The traditional Chinese language is written in pictographic form. That means that a picture represents an idea. A picture of the sun and moon together is translated as the word bright. (In English, of course, we use letters to stand for the actual sounds we make. This means English is a phonetically written language.) Even though there were many languages and dialects spoken in China, everyone was able to look at the picture of the sun and the moon and know it meant bright, no matter how the word was actually said. This made learning to write Chinese a very valuable skill.
This is how Hudson and John worked out what the pictograms meant: They would pick a word in English and then find it in a verse in an English copy of the Gospel of Luke. If they were looking at the word salvation they might identify Luke chapter 2, verse 30: “For mine eyes have seen thy salvation.” Then they would use an English concordance to find ten or twelve other verses in Luke that had the word salvation in them, such as Luke chapter 3 verse 6: “All flesh shall see the salvation of God,” and Luke chapter 19 verse 19: “Today salvation has come to this house.” Then came the tricky part. They would then find the same verses in the Chinese Gospel of Luke and write them out one under the other. They then searched for the pictogram that appeared in all the Chinese verses. Finally they searched the entire Gospel in Chinese, looking for more verses with the same pictogram in them. If, in every instance, they found the pictograph to be where the English word could be found, they would enter it into a notebook in pencil.
Later, if they did not find a single place where that pictogram seemed to mean something else, they would trace the pictogram in ink.
Slowly, one word at a time, they identified and memorized the Chinese characters, until Hudson could read and write over 500 of them.
Not only did Hudson need to know the Chinese language, but also he realized that he needed to know more about China itself, particularly beyond the coastal areas. In 1850 it was not easy to find out much about China. The Chinese people were very good at keeping secrets, since they did not want foreigners, or “white barbarians,” as they called them, to influence their way of life. This was partly because of the Opium War, in which the English humiliated the Chinese people. The Chinese were not about to forgive the English for that humiliation.
The Opium War had begun in 1839, when Hudson was seven years old. It was fought over trade rights between England and China. English people wanted many things that the Chinese had to sell: silk, spices, tea, and porcelain china, to name a few. The Chinese, though, didn’t want anything the English had to sell except for a little silver. This led to a huge trade imbalance. The English soon owed the Chinese lots of money, and they were frustrated that the Chinese didn’t want to buy things from them to even out how much they owed. So they set about trying to come up with something the Chinese did want.
Unfortunately, some English officials came up with a very clever but very horrible plan. They would sell the Chinese people a drug called opium, a drug that was very addictive so they would need to buy more and more of it. Opium came from special poppies that grew in India, a country the British had already overrun and made part of their empire. Before the Chinese government knew what was happening, 40,000 cases of the drug were being brought into China each year, causing thousands and thousands of Chinese people to become addicted to opium. It was a nightmare for the Chinese. People lay in the streets begging for opium, high officials became addicted and made foolish decisions, and even the emperor’s own son died from an overdose of the drug.
No matter how much it angered the British, the emperor decided they had to be stopped. He declared a ban on the import of opium. The English, of course, were not ready to give up their new trading item, and so war began. It was a war that didn’t take the English long to win. Even though China had invented gunpowder many centuries before, it was the British who knew how to use it in cannons and guns. The Chinese were hopelessly outgunned by their invaders and were defeated in 1842. They were forced to sign the Treaty of Nanking. It was a very unequal treaty. But then, the British had won, and the Chinese had lost. As one condition for ending the bombardment of China, the emperor had to agree to give the island of Hong Kong to the British and to open up five cities along the coast as places for foreigners to live and trade. But the treaty said nothing about opium imports. The Chinese had lost the real battle they had set out to win, the right to keep opium out of their country.
The Chinese were very bitter about this foreign interference, and while they tolerated traders and a few missionaries in the “treaty ports,” as they were called, they would not let missionaries, or any foreign “barbarians,” venture into the inland areas.
This was still the basic state of affairs between the two countries when Hudson began to focus his attention on China. Hudson knew the Chinese would not welcome him or the message he brought. Yet the tracts he got from the Chinese Evangelization Society in London inspired him. There was such an enormous number of people in China who had never heard about Jesus Christ. Hudson read and reread the tracts, trying to grasp the numbers of people they talked about. He studied the map until he worked out that Great Britain would fit into China about forty times. One tract estimated the number of people in China to be 400 million. It seemed almost too big a number to be true.
About this time, Hudson heard that the local Congregational minister had a good book on China called China, Its State and Prospects, by Walter Medhurst. He knew that Medhurst had printed copies of the Bible in Chinese and disguised himself as a native in order to smuggle them up the rivers into Inland China. Hudson could hardly wait to read the book and learn about Medhurst’s adventures.
“May I borrow your copy of Walter Medhurst’s book?” Hudson politely asked the Congregational minister.
“Certainly,” said the minister. “But I am curious as to what a pharmacist’s son wants with such a book.”
“I intend to be a missionary in China, sir,” Hudson replied. “I need to find out as much about the place as I possibly can, and this book has been recommended to me.”
“And how are you going to pay for your trip and support yourself once you get to China?” The minister inquired.
“Like the disciples in the New Testament who took nothing when Jesus sent them to minister to people, I, too, will trust God to supply all my needs,” Hudson said confidently.
The minister smiled. “I have some advice for you, young man,” he said in a kind voice, putting his hand on Hudson’s shoulder. “As you grow older you will become wiser. You will see that such an idea was fine in the days when Christ Himself was on earth, but not now.”
Hudson was surprised to hear words like this from a man of God, but he was not discouraged. Medhurst’s book was too exciting! It described rice paddy-covered plains, walled cities, enormous mountain ranges, yak trips, and river voyages. Hudson read it from cover to cover several times. And he took some advice, not from the Congregational minister, but from the book itself. Medhurst strongly urged potential missionaries to get medical training before they arrived in China. Something clicked in Hudson when he read this. Now he had another focus in his training for China: Yes, he would go to China, but with medical training! Of course, the question was, how to get such training?
Before he could find an answer to the question, it was time for Amelia to come home for the summer vacation. Eighteen-year-old Hudson couldn’t wait to share his new direction with his sister.
When Amelia arrived home, she did not come alone. She brought with her the school’s music teacher, Marianne Vaughan. Marianne was lively and funny, pretty and talented. She played the piano and sang for them. Hudson was hooked! He couldn’t believe how perfect she was. He reasoned that God had brought Marianne into his life so he would have a wife to go with him to China. It all fitted so perfectly. He imagined them as a team, the first missionaries ever to set foot in a far-off Chinese village. He would preach and give medical advice while Marianne taught the children and led singing.
The three of them spent a wonderful summer together horseback riding, singing, and laughing. By the time Marianne and Amelia boarded the train for Barton-upon-Humber and the boarding school, Hudson felt sure he had spent the most wonderful summer of his life with his future wife.
After they had gone, he still had to work out how to get medical training. The obvious place to go was London. But it was so expensive to live there. He would have to work full time just to pay for his food, accommodations, and school fees, leaving him no time to actually attend medical school. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t seem to come up with a solution that worked. Fortunately for him, his mother’s other sister, Aunt Hannah, who lived in Hull, came up with an idea. Her brother-in-law, Robert Hardey, was a well-respected doctor in Hull, and he was looking for an assistant. In exchange for room and board and a small wage, as well as access to the classes Doctor Hardey taught at a local medical school, would Hudson be willing to become the doctor’s assistant?
It was a question Hudson didn’t need to be asked more than once. On his nineteenth birthday he boarded a train headed for Hull, fifty miles away, and, in so doing, took another step closer to China.
Chapter 4
The Opportunity of a Lifetime
Everything was working out better than Hudson had hoped. Dr. Hardey was a well-respected doctor and a good Christian man. He was kind and considerate. He saw potential in Hudson and gave him a lot of responsibility. And although there was much to learn, Hudson found that in many ways he was well prepared for his new duties.
One duty was the accounting; his days as a junior clerk at the bank had provided him with a basic understanding of bookkeeping. He also had to recommend and dispense medicines; five years working under his father’s watchful eye had taught him a lot about medicines, not to mention the care his father had insisted he take when mixing them. And he had to write notes and prescriptions, all in Latin, the language of medicine in nineteenth-century England. His father had taught him Latin, too.
Life quickly fell into a pleasant rhythm for Hudson. He spent most of his spare time studying for the classes that Doctor Hardey taught at Hull Medical School. On Sundays he would attend church and either visit his Aunt Hannah and Uncle Richard or take the slightly longer trip to Barton-upon-Humber to spend the afternoon with Marianne and Amelia.
On one such visit, Hudson could hardly wait to show Marianne and Amelia an article he had read in The Gleaner, a magazine put out by the Chinese Evangelization Society. The article was about a German man named Wilhelm Lobscheid, who had been to Inland China. Lobscheid was going to hold a public meeting in London to tell people about his experiences in China. Hudson told Marianne and Amelia all about what he had read. As he did so, Amelia’s eyes lit up with excitement. But to his surprise, Marianne seemed bored by it all. “Do you have to go to China to serve God? Couldn’t you become a doctor and do church work here?” she finally asked him.
Her question caught Hudson off guard. A puzzled look spread across his face. How many times had he explained to her about how he felt called to China? How could they ever get married if she didn’t share that same calling? Hudson didn’t answer Marianne’s question; instead he resolved in his heart that he would trust God to change the way she felt about China.
Amelia burst in with her own question for Hudson. “Do you intend to go to London to hear Mr. Lobscheid?” When he said that he did, Amelia began to question him more closely. How would he pay for the ticket to get there? Did he have anywhere to stay? Would Dr. Hardey allow him the time off?
