Thailand, where he adopted native dress and lifestyle, but his residence there was cut short due to ill health and the untimely death of his wife and infant daughter.
After leaving Thailand in 1831, Gutzlaff began making journeys along the China coast in any vessel from which he could obtain passage, be it a Chinese junk or an illicit opium clipper. On these voyages, which took him as far as Tientsin and Manchuria, with brief stops at Korea and Formosa, he attempted to verbally communicate the gospel but primarily distributed tracts and portions of Scripture, some of which were supplied to him by Robert Morrison in Canton. In 1833, after two years of traveling along the coast, he ventured inland to distribute literature and preach. His Chinese dress and his fluency in the language served him well until the outbreak of the Opium War in 1839.
During the Opium War, Gutzlaff, like Morrison, served as an interpreter for the British and helped to negotiate the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. After that he made his home in Hong Kong, and from that base he began to formulate his dream of reaching all of China with the gospel. His plan was to train Chinese nationals as evangelists and send them inland to preach and distribute literature. His goal was to evangelize China in one generation. Within half a dozen years he recruited more than three hundred Chinese workers, and the reports of their success were sensational. Thousands of New Testaments and countless more books and tracts were being distributed. People everywhere were flocking to hear the gospel messages, and the greatest news of all was that no fewer than 2,871 converts had been baptized “upon examination and satisfactory confession of their faith.” It was a testimony for which every missionary dreams and a success story for which Christians back home were longing. Gutzlaff ’s detailed letters were met with an outpouring of enthusiasm. Financial support came from all over Europe.
In 1849, after recruiting two European associates, Gutzlaff arrived in Europe in person to share the wonderful news of what God was doing in China. He triumphantly traveled and preached throughout the British Isles and on the Continent. His story was thrilling, and it almost seemed too good to be true. It was. In 1850, while he was in Germany, his bubble burst. The whole endeavor turned out to be a grand hoax perpetrated by his Chinese workers, most of whom were thoroughly dishonest. The literature, instead of being distributed, was sold back to the printers, who then resold it to Gutzlaff. The tales of converts and baptisms were fabricated, and the money that had been so sacrificially donated had quickly found its way to the black-market opium trade.
As shocking as the news was to his supporters, Gutzlaff himself, as evidence indicates, was aware of the shady state of affairs before he left China for his European tour. Pride apparently compelled him to protect his own reputation and to turn his back on the mounting evidence. Following the exposure, Gutzlaff returned to China, vowing to reorganize the work, but he died in 1851, his reputation still tarnished. To some he remained a hero, and out of his missionary efforts was born the Chinese Evangelization Society (CES), the organization that commissioned Hudson Taylor to China in 1853. Gutzlaff, more than anyone else, influenced the missionary methods and goals of the enthusiastic young Taylor, and in later years Taylor referred to him as “the grandfather of the China Inland Mission.”
Few missionaries in the nineteen centuries since the apostle Paul have had a wider vision and have carried out a more systematic plan of evangelizing a broad geographical area than did James Hudson Taylor. His sights were set on reaching the whole of China, all 400 million people, and to that end he labored, though not single-handedly. He had a knack for organization, and he possessed a magnetic personality that drew men and women to him and to his point of view. The China Inland Mission was his creation and was a model for future faith missions. In his own lifetime the missionary force under him grew to more than eight hundred, and in the decades following his death it continued to expand.
But Hudson Taylor did not develop this vision alone. His first wife, Maria, was indispensable in setting the plan in motion, and his second wife, Jennie, was in the front lines carrying out the plan. Taylor’s story is more than a story of a great missionary leader. It is a story of love, adventure, and unswerving faith in God, though not the story of the flawless saint that his early biographers created.
Taylor was born in Yorkshire, England, in 1832. His father was a pharmacist as well as a Methodist lay preacher who instilled in his son a passion for missions. Before he had reached his fifth birthday, the child was telling visitors that he wanted to some day be a missionary, and China (through the influence of his father) was the land that intrigued him the most.
Although family Bible reading and prayer were an integral part of his upbringing, Taylor had not made a profession of faith until he was seventeen years old. That was in the summer of 1849, when his mother was away for an extended visit with a friend. He was at home idly paging through papers in his father’s library when he discovered some religious tracts. More interested in the stories than the spiritual applications, he began reading. He later wrote how he fell under a “joyful conviction … light was flashed into my soul by the Holy Spirit…. There was nothing in the world to be done but to fall down on one’s knees and, accepting this Savior and His Salvation, to praise Him forevermore.”16When his mother returned home two weeks later and he told her the news, she was not surprised. She told him that two weeks earlier while at her friend’s home she suddenly felt the urge to pray for his salvation, so she excused herself to be alone and prayed until she was certain God had answered her.
From that point on, Taylor began planning for missionary work in China. Although evangelism was his sole motivation, he studied medicine in order to build relationships with the Chinese people. The zealous young Taylor also began a rigorous program of self-denial in preparation for missionary work. It was an effort to live entirely by faith. His diet was meager, a pound of apples and a loaf of bread each day, and his attic room was barren of the comforts he had been used to. He even refused to remind his employer of his long overdue wages. His rationale was clear—at least in his own mind—“When I get out to China I shall have no claim on anyone for anything; my only claim will be on God. How important, therefore, to learn before leaving England to move man, through God, by prayer alone.”17Prayer alone did not sustain Taylor’s physical strength. His already frail health declined with his meager diet, and his contact with an infected corpse during his anatomy training did not help the situation. He contracted a “malignant fever” that nearly ended his young life, forcing an interruption in his medical studies for several months.
J. Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission.
Giving up physical comforts was easier for Taylor than setting aside romantic interests. “Miss V.,” a music teacher, had become the object of his affections. Soon after their first meeting, he wrote to his sister: “I know I love her. To go without her would make the world a blank.”18 But Miss Vaughn had no vision for China. She perceived his passion for missions to be a passing fancy that he would forgo for her. Twice they were engaged, but China stood in the way. Taylor’s commitment to missions was more powerful than his love for a woman.
The opening for Taylor to go to China came unexpectedly. His plans to complete his medical training were suddenly interrupted when word reached England that Hong Xiuquan, the leader of the quasi-Christian Taiping Rebellion, had become the emperor of China. With the prospect of China being freely opened to the gospel, the directors of the Chinese Evangelization Society, who had sponsored his medical training, decided to dispatch him immediately. So in September of 1853 the twenty-one-year-old Taylor sailed for China.
If Taylor had fantasized that he might be welcomed by emissaries of a new Christian emperor, he was mistaken. The Taiping Rebellion had failed. Nevertheless, Shanghai was a strange and exciting place for a young Englishman who had never ventured far from his Yorkshire home. It was a city of dragon-roofed Buddhist temples, narrow shanty-lined streets, cheap coolie labor, subservient foot-bound women, pigtailed men, and a snobbish international settlement. There in the international settlement, Taylor found his first home; but loneliness soon engulfed him. The Chinese Evangelization Society was a small, disorganized mission board, and there was no one in China to initiate him into the work. There were many missionaries, but they looked down on the uneducated, unordained boy who had the audacity to call himself a missionary.
Soon after his arrival, Taylor found himself in financial straits. The visionary dream of evangelizing China quickly faded, and the memories of his boyhood days in Yorkshire filled his thoughts. Feelings of homesickness pervaded his letters to his family: “Oh I wish I could tell you how much I love you all. The love I have in my composition is nearly all pent up, and so it lets me feel its force. I never knew how much I loved you all before.”19
Taylor’s efforts to master the Chinese tongue only added to his frequent bouts of depression. His early months in Shanghai were filled with long hours of language study, and there were times when he feared he would never learn the language. Writing to the CES directors in England, he pleaded: “Pray for me, for I am almost pressed beyond measure, and were it not that I find the Word of God increasingly precious and feel His presence with me, I do not know what I should do.”20
After some months of living at the London Missionary Society compound, Taylor moved out of the international settlement and bought his own shanty, which he described as having “twelve rooms, doors without end, passages innumerable, outhouses everywhere, and all covered with dust, filth, rubbish, and refuse.”21 It was hardly an ideal living situation. To make matters worse, civil war was raging close by, and the frigid temperatures of winter mercilessly invaded his walls. His initial experiment in independent living had failed, and he was grateful to be back in the international settlement.
Taylor, however, was never happy living among the other missionaries. In his eyes they lived in luxury. There was no place in the world, he said, where missionaries were more favored than in Shanghai. He viewed most of them as lazy and self-indulgent, and beyond that, he characterized the American missionaries as “very dirty and vulgar.” He was only too anxious to get away from their “criticizing, backbiting and sarcastic remarks,”22 so less than a year after he arrived in China he began making journeys into the interior. On one of these trips he traveled up the Yangtze River and stopped at nearly sixty settlements never before visited by a Protestant missionary.
Foreign missionaries had become commonplace in Shanghai, and the Chinese people took little notice of them, but the situation was very different in the interior. Early in his travels Taylor discovered that he was a novelty and that the people were far more interested in his dress and manners than in his message. To him there was only one logical solution: to become Chinese—to adopt Chinese dress and culture. Jesuit missionaries had long taken up Chinese ways, but most Protestant missionaries were more reluctant to closely identify with the people.
Adapting Chinese dress was a complicated ordeal for the blue-eyed, sandyhaired, Yorkshire-bred Taylor. The baggy pantaloons “two feet too wide around the waist,” the “heavy silk gown,” and the “flat-soled shoes” with turned-up toes would have been trial enough, but to blend in with the Chinese people, black hair and a pigtail were essential.23 Taylor’s first attempt at dying his hair was a fiasco. The top blew off the ammonia bottle and burned his skin, nearly blinding him. But despite the bad experience, he went ahead with his plans, “resigned” his “locks to the barber,” and dyed his hair. But it was no fun. He found it to be “a very sore thing to get one’s head shaved for the first time, when the skin is so irritable as the prickly heat makes it,” and “the subsequent application of hair dye for five or six hours after does not do much to soothe the irritation.” But the end result was worth the pain. With some “false hair plaited” in with his own to form a pigtail, and with some Chinese spectacles, Taylor blended in with the crowds: “You would not know me were you to meet me in the street with other Chinese…. I am not suspected of being a foreigner.”24
To Taylor there was only one logical solution: to become Chinese— to adopt Chinese dress and culture.
As pleased as Taylor was with his new appearance, most of his fellow missionaries were unimpressed. He was an embarrassment to them and soon became the object of ridicule. Even his own family was shaken when they heard the news. But he persisted, and his adoption of Chinese dress and culture became his trademark. Not only could he move about more freely in the interior, but he found Chinese dress to be better suited to the climate.
Chinese dress by no means solved all of Taylor’s problems of working in the interior, however. As he traveled and dispensed medical treatment, he was sometimes driven out of villages by local doctors. Traveling itself was risky. On one occasion Taylor’s servant, who was hired to carry his belongings, absconded with his money and everything Taylor owned, forcing him to return to Shanghai, where he found refuge in the international settlement—until money came from England.
Taylor could not have survived his early years in China without private donations. Though his adopting Chinese culture and his residence in the interior had reduced his living expenses, his support from the CES was erratic and far less than he was able to live on, causing him to charge that the society had “acted disgracefully.” In 1857, after three years of strained relations, Taylor resigned from the CES. From that point on he was entirely on his own, still unsettled and wandering through the interior of China, “not idle, but aimless,” as one missionary characterized him.
The loneliness that Taylor had experienced during his early months in China still plagued him. He desperately longed for a wife. Although Miss Vaughn had refused to come to China with him, he could not forget her: “I am glad to hear of any news of Miss Vaughn you may have. She may get a richer and a handsomer husband but I question whether she will get one more devoted than I should have been.25 Finally, with all hope for her fading, Taylor turned his attention to Elizabeth Sissons, another young woman whom he had known in England. He wrote to her, requesting a lock of her hair, and after he received it, he wasted no time in proposing marriage. Elizabeth accepted but quickly changed her mind. She did not answer his letters, and for a time he contemplated “giving up the missionary work” and returning to England to woo her.
During this time of depression and uncertainty Taylor arrived at Ningpo, and there he met Maria Dyer. Taylor was still pining over Elizabeth, and Maria was leery of the robed and pigtailed Englishman, but she was also intrigued: “I cannot say I loved him at once, but I felt interested in him and could not forget him. I saw him from time to time and still this interest continued. I had no good reason to think it was reciprocated; he was very unobtrusive and never made any advances.” If Taylor seemed reticent to show any feelings for Maria, it was because he was still waiting for Elizabeth to write, and he no doubt feared a third rebuff were he to show interest in Miss Dyer. But in his diary he described her as “a dear sweet creature, has all the good points of Miss S. and many more too. She is a precious treasure, one of sterling worth and possessed with an untiring zeal for the good of this poor people. She is a lady too.” As for the “very noticeable” and “decided cast in one of her eyes,” the insecure Taylor was grateful: “I felt it gave me some chance of winning her.”26
Maria Dyer Taylor, Hudson Taylor’s first wife.
Maria Dyer had been born in China of missionary parents. Her father died when she was a small child, and her mother some years later. After that, she and her brother and sister were sent home to London for their education. But for Maria and her older sister, China was home. They returned when they were in their late teens to serve as teachers in Miss Mary Ann Aldersey’s school for girls. Aldersey, the first single woman missionary to China, was a remarkable woman, but in the ensuing romance between Hudson Taylor and Maria Dyer, she played the role of the spoilsport, and it is that role for which she is remembered.
In March of 1857, several months after they had become acquainted, Taylor sent her a letter containing a marriage proposal. A mutual friend delivered the letter while she was teaching school. She waited until she was alone: “I then opened my own letter and read of his attachment to me, and how he believed God had given him that love for me which he felt. I could hardly understand that it was a reality. It seemed that my prayers were indeed answered … he asked me to consent to an engagement to him.” Taylor went on to plead with Maria not to “send him a hasty refusal,” intimating it would cause him “intense anguish.” But she sent him just that—a “hasty refusal”: “I must answer your letter as appears to me to be according to God’s direction. And it certainly appears to be my duty to decline your proposals.”27 Miss Aldersey had stood over her timid teenage charge and dictated the response. With that accomplished, she wrote to Maria’s uncle and legal guardian in England, strongly outlining her objections. He was uneducated, unordained, unconnected (with a mission society), and uncouth. And if that was not enough, he was short (Maria was tall), and he wore Chinese clothes.
Although Taylor was dejected when he received the response, he “strongly suspected that the hindrance lay with Miss Aldersey,” and he refused to give up hope. In July of 1857, some months after his letter of proposal, Taylor secretly arranged an “interview” with Maria in the presence of another missionary. They shook hands, exchanged a few words, prayed, and then parted—a seemingly harmless meeting, but one that hurled the normally tranquil missionary community at Ningpo into the throes of dissension. Miss Aldersey threatened Taylor with a lawsuit; and Reverend W. A. Russell, her strongest ally, suggested Taylor “ought to be horsewhipped.” Some were calmer in their reactions, suggesting that if Taylor were to return to England and finish his education, he would be worthy of her. Maria’s response was eloquent: “I would wait if he went home in order to increase his usefulness. But is he to leave his work in order to gain a name for the sake of marrying me? If he loves me more than Jesus, he is not worthy of me—if he were to leave the Lord’s work for world’s honour, I would have nothing further to do with him.”28
Reason, however, did not prevail. Maria was virtually placed under house arrest, and Reverend Russell would not allow her to take communion until she “should give evidence of repentance.” In a letter home, Taylor wrote: “Dear Maria is charged with being a maniac, being fanatical, being indecent, weak-minded, too easily swayed; too obstinate and everything else bad.”29
The months passed with only one brief meeting in October. Then in mid-November, with the help of a sympathetic friend, they met secretly and became secretly engaged. Wrote Taylor, “I was not long engaged without trying to make up for the number of kisses I ought to have had these last few months.”30 Back in England, William Tarn, Maria’s uncle and guardian, was in a quandary. He had received not only Miss Aldersey’s letter but also a letter from Maria and one from Taylor himself. Thousands of miles away, Tarn was outside the fray, and common sense directed him to calmly check out who the young man really was. So impressed was he with the reports, that he gave his unqualified approval of the match, and at the same time “condemned” Miss Aldersey’s “want of judgement.” His letters arrived in December, and the following month, on January 20, 1858, Hudson Taylor and Maria were married.31
Maria was the very woman Taylor needed to polish the rough edges of his personality and help focus his enthusiasm and ambitions, and from the start their marriage was a true partnership. They remained in Ningpo for three years, during which time Taylor was unexpectedly thrust into the supervision of the local hospital, a position that was clearly beyond his capability. Through that experience he became convinced that he needed to return to England for more medical training.
In 1860 the Taylors arrived in England for an extended furlough, one that would serve a number of purposes. Both were in ill health and needed a time of recuperation. It was also a time for further education. Taylor enrolled at the London Hospital, where he completed the Practical Chemistry course, the Mid-wifery course, and the Diploma for Membership of the Royal College of Surgeons. Another priority was translation work. Accompanying them to England was a Chinese assistant, and together with him and another missionary, Taylor made a revision of the Ningpo New Testament—an arduous task, sometimes consuming his energies for more than thirteen hours a day. But the most significant accomplishment during their extended furlough was organizational work. It was during this time that the China Inland Mission was born.
Taylor needed the backing of a mission organization, but there was none that suited his purposes—that is, none that would focus on reaching into the vast interior of China. As Taylor traveled through England, people were moved, not just by his enthusiasm, but also by his passion for lost souls: “A million a month dying without God” rang in the ears of his listeners, and many responded. They would form the support base for the new mission.
The China Inland Mission (CIM) was a unique missionary society molded around the experiences and personality of Hudson Taylor. It was an independent mission that appealed largely to the working classes. Taylor knew that China would never be evangelized if he had to rely on educated, ordained ministers to go, so he sought men and women among England’s massive laboring classes. By appealing to this segment, he avoided competition with other mission boards, thus maximizing the missionary effort in China. His experience with the CES confirmed the need to establish the headquarters for the mission in China, where he would retain control. Indeed, as time went on he became a virtual dictator—though sensitive to the personal needs of those under him. As to finances and personal support, the CIM missionaries were offered no set salary but rather were to depend entirely on God for their needs. To avoid even the appearance of relying on human resources, offerings and other forms of direct appeals for money were strictly taboo.
In 1865 the China Inland Mission was officially established, and the following year the Taylors returned to China with their four children and fifteen raw recruits, including seven single women. During his furlough Taylor had left his mark on England. In the words of the great Charles Haddon Spurgeon, “China, China, China is now ringing in our ears in that special, peculiar, musical, forcible, unique way in which Mr. Taylor utters it.”32
The voyage to China was a remarkable one. Never before had such a large mission party set sail with the mission’s founder and director on board, and the impact on the ship’s crew was noticeable. By the time they had rounded the Cape, card playing and cursing had given way to Bible reading and hymn singing. But there were problems as well. The “germs of ill feeling and division” had crept in among them, and the once-harmonious band was sounding dissonant chords before it reached its destination. Lewis Nicol, a blacksmith by trade, was the ring-leader of the dissenters. He and two other missionaries began comparing notes and came to the conclusion that they had received less substantial outfits than were usually received by Presbyterians and other missionaries. With that complaint came others: “The feeling among us appears to have been worse than I could have formed any conception of,” wrote Taylor. “One was jealous because another had too many new dresses, another because someone else had more attention. Some were wounded because of unkind controversial discussions, and so on.”33 By talking to each missionary “privately and affectionately” Taylor was able to calm the dissention, but underlying feelings of hostility remained that would soon culminate in a near collapse of the infant CIM.
On arriving in Shanghai, Taylor ordered tailor-made Chinese clothes for each of the missionaries. They had been aware of his stand on the issue of Chinese dress and had agreed to it in principle, but this requirement, complicated by the ordinary pressures of culture shock, led to further turmoil. The initial discomfort of the clothing and the hair dyeing and head shaving were difficult enough, but the ridicule heaped on them by the resident missionary community in Shanghai was more than some could cope with, and the situation only seemed to worsen after the missionaries moved to the CIM compound at Hangchow. Taylor’s leadership was challenged, and again the mission was caught up in strife. Even his most loyal supporters, Jennie Faulding and Emily Blatchley, had a falling out. Nicol and others flatly refused to wear native dress and began meeting separately for meals and devotions. The situation was tense, and the prospects for renewed fellowship seemed dim. Could anything save this visionary dream that had fallen into such shambles?
The price was high, but the mission was saved. During the heat of the summer of 1867, a year and a half after the missionaries had arrived in China, eight-year-old Gracie Taylor, whom her father idolized, became ill. For days Taylor sat beside her, giving her the best medical attention he was capable of giving, but her situation did not improve. The climate had also taken its toll on others; and during his vigil with Gracie, he was called away to treat Jane McLean, one of the missionaries who had strongly opposed him. Her illness was not as serious as supposed, and she soon recovered; but Taylor’s delay in returning home to Gracie proved critical. He diagnosed water on the brain, but he was too late to be of any help. Her death was a heartrending tragedy, but it saved the CIM. The grievances were forgotten, and the outpouring of sympathy brought the missionaries back together, except for Nicol and his wife and the two single sisters, one of whom was Jane McLean. In the fall of 1867 Nicol was “put away” from the mission, and the McLean sisters resigned, allowing the mission family to move ahead in harmony.
The death of Gracie by no means ended the problems of the CIM. The greater crises were yet to come, and they revolved around the age-old hostility of Chinese for foreigners—a hostility that was magnified many times over in the interior. The first violent attack against the CIM missionaries occurred at Yangchow in 1868. The mission house was attacked and set on fire, and the missionaries, including Maria Taylor, barely escaped with their lives. As peaceable as the missionaries had been, it seems incredible that the incident could have brought on them the charge of their being warmongers, but such was the case. Although Taylor never sought for revenge or even requested British protection, certain hawkish politicians viewed the Yangchow incident as the perfect excuse to dispatch the gunboats of the Royal Navy to humiliate China, and the CIM suffered the consequences. Though shots were never fired, the Times of London despaired that England’s “political prestige had been injured” and blamed it on “a company of missionaries assuming the title of the China Inland Mission.”34The adverse publicity was devastating. Financial support plummeted, and prospective recruits suddenly lost interest.
While international controversy raged over the Yangchow incident, the CIM missionaries quietly returned to that city and continued their ministry. Their courage had been a testimony to the Chinese people, paving the way for more effective evangelism. A church was begun, and, wrote Emily Blatchley, “The converts here are different from any others we have known in China. There is such life, warmth, earnestness about them.”35
In the aftermath of the Yangchow controversy, as critical newspaper editorials and private letters reached China, Taylor became deeply depressed—so much so that he lost his will to go on, even being tempted to end his own life. He was confronting the most serious spiritual battle of his life: “I hated myself; I hated my sin; and yet I gained no strength against it.” The more he sought to attain spirituality, the less satisfaction he found: “Every day, almost every hour, the consciousness of failure and sin oppressed me.” He was at the point of a mental collapse when he was, by his own account, rescued by a friend. Aware of Taylor’s problem, the friend, in a letter, shared his own secret to spiritual living: “To let my loving Savior work in me His will…. Abiding, not striving or struggling…. Not a striving to have faith, or to increase our faith but a looking at the faithful one seems all we need.” With that letter Taylor’s life was changed: “God has made me a new man.”36
His spiritual renewal came in time to sustain him through a period of severe personal testing. Soon after the Christmas season was over in January of 1870, the Taylors began making preparations to send their four older children back to England for their education. Emily Blatchley, who knew them well, offered to return with them and to care for them in England. But it was a painful time of trauma for the close-knit family—so much so that frail little five-year-old Sammy could not endure. He died in early February. Despite the tragedy, the decision to send the children away was firm. In March the Taylors sorrowfully parted with the other three children. They could not know that their kisses and hugs were the last they would ever give to their mother. During the hot summer that followed, Maria, who was late in another pregnancy, became seriously ill. In early July she delivered a baby boy, who lived less than two weeks. A few days after his death, Maria, at the age of thirty-three, died also.
Without Maria, Taylor was lonely. He had relied heavily on her support and good judgment and female companionship. In the months following her death, he renewed his friendship with Jennie Faulding, a twenty-seven-year-old single missionary who had been a close family friend. In England, Emily Blatchley, who had become a surrogate mother to the Taylor children, awaited his return—thinking that it would be natural for her to become Taylor’s second wife. But when he arrived home, he was accompanied by Emily’s former partner, Jennie, to whom he was now engaged.
Years earlier, when Emily and Jennie were living at the mission house in Hangchow with the Taylors, Lewis Nicol had spread rumors that Taylor was giving the young women good-night kisses and more. In his effort to discredit Taylor, he carried his charges to George Moule, an Anglican missionary who strongly opposed the ministry of single women. Moule called for an informal trial and questioned both Taylor and the young women. There was no evidence of wrongdoing—except bad judgment. The living arrangement that appeared inappropriate to some Western missionaries looked no different than polygamy to the Chinese.
Jennie Faulding, Hudson Taylor’s second wife.
The news of Taylor’s engagement to Jennie was devastating to Emily. “I feel sure from what I know of my own nature that I should, if I had had the chance, have been Mrs,” she plaintively wrote in her diary. “And so it is in love and mercy my God cut off my flowing stream at which He perhaps saw I should drink too deeply. Such a sweet sweet stream, such a painful weaning! Therefore such a great blessing must await me for Jesus to bear to see me have so much pain.”37
Returning to China in the fall of 1872 with Jennie, Taylor found himself increasingly involved in travel and administrative duties. He served as a trouble-shooter and was continually called on to settle problems throughout China’s many provinces as well as back in England. In 1874, after a two-year absence, he returned to England to bring together his children, who had been scattered due to Emily Blatchley’s ill health. He returned to China in 1876, once again bringing with him more missionaries.
About all that Taylor could promise his new recruits was hardships and privations and negative publicity. Yet many volunteered to leave the drudgery of working-class Victorian England to answer God’s call to missionary service. Financial support for the increasing numbers of missionaries—many of whom came from impoverished families—became an all-consuming endeavor. One of the interesting aspects of Hudson Taylor’s ministry is his perspective on money. The impression given in CIM literature is that Taylor and Henry Frost, the American director, were relaxed about money, confident that the Lord would provide. In actuality, they were obsessed with money. In fact, four of the five “principles” of the CIM (requiring no debt, no guaranteed income, dependence on God alone, and no solicitation) related to money matters. Part of the obsession, according to Alvyn Austin, related to the very secretive nature of the organization.
The old CIM was surrounded by an aura of secrecy which A. J. Broomhall … described as a “conspiracy of silence” and a “cocoon of silence” impossible for outsiders to penetrate. Within the mission, “family secrets” permeated every level: by the 1890s the rank and file in China were in open rebellion, London was not on speaking terms with Shanghai, Toronto would not reveal its finances to London, Australia was in debt, and Hudson Taylor was threatening to resign and take the work with him. The silence extended to the mission’s archives, where Taylor decreed that “nothing detrimental to the mission be written and any documents which might prove an embarrassment in later years were to be destroyed.” … The biggest secret was money.38
One such secret was the great sums of money that flooded into CIM coffers in later years, through donations as well as book publications. But the stories of privation were plenty, and the stories—like those of George Mueller’s orphanages—had a similar theme, that of an extraordinary answer to prayer:
More than once a dozen candidates and [Henry] Frost’s six children sat down to the table without a scrap of food in the house; always, providentially, someone would appear at the door with a brace of partridges, a hamper of groceries, or a ton of coal, whatever was needed to survive the next day or week. These stories, repeated endlessly when the CIM became rich, reinforced the notion that it was always a poor faith organization.39
While hiding the millions in wealth, Taylor focused publicly on the millions of lost souls. The more Taylor worked and traveled in China, the greater his determination to reach the whole country became: “Souls on every land are perishing for lack of knowledge; more than 1,000 every hour are passing away into death and darkness.”40 It seemed like an impossible task, but he had a plan. If he could muster up one thousand evangelists, and if each of those evangelists could reach two hundred and fifty people a day with the gospel, the whole of China could be evangelized in a little more than three years. It was an impractical numerical abstraction that allowed for no interaction and bonding. But while the plan itself had little merit, the CIM did leave an indelible mark on China. By 1882 the mission had entered every province, and in 1895, thirty years after its founding, it had more than six hundred and forty missionaries serving throughout China.