In Chinese Dress

“For though I was free from all men, I brought myself under bondage to all, that I might gain the more.” — 1 Corinthians 9:19 (ASV)

The Seven reached Shanghai on 18 March 1885. Shanghai was a treaty port, one of the coastal cities China had been forced to open to foreigners after losing the Opium Wars. It had a foreign settlement with banks, clubs and racecourses. A young English gentleman could have lived very comfortably there. The China Inland Mission existed so that its workers wouldn’t.

Within days they had put on Chinese clothes: a long gown, cloth shoes, and for the men the queue, with the front of the head shaved and the hair at the back grown or lengthened with false hair into a long plait. Many Europeans in China mocked this. They thought it lowered the dignity of the white man. For Hudson Taylor that was exactly the point. His workers were to come as guests and learners, not as members of a ruling race. Studd loved it. He was always more at ease with something that cost him.

There was another reason to come humbly. In the 1880s Britain was the main supplier of opium to China. It was grown under government monopoly in British India and sold in China on terms China had been forced to accept. Millions smoked it, and it wrecked families. Missionaries were told again and again that the nation sending the Bible was also sending the opium. Studd’s own fortune came from a different crop, but from the same empire.

Studd and the Polhill-Turner brothers were sent west by river boat, slow and cramped, and used the weeks to study Chinese. It was hard. Studd learned enough to live and work in it, but he never became a linguist. For the first time in his life he was a beginner. At Eton and Cambridge he had been a star. In China he couldn’t ask for a cup of tea without help, and every child on the street knew more than he did.

Later he moved north to Shanxi province, where millions had died in the famine of 1876 to 1879. Shanxi was also home to one of the most remarkable Christians of the century. Xi Shengmo was a Confucian scholar who had been addicted to opium. He was converted around 1879 by reading the New Testament and broke his addiction through prayer. He took a name meaning conqueror of demons and opened refuges where addicts could be cured with medicine, care and prayer. By the late 1880s Chinese Christians ran them in many towns, and in 1886 Hudson Taylor recognised him as a pastor.

Here’s the key point. The church in Shanxi was already being built by Chinese men and women, often at great cost. The young foreigners in Chinese gowns were joining a work Chinese Christians were leading. Dixon Hoste worked beside Pastor Xi for years and learned a deep respect for Chinese leadership. Studd’s link with him was less close.

From the Mission, Studd took ideas he kept all his life: go to people who haven’t heard, live close to them, trust God for money, lead from the field. What he didn’t take enough of was Taylor’s patience and willingness to listen to others, including Chinese colleagues. Taylor built a mission that could survive him. Studd would build one that nearly didn’t. And in Africa, years later, he arrived as a leader from day one, and never spent long years as a learner among the people he served.

Paul, a free Roman citizen, made himself a servant so nothing about him would get in the way of the gospel. A Chinese gown didn’t make Studd Chinese. But it showed he understood that a messenger who won’t change anything about himself is saying, without meaning to, that his own ways are the gospel.

Being the beginner is uncomfortable. You might feel it in a new school, a new team, or a youth group from another culture. It’s also where you learn to listen.

One thing to do this week: put yourself somewhere you are the beginner: learn ten words of a language a classmate speaks at home, or ask someone from another background to teach you something they know well. Listen more than you talk.