Hudson Taylor

He was a chemist's son from a small Yorkshire town in the north of England, and before he had even been born his father had prayed him to China.

Barnsley in the 1830s was a coal and cloth town, eighteen miles south of Leeds, the kind of place where a Methodist local preacher raised his family above his own shop. James Taylor senior was that preacher, a chemist by trade and an eloquent man by pulpit, and Amelia his wife was the gentler of the pair. Their son James Hudson Taylor was born in the room above the shop on the twenty-first of May, 1832, and from the beginning his parents laid the world of the Bible over the world of the dispensary like a second, brighter map.

The father had read a book about China. He had read it long before his son could speak, and something in the country's vastness — four hundred million souls, they said, with almost no gospel among them — settled into him and would not leave. He prayed, quietly, that if God gave him a son the son might go there. He did not tell the boy. For a while it seemed unnecessary, because the boy told himself. At the age of five, having heard some visiting speaker describe the heathen lands, Hudson looked up and said what small children say without knowing what they are promising: that when he was a man he would be a missionary and he would go to China.

Then he grew, and the promise thinned.

By fifteen he was a junior clerk at a Barnsley bank and quietly sceptical of the whole Christian scheme he had been raised in. He could still recite it. He no longer believed it. One afternoon in June, alone in his father's shop with time to kill, he pulled a gospel tract from a basket and read it for the story rather than the doctrine. Something in it caught him. Miles away, at the same hour, his mother had shut herself in a room to pray for her son's soul until she felt the answer come. She would learn only later what had happened while she knelt. He was converted that afternoon — his own account is plain — and the promise made at five began to rise again, no longer a child's boast but a debt.

He gave himself the training a poor young man could give himself. He studied basic medicine so that a body might follow the sermon. He taught himself the beginnings of Mandarin from a borrowed grammar. He moved to lodgings in the London slums to harden his stomach against poverty. He learned, deliberately, to live on less than he had, so that when the sea took his salary away he would already know how.

On the nineteenth of September, 1853, not yet twenty-two, he sailed from Liverpool on the Dumfries. The passage was rough — twelve days beating up and down the Irish Channel before the ship could clear the coast — and he landed at Shanghai on the first of March the following year, into a country ripped open by the Taiping rebellion and closed to foreigners beyond a handful of coastal ports.

The other missionaries in Shanghai wore top hats and long black coats. They preached in English rooms and dressed like the British consuls beside whom they lived. Taylor tried this for a while, and it did not fit him. He was young and short and easily mocked in the street, and the black coat drew crowds that came to laugh rather than to listen. So he did something almost no European missionary had done. He shaved the front of his head, grew the rest into a queue, dyed it black, and put on the long gown of a Chinese teacher. His own countrymen were appalled. Some of them wrote home to say he had lost his dignity. He wrote home to say he had lost his English clothes and gained a hearing.

He met Maria Dyer in Ningpo. She had been born on a Malayan mission compound, orphaned by ten, and had come out to China at sixteen to teach in a girls' school. They married on the twentieth of January, 1858, in the British consulate at Ningpo, and she gave him what he needed most: fluency in a dialect he was still learning, and a steadiness that outlasted his own.

By 1860 his health had collapsed. He came home to England with Maria and their infant daughter, and for the next five years, in a small London house, he did the work that would remake missions. He completed a translation of the New Testament into the Ningpo dialect. He drew up maps of the inland provinces of China and marked, one by one, the places where no missionary had ever gone. He counted the millions in each and could not stop counting them.

And the counting broke him.

In June of 1865 friends sent him to Brighton, on the south coast, to rest. He was thirty-three and ill and could not sleep. On Sunday the twenty-fifth he went with them to a large seaside chapel, sat through part of the service, and could not bear the rest of it. He walked out. He went down to the beach.

He later wrote what happened there.

He was asking God for twenty-four workers. Two for each of the eleven inland provinces still without a resident missionary, and two for Mongolia. It was not a modest prayer for a man with ten pounds in the bank and no organisation to send them. He opened a bank account under a name that did not yet exist — the China Inland Mission — and wrote in the flyleaf of his Bible that he had prayed for twenty-four willing, skilful labourers at Brighton, on the twenty-fifth of June, 1865.

Less than a year later the Lammermuir sailed from London with Taylor, Maria, their four children and sixteen new missionaries aboard, bound for a country that did not want them. The twenty-four came, and more.

The mission he made was a strange thing by the standards of its day. It took working-class men whom the older societies would not take. It sent single women into interior provinces where no other agency would send them. It refused to solicit funds, on the plain principle that God's work done in God's way would not lack God's supply. Its members wore Chinese clothes and ate Chinese food and lived in Chinese houses, and they went, at last, into the inland where no other mission had gone.

The cost of it was terrible. In August of 1867 his eldest daughter Grace died of meningitis, eight years old, near Hangchow. In July of 1870 Maria died of cholera at Chinkiang, thirty-three years old, buried in the small Protestant cemetery there. Of the nine children she had borne him, five had already gone into the ground before her. He sat by her grave and wrote that God was too wise to be unkind. He did not say it lightly. He had earned every word of it.

He kept going. He married again — Jennie Faulding, one of his own missionaries — and for forty years more he crossed and re-crossed the sea, ten voyages in all, watching the mission he had begun with ten pounds grow to more than eight hundred workers across the inland provinces. He wrote quietly, from the middle of that long work, that

He died on the third of June, 1905, in a small house in Changsha, in the province of Hunan. He was seventy-three. He had come back to China for one last visit, because he could not stay away from it, and one evening after supper he sat in a chair and simply went. They carried him down the Yangtze to Chinkiang and buried him beside Maria and the children, in the little cemetery he had asked for long before.

The graves are gone now — the Red Guards took the stones in the Cultural Revolution, and industrial buildings stand over the ground. But the church he prayed for on Brighton beach did not go with them.

There were, at his death, some hundred thousand Chinese Christians. There are, at the last honest count, close to a hundred million.

A chemist's son from Barnsley prayed for twenty-four labourers on a beach one Sunday morning in June.

The Lord of the harvest was listening.