As Hudson made his trips inland, he wrestled with a problem. What Wilhelm Lobscheid had told him four years before at the meeting in London was true. Even when he was only ten or twenty miles from Shanghai, he scared people. They were not used to his foreign clothes, polished shoes, or curly blond hair. He remembered that to blend in, Dr. Medhurst had dressed in Chinese clothing when he made his earlier trips into inland China. So he spoke to Dr. Medhurst about the situation, and the doctor encouraged Hudson to start wearing Chinese clothing.
His wearing Chinese clothes might make Chinese people happy, but Hudson had a feeling it would make many of the other missionaries angry. They thought they were “civilizing” the Chinese, and an Englishman dressed in Chinese clothing had things completely the wrong way ’round. Besides, looking British was a protection. Everyone knew that to harm a person dressed in English clothes was to insult the powerful British Empire.
But as Hudson thought about it, he became convinced there were more good points than bad to dressing like the Chinese. And not only dressing like them but looking like them as well. He hired a barber who cut off the blond curls that hung on his forehead. Then the barber shaved the front half of Hudson’s head. The razor made a few small cuts in his scalp that stung when the barber smeared black hair dye on his remaining hair. Once the dying was complete, the barber braided a false queue into his newly blackened curls.
Next Hudson bought himself some Chinese clothes and put them on. He started with the pants, which were enormous. The waist seemed twice as wide as he was. The merchant was right, one size definitely did fit all. Fortunately, the men wore their pants with a belt. So he put the belt on and bunched the top of the pants inside it. Next he put on socks. They felt scratchy on his feet, and they had no elastic at the top. The legs of his oversized pants were tucked into the socks, and two very strong garters were used to hold the pants down and the socks up. He put on a plain cotton shirt, over which an embroidered tunic was then pulled. This tunic reached all the way to Hudson’s feet, hiding his baggy pants. The sleeves of the tunic hung eighteen inches below his fingertips. Every time he wanted to do something with his hands, he had to remember to roll the sleeves up, then fold them down again afterwards. It seemed quite impractical to Hudson, but that was how Chinese men wore them. The shoes, though, proved the most difficult to get on. He had to fold his socks against his feet and then maneuver the cloth shoes over the top of them. The shoes were designed to curl up at the toes, and the curls kept catching on the bottom of his tunic. Hudson looked at himself in the mirror. He was now a blue-eyed Chinaman.
Even so, it took a while before he was brave enough to walk outdoors in his new outfit. But when he did, he discovered that people didn’t give him a second glance. After being so different for so long, it was strange to walk past a Chinese person without being stared at, or to not draw a crowd when he stopped to buy fruit in the market. For the first time since he left London, he really felt like one of the crowd.
Chapter 11
The Luckiest Man Alive
Each week, Dr. Medhurst held a prayer meeting in his home. Hudson regularly attended the meeting, as did William Burns, a Presbyterian minister from England who had made several trips inland with Hudson. On one particularly cold, wintry night, Captain Bowers, captain of the Geelong, a coastal sailing ship that serviced the treaty ports dotted up and down the coast of China, was attending the prayer meeting. He asked for prayer for the city of Swatow, eight hundred miles to the south. The captain had just come from there and could not forget the awful things he’d seen. Swatow was not a treaty port, but there were many foreigners living there. Most were traders: traders of opium, slaves, and prostitutes. Captain Bowers wanted the group to pray that a missionary would feel called there.
Hudson couldn’t get out of his mind all Captain Bowers had said about Swatow. He felt sure God was calling him to go. There was just one problem. He and William Burns had become close friends. Hudson hated the idea of leaving his friend. Indeed, they had become a very effective team, ministering together. But despite his personal feelings, Hudson had to obey God. So he went to tell William Burns his decision. When Hudson finally said he was leaving, a big smile spread across William Burns’s face. That very evening, he had been going to tell Hudson exactly the same thing. God had called him to Swatow as well.
In March 1856, with free passage on the Geelong, the two men set out on their journey south. The ship stayed close to the coastline, and as they got farther south, they could see the plants and trees become more and more tropical. Apple trees were replaced by banana trees, and the fertile river plain that surrounded Shanghai slowly became steep mountains, whose sides had been terraced to grow rice. Silt and mud gave way to long, white sandy beaches. It was all so warm and bright and lush compared to Shanghai in winter.
In Swatow the two men rented an attic room above an incense shop. It was a big room that ran the length of the store. To get to it they had to climb a ladder propped behind the counter. There was no trapdoor to the room, and anytime someone in the shop was curious about what the foreign devils were doing, they just climbed the ladder and looked in.
Hudson learned some of the local dialect, and before long he was preaching in the streets. He and William Burns also set up a small medical clinic. Soon the clinic was bustling with people. Hudson did his best to meet their needs, but he had left most of his medicines, surgical equipment, and books back in Shanghai. For the clinic to be more effective, it was decided that Hudson should make an extended trip back to Shanghai and collect his things.
Someone in Shanghai could have saved him the trip if he had been told that a fire in the London Missionary Society store house had destroyed all his medical supplies. But since no one had written him, it was a great shock to Hudson when he reached Shanghai. Although discouraged and frustrated by what had happened to his belongings, he decided that after traveling eight hundred miles, he was not going to return empty-handed. So he set out for Ning-po to see if Dr. Parker had any spare supplies.
When he arrived, he found the new hospital nearly finished. Glad to see him, Dr. Parker asked Hudson to help him get things organized. There was much to do. Hudson decided the experience would be useful to him when he returned to Swatow.
It was two months before everything was organized. Hudson felt great satisfaction as the new hospital opened and began ministering to the medical needs of the local population. The two months had also given him a good opportunity to get to know John Jones and his wife Mary, who were the latest missionaries the Chinese Evangelization Society had sent to China. John Jones and Hudson became good friends. They made several short trips together to some of the outlying settlements around Ning-po to preach the Gospel and distribute tracts and Bibles.
Hudson made another friendship during his two months in Ning-po. Every Wednesday evening, the Parkers had dinner with Miss Aldersey and the Dyer sisters. At sixty years of age, Miss Aldersey was a formidable woman. She had been in China a long time and had single-handedly established a large school and orphanage, the first of its kind to be opened in China by Protestants. When Miss Aldersey made up her mind about something, there was no going back. She decided once that an early morning walk was good for her health. So at exactly 5 a.m. every morning she could be seen walking once around the city wall. If it snowed, she wore more clothes. If it was dark or foggy, a servant walked in front of her carrying a lantern. Nothing got in the way of her morning walk.
Many Chinese people found it difficult to imagine the mighty British Empire being run by a woman, Queen Victoria. Those who knew Miss Aldersey did not find it strange at all.
The Dyer sisters, twenty-one-year-old Brunella and nineteen-year-old Maria, came to be in Ning-po through a very roundabout set of circumstances.
The girls had been born in Singapore, where their parents were early missionaries with the London Missionary Society. When their father died, their mother married Mr. Bausum. He became the girls’ stepfather. Not long after that, their mother died, and Mr. Bausum remarried. The girls continued to live with him and his new wife. Several years later, Mr. Bausum also died. After his death, the girls’ uncle, William Tarn, who lived in London, became their guardian. He paid for their education, but the girls remained close to Mrs. Bausum, who, even though she had not known either of their parents, was like a mother to them.
Since she was getting on in age, Miss Aldersey had asked Mrs. Bausum to come to China and prepare to take over the management of the orphanage and school from her. Brunella and Maria agreed to go with her to China. That was how both girls came to be living in Ning-po.
During the time the girls had been in Ning-po, Miss Aldersey had given more and more of the control of the orphanage and school over to Mrs. Bausum. And having more spare time on her hands, she had taken more and more control over what Maria and Brunella did. In her mind, they were fragile young women in a land where men might take advantage of them. They had to be protected, and she was going to do it.
For that reason, Miss Aldersey was not pleased when Dr. Parker asked if he could bring Hudson along to dinner at her house. She could have said no, but that would have been bad manners. Yet to her, Hudson Taylor was an embarrassment to have around. He was short, had dyed hair and a ridiculous queue, and wore threadbare Chinese clothes. “Really,” she asked the girls one evening after he had left the house, “does he have no pride in being British?”
For his part, Hudson enjoyed the evenings at Miss Aldersey’s. Brunella and Maria both sang beautifully, and the food was always English, reminding him of his mother’s cooking. He was completely unaware, though, of the effect he was having on one of the two sisters. While Miss Aldersey disliked Hudson more and more with each visit, tall, slim, brown-haired Maria saw him as more exciting and daring than anyone she had ever met.
Once the hospital was up and running, Hudson prepared to return to Swatow and his work with William Burns. Dr. Parker gave him as much medicine and equipment as he could spare, and Hudson set out for Shanghai, where another ship would take him down the coast to Swatow. When he got to Shanghai, there was an urgent letter waiting for him from William Burns. Burns had decided to take a trip inland from Swatow. In the course of the journey, he and his two servants had been arrested by Chinese authorities and put in jail in Canton. Eventually, he had been freed and turned over to the British Consul. But now the British Consul had forbidden them to return to Swatow and continue their work there. So there was no point in Hudson’s returning.
Hudson was stunned. It had taken him three months of travel and work to get the medicine and equipment he needed for his clinic there. Besides, he enjoyed the work in Swatow. He’d looked forward to getting back there. There was so much to do, so many needs, both medical and spiritual, to be ministered to. What would happen to the people of Swatow without them?
As he thought about the situation, he decided he had two options while he waited to see if things changed in Swatow so that he could go back. He could either stay on in Shanghai or go back to Ning-po and work with Dr. Parker. He decided on going back to Ning-po.
Dr. Parker welcomed him back. Hudson moved into a house on Bridge Street, named for the bridge at each end of the street. Dr. Parker used the house as a school, but the attic was too cold for the children. That was where Hudson slept. On very cold winter mornings, it wasn’t unusual for him to wake up and find a thin layer of snow on top of his quilt that had drifted in through the cracks in the tile roof.
