Lungan

“They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing seed for sowing, Shall doubtless come again with joy, bringing his sheaves with him.”

— Psalm 126:5-6, ASV

A City That Did Not Want Them

After their wedding, the Studds went to live in Lungan, a prefectural city in the south-east of Shanxi province. In the romanised spelling of the day it was usually written Lungan-fu or Lu-an-fu; the city is now known as Changzhi. The China Inland Mission had marked it as a place where a station ought to be opened, and the Studds were the ones who went.

The record of their years there is thin. Studd’s biographer drew on family letters that have not been published in full, and the Mission’s own reports of the period mention the station only briefly. What follows is therefore an outline, not a detailed narrative, and the reader should know that much of what popular books say about these years cannot now be checked.

The outline is clear enough. Foreigners were not welcome in Lungan. In the late 1880s and early 1890s feeling against missionaries ran high in many parts of China. Placards accused them of terrible crimes, including the kidnapping and mutilation of children, and in 1891 a wave of riots against missions swept the cities of the Yangtze valley. Some of that suspicion was the product of ignorance and rumour. Some was the natural resentment of a proud people who had been defeated in war by foreign powers and forced to accept their merchants, their opium and their missionaries. A young couple who arrived in a Chinese city and rented a house to preach a foreign religion could expect to be watched, insulted and sometimes threatened. The Studds were.

They stayed. Accounts agree that they lived as simply as their neighbours, that for a long time they had almost no visible results, and that the hostility only slowly gave way to tolerance and then, in some quarters, to friendship. Like many China Inland Mission stations in Shanxi, theirs became connected with the work of opium refuges, where men and women who wanted to break their addiction could come for treatment, care and teaching. Such refuges in Shanxi were very often run by Chinese Christians, many of them former addicts themselves. Priscilla worked among the women of the city, whom her husband, as a man and a foreigner, could hardly reach at all.

Some people in Lungan became Christians. How many is not recorded in any source available to this book, and the round numbers given in some popular accounts have not been traced. The names of the Chinese Christians who worked with the Studds have not survived in those sources either. They should not be forgotten simply because they were not written down. Every station of the Mission depended on Chinese evangelists, teachers, Bible-women, cooks, carriers and landlords, people who took real risks in associating with foreigners and who carried the gospel into homes and villages where no missionary could go.

Four Daughters and Two Sons

Four daughters were born to the Studds in China. The eldest, born in 1889, was given the names Salvation Grace Faith, a choice which says a good deal about her parents. She was always called Grace. Dorothy Catherine followed on 9 July 1891, born at Lungan, and Edith Mary Crossley in 1892. The youngest, Pauline Evangeline Priscilla, was born at Lungan on 10 February 1894. All four survived, and all four would grow up to share in some way in their parents’ work. Grace married Martin Sutton and, after his death, David Munro, an army officer. Dorothy married Gilbert Barclay, a clergyman who would help to run the mission at home. Edith married Alfred Buxton, her father’s companion in Africa. Pauline married Norman Grubb, his successor.

The Studds also had two sons, and both died in infancy. The details are uncertain. One record compiled by a modern historian of the family says that a son named Paul was born in China and lived only a day; another son, born later, is recorded as having lived for two days. Parents in their position, far from doctors and hospitals, in a climate and conditions that killed many foreign children, knew that such losses were possible. That did not make them easier to bear.

Studd rarely wrote about these deaths, at least in anything that has been published. It would be wrong to fill the silence with invented feelings. But it is right to notice it. Every missionary biography of the period contains small graves. They were part of the price that missionary families paid, and that their children paid, and it is a price that the heroic retellings tend to pass over quickly. The words of Job, “Jehovah gave, and Jehovah hath taken away; blessed be the name of Jehovah” (Job 1:21, ASV), are words of faith, but they are also words spoken by a man sitting in the ashes, and the Bible does not hurry past his grief.

Broken Health

Studd had never been as strong as his cricket suggested, and China wore him down. He suffered from asthma, which troubled him for the rest of his life, and from recurring illnesses of the chest. Priscilla’s health was also poor. By 1894 both of them were in a state that the accounts call broken. The Mission’s doctors, and their own families, urged them to go home.

They left China in 1894. They had been there, Charlie for about nine years and Priscilla for about seven. Before they left, they handed over to the Mission the property they had paid for at Lungan, so that the work could continue. Accounts say that they afterwards severed their formal connection with the China Inland Mission. Studd never returned to China.

1900

Six years after the Studds left China, the province where they had worked became the scene of one of the worst massacres of missionaries and Chinese Christians in modern times. In 1900 the movement known in the West as the Boxer Rising, which blamed foreigners and Christians for the drought, poverty and humiliations that China was suffering, spread through the north of the country with the encouragement of parts of the imperial government. In Shanxi the governor, Yuxian, was one of the most hostile officials in China. In July 1900 dozens of missionaries and their children were executed at Taiyuan, the provincial capital, and others were hunted down across the province.

The China Inland Mission lost fifty-eight missionaries and twenty-one children in that year, more than any other society. Many of them died in Shanxi. Far more Chinese Christians died than foreigners: across the north of China, thousands of Protestant and Catholic believers were killed, many of them refusing to deny their faith to save their lives. Some of them were members of churches that the young men of the Cambridge Seven and their colleagues had helped to plant.

The Studds were in England, about to leave for India. It is not recorded in any source available to this book how they received the news, or whether they knew personally any of those who died. It would be strange if they did not. The Mission’s workers at Lu-an, the city where the Studds had lived, were among those whose lives were in danger that summer. One of them, Archibald Glover, escaped with his family and others on a long and terrible journey to the Yangtze, which he described in his book A Thousand Miles of Miracle in China. Had the Studds stayed in China, their daughters would have been children in Shanxi in 1900.

The story belongs here because it is a reminder of what was at stake for the Chinese Christians whom missionaries like the Studds left behind. Missionaries could go home when their health broke. Chinese believers could not. They bore the cost of their faith in their own communities, and in 1900 many paid with their lives. Their courage is part of the story of the Studds’ years in Shanxi, even though it came after the Studds had gone.

The psalmist knew that kind of grief, and wrote, “Jehovah is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, And saveth such as are of a contrite spirit” (Psalm 34:18, ASV). The Studds left Lungan with broken health and, it may be supposed, with broken hearts. The promise was not that they would be spared, but that they would not be alone.

Sowing in Tears

By any outward measure, the Studds’ years in China were not a great success. They opened one station in a hostile city. They saw some converts, but not many. They buried two sons. They lost their health and came home. There were no great revivals, no crowds, and no famous stories, and later biographers have found little to say about these years compared with the drama of the Seven before them and of Africa after.

The psalm at the head of this chapter was written for people who had sown seed in difficult ground. “He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing seed for sowing, Shall doubtless come again with joy.” It is a promise about the harvest, but it does not promise that the sower will see it. The church in Shanxi would suffer terribly in 1900, when the Boxer uprising killed many missionaries and a far larger number of Chinese Christians in that province. It would suffer again in the twentieth century. And it would survive. The Studds were a small part of its early history. Their part was to sow, to weep, and to go home. Whatever came of it belongs to the Chinese Christians who stayed.