Across China's Gobi: The Lives of Evangeline French, Mildred Cable, and Francesca French of the China Inland Mission

By Linda K Benson

In the 1920s three adventurous and determined British women missionaries traveled along the traces of China’s old Silk Road to “gossip the Gospel” in the Muslim regions of northwestern China. But as this ground-breaking biography of Mildred Cable and the sisters Eva and Francesca French illustrates, their mission service w

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eastbridge Books
• Release date: Mar 31, 2008
• ISBN: 9781788690751

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Preface

Alice Mildred Cable’s 1942 book, The Gobi Desert, has enthralled readers ever since it first appeared. Her vivid imagery and elegant prose turn the forbidding Gobi lands of western China into a landscape of great beauty. So evocative is Cable’s description that successive generations of readers have followed her dusty footsteps through what is now a classic of travel literature. Numerous reprint editions testify to the book’s enduring appeal.

My interest in Mildred Cable began with that remarkable book. As a graduate student at the University of Hong Kong, my search for firsthand materials on western China led to Mildred Cable and her colleagues, Evangeline and Francesca French. Detailed descriptions in their books provided information on trade routes, local politics, and encounters with the Tibetan, Mongolian, and Muslim peoples. At that time, it was not possible for Americans to travel to the northwest, so Cable’s fascinating books had to substitute for firsthand experience. When the region at last re-opened to foreign travelers in the 1980s, I was finally able to visit the places where Cable and her colleagues traveled over half a century earlier. My admiration for the three women grew over the course of successive visits. Each time, I marveled at the endurance and tenacity of women who had dared to travel through such harsh terrain in the early decades of the twentieth century.

While The Gobi Desert, and other publications under the names of Cable and French, include rich detail on the women’s Gobi travels, they offer surprisingly little information on other aspects of the women’s lives. Except for scattered references to their relationship with the China Inland Mission, their books left many intriguing questions unanswered: Where did they come from, and why had they chosen to work in China? What motivated their repeated journeys through the arid Gobi and Central Asia, and why did they decide to stop? Clearly, there was a fascinating story to be discovered, but over the years other writing projects intervened. Finally, a few years ago, I decided that the time had come for me to answer these questions and unravel some of the mystery that seemed to surround them. As I soon discovered, the three women’s lives were so closely intertwined that the story of one would be incomplete without the story of the other two. That is why, in the end, this book charts the personal histories of all three of these remarkable women.

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks are due to those individuals who have been helpful and encouraging during the process of researching and writing this book and to the institutions which made available the documents and materials on which it is based. The latter include, first and foremost, the Special Collections section of the School of Oriental and African Studies Library, University of London, where archivist Rosemary Seton and her staff provided helpful, efficient service; the British and Foreign Bible Society, Swindon; and the India Office Records, in the British Library, London. In the United States, I consulted the archives of the Billy Graham Center, Wheaton College, in Wheaton, Illinois, and am particularly indebted to Robert Shuster and his staff who also facilitated a memorable evening with Reverend Otto Schoerner who, while serving as a newly minted young missionary in 1930s Xinjiang, met Mildred Cable and the French sisters on one of their long itinerations in the Gobi.

My thanks to colleagues R. Gary Tiedemann, Kathleen Lodwick, and Alvyn Austin for sharing information and ideas, and to Daniel Bays, Roger Thompson, and Rhonda Semple, all of whom read my first effort at documenting the women’s lives in a paper presented at the Association for Asian Studies meeting in 2000. Thanks also to the Yale-Edinburgh group for providing a supportive forum in which to explore ideas related to Christian world missions. For copies of documents related to various aspects of the women’s lives, I am grateful to Brian MacCredie, Glen Timmerman and Patricia Eastman, and, in Michigan, Michael and Mary Tedrake whose careful reading of British census data unearthed details on the French family circa 1891.

A special note of thanks is due to Philip Evans, archivist at the Westminster Chapel, London, where Mildred Cable was a member for nearly half a century. His own long-standing interest in Miss Cable and his kind offer to read through a draft of the manuscript saved me from many small errors and also helped me to better understand the role Dr. George Campbell Morgan played in Mildred’s life.

For financial support, I gratefully acknowledge the Oakland University research committee for a summer fellowship in 1999, and Dean David J. Downing who provided additional funds for research in the summer of 2000. A sabbatical in 2002–2003 enabled me to complete a first draft of the manuscript.

Over the years, my travels to northwestern China and, more recently, to the small Shanxi town of Huozhou, where the women taught for twenty years, allowed me to envision the world that helped shape the women’s careers and their travels in China. I also have benefited from the advice and friendship of colleagues in Xinjiang, Nanjing, and Beijing. Although I will forego mentioning each by name, I hope they will understand how much I have valued their support and their knowledge of the northwest.

Friends and family added to the pleasure of research and writing. In England, friends Angela Riley and David Bull provided a warm and congenial welcome. In Taipei, Taiwan, Makbule Wang Shuli and her family once more reminded me of the power of enduring friendship. Friends and colleagues in Hong Kong offered convivial company; special thanks to the Mackeowns, the Hunters, and Dr. Geoff Blowers.

I am especially grateful to my husband, sociologist David R. Maines, for his support and encouragement over the many months in which this book was in preparation. My extended family, which spreads from the mid-west to the west coast, remains, as always, an inspiration. Through the years it has taken to write this book, my parents, Ben and Margaret Westby Benson, have taken a special interest in its progress. I dedicate this book to them with love and admiration.

Although many people and institutions have contributed to my understanding of Mildred Cable and the French sisters and of the enterprise in which they were engaged, the interpretations offered in the pages which follow are mine alone.

Note on Romanization

Appended to their 1927 book, Through Jade Gate and Central Asia, Mildred Cable and Francesca French wrote, The perennial problem of how best to convey to the English Reader the pronunciation of Chinese names has been faced by the Authors, who, in order to avoid confusion, have very regretfully adopted the system of Romanization as used by the Chinese Post Office.

In some ways, the problem of romanization which faced the women years ago is still with us. While scholars of modern China use the Hanyu Pinyin system created in the People’s Republic of China, some readers more readily recognize the older forms of names such as Chiang Kai-shek, Sun Yat-sen, or Peking, while stumbling over the new spellings of Jiang Jieshi, Sun Zhongshan, and Beijing, their respective Pinyin equivalents. Complicating the issue of romanization for books like this one is the fact that some place names also changed after 1949. For example, the city of Suzhou in western Gansu where the women were based in the 1920s is today called Jiuquan. As if these were not enough to sow confusion, the areas through which the women traveled include many place names that are not Chinese but Turkic or Mongolian, and northwestern towns often had several names concurrently, reflecting the area’s multiethnic population. Thus, the town now officially called Tacheng appears on some maps as Tarbagatai but is also known locally as Chugachak (or, Qochek).

In the circumstances, no form is ideal. In general, I have chosen to follow contemporary Chinese romanization, and thus Chinese names and places appear in Hanyu Pinyin. Alternative spellings (e.g., the form used by the ladies in their books) are given the first time a word appears in the text. A glossary of Chinese terms allows the reader to move between the different spellings as well as the changes in place names since 1949. In quotations and book titles, the original spellings have been retained.

Introduction

In the spring of 1923, three British women began an extraordinary journey. From Shanxi Province in north-central China, they traveled west by mule cart along the major trade route linking north China’s towns and cities. They crossed the silt-laden Yellow River twice before joining the caravan trails of the old Silk Road. Following worn desert tracks, their route ultimately led them across the Gobi Desert, through the Tianshan Mountains of Xinjiang and over the steppes of Central Asia before they finally reached Moscow and then London in 1927.

The women’s journey through one of the world’s most unpredictable and dangerous regions at a time of growing civil unrest was a feat that few men of their day could match. As if their travels across Eurasia were not enough, they returned to China and repeated the same arduous trek four more times before finally leaving China in 1936, on the eve of the Japanese invasion. Through their years in China’s far northwest, they came to know the Gobi and its environs well; and their knowledge became the basis for a series of books which introduced China’s frontier territory to an international audience. Today, those volumes remain among the few firsthand accounts of daily life in northwestern China for the first half of the twentieth century.

Of the three women, Mildred Cable has become the best known, primarily for her masterful work The Gobi Desert, which has enjoyed innumerable reprints and translations since it first appeared in 1942. Despite the popularity of the book and the attention she and the two French sisters garnered for their travels and many publications, they have yet to enjoy the kind of attention thus far reserved for the European men who braved the rigors of travel in northwestern China. Books such as Peter Hopkirk’s Foreign Devils on the Silk Road [1] profile the exploits of Sven Hedin, M. Aurel Stein, and Albert Von Le Coq, all of whom led well-funded and well-armed expeditions through northwestern China in the early decades of the twentieth century. The three women who are the focus of this book made some of the same journeys at roughly the same tumultuous time, but did so without the equipment or armed guards that their male counterparts considered vital to their safety. Instead, the women traveled in mule carts loaded with supplies and copies of religious tracts. For protection, they relied on local goodwill, their unarmed cart driver and cook, and their own common sense. Their travels did not result in new maps of the Takla Makan Desert, such as those produced by Hedin, or discoveries of Buddhist documents like those found by Aurel Stein, but they left their own unique legacy by recording in detail everyday life along caravan trails and in small Gobi settlements and nomad camps.

While the men mentioned above can be categorized primarily as explorers and authors, the lives of the Misses French and Mildred Cable are more difficult to classify. Certainly, they thought of themselves first and foremost as missionaries, and, like hundreds of other Christian workers, they shared an intense dedication to that single cause. The three had arrived in China during the waning years of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and began their lives in China as members of the China Inland Mission (hereafter CIM), which was founded specifically to serve the people of China’s hinterlands. Prior to beginning their ministry in northwestern China, they taught for more than twenty years at the CIM mission station at Huozhou, a small town in Shanxi Province. They spoke fluent Chinese and considered China their home. But unlike the majority of their fellow missionaries, at middle age their lives took a very different path. They chose to leave the safety and comfort of their mission station for the unknown terrain of China’s far northwest where they became itinerant teachers and preachers. It was this decision that took them beyond the narrower sphere of mission service and into new realms where they became, by stages, seasoned Silk Road travelers, authors, scholars, and champions of women’s equality in both England and China.

Their travel accounts are what first brought them to the attention of the general public. The Cable and French collaboration resulted in books written with grace, wit, and authority, but it was the story of travel in exotic lands and of selflessness and sacrifice that brought them legions of readers and supporters. Like other missionaries on home leave in England, the women often spoke publicly; because of their books and also a strong public interest in China at that time, the women were in almost constant demand during periods of home leave. They drew enormous audiences whenever they spoke. In fact, their popularity was such that newspaper reporters eagerly interviewed them when they arrived in town, and local papers as well as mission publications published their schedule of speaking engagements well in advance.

Their travels also brought them another form of fame that most missionaries neither aspired to nor had the energy or ability to pursue. They won recognition from England’s learned circles for their scholarly writing and archaeological discoveries; they also received awards from two prestigious royal societies for their knowledge of the Gobi and its peoples. Mildred Cable addressed the membership of several such societies during her furloughs home, and articles under her name alone appeared in scholarly journals, establishing her as an authoritative contributor to Central Asian studies.

The women’s travels, as documented in their books and other writings, are relatively easy to trace, but other aspects of their lives are more difficult to uncover. Among these is the fact that they were passionate supporters of female equality, in both secular and religious life. They not only spoke out strongly in support of a female presence on the governing boards of mission societies, but they also were at the forefront of advocating the full inclusion of women in all aspects of Christian religious practice. Their views on the proper role of women in the church were not initially shared by the majority of their fellow missionaries, but over the course of their lifetimes the women saw some of the changes they so strongly advocated gain acceptance by mainstream Protestant groups. Throughout their careers, they also worked for improvement in the lives of Chinese women. They contributed directly to that enterprise through their girls’ schools in Shanxi and, later, in the northwest, where they taught innumerable Chinese women to read their own language in the national phonetic script, contributing to the movement for basic literacy. By example, they showed countless more women — from London to Beijing — that hard work, difficult travel, and scholarly endeavors were not the sole province of men.

Women with strong opinions and the intellectual capacity to back them up did not always mean smooth relations. As it became clear to me that their personal agenda for change occasionally put them at odds with some of their fellow missionaries, particularly male colleagues, I began to refer to them as missionaries with attitude, a rather irreverent way of characterizing women who were unwilling to have their views or their abilities dismissed by the largely patriarchal world in which they worked and lived. They were not unmindful of the genuine nature of the disagreement of some men with their strongly held view that women could accomplish as much as men, yet they did not allow this divergence of opinions to interfere with their relationship to the CIM. Ultimately, they let their work speak for them, and through their own endeavors and accomplishments proved that women could be men’s equals. Indeed, their experiences in the Muslim northwest made it clear that only women could undertake certain forms of evangelism: no male missionary could ever have gained access to Muslim women’s quarters where the three women visited regularly throughout their time in the northwest. As the following pages show, gaining acceptance for women as full participants in all areas of Christian practice and, especially, in the mission enterprise in China was an on-going struggle to which the women remained committed throughout their lifetimes.

Another aspect of the women’s lives not readily apparent from their books or other sources is the richness of their extensive social networks. They counted among their friends and correspondents members of leading Mongolian families and high-ranking Chinese officials. At academic gatherings in England, they shared the podium with Sir Denison Ross, an eminent scholar of Central Asia, and Sir Francis Younghusband, the British Colonel whose 1904 venture in Tibet drew world-wide attention and controversy. During World War II, the three received an invitation for tea at Buckingham Palace with the Queen who was among their admirers and a supporter of several societies with which the women were associated. In addition to these exalted circles, countless people of more humble backgrounds also belonged to the women’s informal network of friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and admirers. As these connections show, the women did not hide from life or from controversy, but embraced every opportunity to learn and to extend themselves intellectually and socially.

* * *

This book begins with a brief history of Christian mission efforts in China and the place of the China Inland Mission in that enterprise. Succeeding chapters follow the course of the women’s lives chronologically, with two pauses in the narrative: chapter four discusses the women’s theological beliefs and their role in supporting women’s requests for a greater role in mission service; chapter eight discusses specific aspects of their ministry in the Muslim areas of northwestern China and reflects on the place of missionaries in Asia during an era of increasing Chinese nationalism and animosity toward the Western presence.

ACROSS CHINA’S GOBI

1.

China and the Christian Mission Enterprise

Mildred Cable and the French sisters joined one of the great international enterprises of the nineteenth century when they became members of the China Inland Mission. Evangeline French made her initial voyage to China in 1893 and was thus the senior member of the trio. Mildred Cable was second, arriving at Shanghai in 1902. Francesca, Evangeline’s younger sister, joined them in 1908. Initially, the three women shared the work and responsibility of a China mission station where their duties were typical of many unmarried women volunteers in China. But their decision to begin an itinerant Gobi ministry in 1923 earned them a unique place in the history of Christianity in China. While a handful of European missionaries had reached northwestern China by the turn of the twentieth century, few women chose the difficult and often dangerous path of itinerant preacher and teacher, and no other CIM women chose a similarly itinerant existence in the northwest.[2] The three thus became pioneers whose story constitutes a unique chapter in the modern history of Christianity in China. The following pages briefly survey that history, tracing the efforts of European Christians to convert Chinese followers and the origins of the CIM as part of that effort.

* * *

As detailed in Kenneth Latourette’s classic account[3] of Christianity in China, European missionaries began to arrive by sea toward the end of China’s Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Matteo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit scholar and linguist who arrived at Macao, in south China, in 1583,[4] was the foremost pioneer in what became an ever-expanding European Christian presence in Asia. Ricci first mastered the Chinese language and then focused his efforts on China’s educated elite in hopes of converting ordinary Chinese through the influence of its upper class. After repeated refusals, he was finally allowed to move north to Beijing where he attracted a number of converts before his death in 1610. He was followed by a succession of Jesuit fathers who slowly expanded the number of Chinese Christians.

The advent of a new dynasty, the Qing, in 1644 did not immediately interrupt the efforts of Ricci’s successors. The new Manchu rulers[5] initially welcomed Jesuits at court and admired their knowledge of astronomy and mathematics. But by the end of the eighteenth century East–West relations began to sour and Western missionaries no longer found China hospitable. Disagreements over Western access to Chinese goods and markets repeatedly strained relations with European states.

After 1800, increased Western trafficking in the banned drug, opium, ultimately led to the Opium wars. Qing military defeats forced the court to accept humiliating treaty terms. In the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin, new privileges for foreigners in China included the right of missionaries to preach and teach openly. All Westerners also enjoyed the protection of extraterritoriality, which exempted them from trial or punishment by Chinese law. With freedom of movement guaranteed and protection from Chinese laws in place, the door to China stood open, and Christian missionaries from Europe and the United States began to arrive in growing numbers. Although mission societies founded schools and hospitals as part of their efforts to promote Christian beliefs, these well-intentioned activities drew critics as well as supporters. By the 1890s, anger at the Western presence was growing. By the end of the century, such anger was expressed in the rise of the so-called Boxers, or Yihetuan movement. Violent attacks on missionaries began in 1898 and in 1900, at the height of Boxer power, over two hundred Western missionaries died at the hands of roving groups of Boxers. Thousands of Chinese Christians were wounded or killed as Boxer animosity extended to anyone converted to the Westerners’ religion. As described in Chapter Two, Evangeline French was among the survivors of the Boxer attacks. The movement was suppressed by Western military intervention, and when it was finally over, missionaries who had fled the fighting, like Miss French, returned once more to work in China.[6]

In 1901, reassertion of Western power was exemplified in the terms of the Boxer Protocol[7] of that year. Western privilege was again assured, and the Qing agreed to pay a financially crippling indemnity. Chinese anger shifted to the Manchu rulers of the Qing. Revolutionary organizations enlisted a growing number of members who sought to end Manchu rule and found a republic. On October 10, 1911, loosely allied opponents of Manchu rule took control of the city of Wuhan, in central China. This event marked the beginning of the Chinese Revolution. On January 1, 1912, Dr. Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) assumed the post of president.

Mission circles believed that with Christian Dr. Sun at the head of the new government, opportunities for the uninhibited spread of the Christian message had arrived at last. But the revolution did not lead to national unity, or to an atmosphere more conducive to the growth of Christianity. Instead, by 1916, warlords dominated the provinces and ruled with little reference to the weak and divided government at Beijing. Missionaries sought to continue their work as best they could in what were often difficult circumstances.

In 1928, the unification of China under the newly designated Chinese president, Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), gave renewed hope that mission work could finally expand. Despite flaws in his government and corruption within his party, the Guomindang (formerly, Kuomintang or KMT), most of the Christian community in China held to their belief that Jiang represented the best chance for China’s future. He was still in power when Cable and the French sisters left China in 1936. Those hopes were disappointed. Jiang’s long fight with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Japanese invasion in 1937 led to another period of misery and deprivations caused by long years of war. When WWII finally ended, civil war between the Nationalists and Communists ultimately led to Jiang’s defeat and the communist victory in 1949. The decades-long effort of Western Christians to spread their message in China came to an end.

Throughout the violent and often chaotic years described above, mission organizations continued their work to the extent that warlord politics and national warfare allowed. Among the societies facing particularly difficult circumstances was the China Inland Mission. CIM missionaries worked at isolated and scattered mission stations throughout the Chinese hinterland where they made easy targets whenever trouble erupted.

The following brief overview of the CIM and its charismatic founder, James Hudson Taylor, summarizes the society’s history and guiding principles, as well as some of the remarkable traits that set it apart from other Christian mission societies of the same era. As CIM members, the three women both benefited from — and chafed at — some of the society’s practices, as explained below, but they remained steadfast in their admiration of Hudson Taylor himself and followed key principles established by the CIM founder throughout their years in China.

The China Inland Mission

The China Inland Mission was founded by James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905), the man who Christian mission historian Kenneth Latourette calls the greatest Western missionary in China.[8] Born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, Taylor was the son of James and Amelia Hudson Taylor, a Methodist family that also included two daughters (two other boys having died in childhood). The senior James Hudson Taylor was a chemist and his wife the daughter of the local clergyman, making them a family of consequence. It was fitting therefore that their only surviving son would choose to study medicine, first as an apprentice to his father and then with a surgeon in the city of Hull. During these early years, Hudson Taylor came to believe fervently that China was his calling, and his time in Hull was divided between medical training and studying Chinese on his own in preparation for the day when he would find the means to travel to China. In the late 1840s, he joined Karl Gutzlaff’s new mission group, the Chinese Evangelization Society (CES), which subsequently offered to provide financial support for Hudson Taylor’s medical studies at London Hospital with the expectation that the newly credentialled young doctor would go to China under their auspices once the country was opened to evangelists.

In 1852, Hudson Taylor began his studies in London. During that year, however, word came that Christian Chinese rebels were sweeping through the country; and it appeared to some observers that the end of the old dynasty was imminent. Young Hudson Taylor cut short his studies, and in the fall of 1853 left for China without completing his degree. When he arrived in 1854, he soon discovered that reports about the rapid collapse of the dynasty were far from accurate. Instead, the young evangelist arrived in the midst of China’s Taiping Rebellion, a bloody civil war between the ruling Qing and the rebels whose system of belief bore only a vague resemblance to a Christian movement. Its leaders advocated an idiosyncratic religion that borrowed from Christianity, Buddhism, and Daoism. The man with whom the movement originated was Hong Xiuquan who, as a result of several visions, believed himself to be the younger brother of Jesus. Hong initially attracted a number of Western evangelists to his cause, but as Hong gradually descended into madness, those supporters disappeared.[9] Hudson Taylor was among them.

Despite the continuing upheaval caused by the Taiping rebels, Hudson Taylor remained in China. He began to preach dressed in Chinese clothing, a practice he would ask his mission volunteers to follow. He also learned to survive on funds remitted by friends and family, as none of the promised payments from the CES ever reached him. Finally, in 1857, he formally resigned from the CES and moved to Ningbo, a city south of Shanghai in Zhejiang Province, where he continued to preach. While there, he met and married Miss Maria Dyer who became partner and supporter in his missionary endeavors. In 1860, the young couple returned to England with their infant daughter, primarily to recover their much-impaired health.[10]

In London once more, Hudson Taylor resumed his medical studies at London Hospital. At the same time, he spoke publicly of the great need for missionaries willing to serve in China, and, over time, several young men responded. A few went under the auspices of mission societies and others as independents. But these small numbers did not satisfy Hudson Taylor. After much prayer and consultation with his family, in 1865 he announced that he was founding a new society, the China Inland Mission. Within a year he had gathered a group of volunteers, and, at the age of thirty-four, returned to China. With him was his wife Maria and their four children. (The couple had nine children before Maria’s untimely death in 1870.) In the years that followed, Hudson Taylor moved between China and England in the service of his new mission society. He expanded his travels to include Scandinavia, Canada and the United States, where he recruited further workers for the CIM. From its founding in 1865 the CIM grew to become the single largest Protestant organization in China, reaching a membership of 1,100 active missionaries in 1900.

The CIM stood apart from other mission organizations from the outset. Because so many mission societies focused on urban centers, Hudson Taylor decided his primary field was inland China, away from the populated coastal areas. Although the CIM headquarters was established in Shanghai where volunteers first arrived to begin their service, the mission stations themselves were in the hinterland. From its inception, the CIM was also different from other groups because it was interdenominational[11] with membership open to all Protestants. It required members to avow their acceptance of seven doctrines which were among the most conservative of Protestant interpretations of Christian tenets. These were: the inspiration and authority of the Scriptures; the Trinity; the fall of man, his state by nature, and his need of regeneration; the Atonement; Justification by faith; resurrection of the body; and the character and duration of future rewards and punishment.[12] As part of the examination process, candidates had to write their views about each of these, citing Scripture in their responses.[13] Candidates also had to respond to specific questions about their health, hereditary disease, the willingness of their parents to allow them to go abroad, their education, any debts they might have, when he or she experienced conversion, and whether he or she was a total abstainer.[14] A photo and testimonials, as well as a medical examination, completed the application requirements. Those writing reference letters for female applicants were asked to comment on the woman’s Christian character, knowledge of Scripture, common sense, ability to learn and teach, energy, health, and any evangelistic work known to the referee.[15]

Once accepted, all missionaries signed an agreement promising to abide by the Principles and Practice of the China Inland Mission, commonly abbreviated as the P & P. Although years later some younger members referred to it as the document of serfdom, it was in fact a statement of beliefs as well as a code of conduct that clearly stated the standard of behavior expected of all members. It declared that the CIM was supported only by free-will offerings and that no personal solicitations or collections were authorized. The CIM could not, according to these articles, go into debt and, therefore, there was no guarantee of any fixed amount of support to any of the workers, a dramatic departure from the usual, denomination-based society which drew on its member churches for regular support. Hudson Taylor firmly believed that God would provide for his missionaries and anyone lacking such faith in the power of God to supply all their needs while working in His service could look elsewhere. Indeed, the P & P clearly warned that members must count the cost, and be prepared to live lives of privation, of toil, of loneliness, of danger — to be looked down upon by their own countrymen and to be despised by the Chinese; to live in the interior, far from the comforts and advantages of society and protection such as they have enjoyed at home.[16]

If any candidate chose to marry, before or after beginning service, both partners had to meet the requirements of the CIM and both had to serve as missionaries. A wife could not come simply as a dependent. Engaged couples not married prior to the beginning of service in China had to wait until the woman reached the status of junior missionary, a minimum of two years. Any violation of this rule meant the parties concerned must retire. For any change in status, the CIM asked for six months notice or, if on home leave, one month notice. The six-month period was imposed primarily so that replacements could be found for any station affected by resignations. Any members choosing to leave before the end of the second year had to refund in full any sums spent by the CIM on their outfit (clothing and other supplies for China) and their passage money.

The outfit for both women and men was extensive. In addition to ordinary clothing, each person was to take with them their own sheets and pillow cases, table linen, hankies, umbrella, and down quilt. Even women were to take a hammer, nails, a screwdriver, a can-opener (in 1914), enamelware (dishes for personal use), and mosquito netting, as well as a Bible, a concordance and Fausset’s Bible Encyclopedia. Despite the fact that a number of vaccines became available during the first decades of the twentieth century, the 1914 list of items for women included only a cholera belt as medicine. Male missionaries carried more medicines, but it would be some years before vaccinations for cholera and typhus were required.[17]

A unique element of the terms was the CIM injunction not to call upon the treaty conventions for support. Specifically, missionaries were enjoined to make no demand for help or protection although it was noted that in emergencies it might be necessary to ask for help as a favor. In particular, the P & P states:

Appeals to Consuls or to Chinese officials to procure the punishment of offenders, or to demand the vindication of real or supposed rights, or indemnification for losses are to be avoided. Under no circumstances may any missionary on his own responsibility make any written appeal to the British or other foreign authorities. [italics in original, ed.].[18]

Hudson Taylor was also adamant that all CIM missionaries wear Chinese dress while serving in China. Although all members agreed to do so as part of the terms of service, from the beginning some males objected to wearing the queue which they found particularly outlandish. In the early twentieth century, this requirement was dropped, and by the 1920s, the stipulation that all CIM members wear Chinese clothing was also modified, leaving the choice of attire to the individual. (The three women were among those who chose to wear Chinese clothing throughout their years in China, finding it more comfortable than the typical European women’s attire).

The matter of dress was ultimately less important than the stipulation that all CIM missionaries speak and read Chinese. All members were required to take formal examinations in Chinese, the most important and demanding being the exams for junior and senior missionary certification. The classical form of the language taught by the CIM was difficult and time-consuming, especially compared to the more colloquial form of Chinese used today.[19]

The CIM was well aware that not all