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

Shanghai, March 1885

The Seven reached Shanghai on 18 March 1885. Hudson Taylor had gone ahead to arrange their journeys inland. Shanghai was the greatest of the treaty ports, the coastal cities that China had been forced to open to foreign trade and residence after its defeats in the Opium Wars of 1839–42 and 1856–60. It had a foreign settlement with banks, clubs, churches and racecourses, governed in effect by the foreigners who lived there. A young English gentleman could have lived very comfortably in Shanghai. The China Inland Mission existed precisely so that its workers would not.

Within days of landing, the Seven had put on Chinese clothes. That meant a long gown, cloth shoes, and, for the men, the queue: the front of the head shaved and the hair at the back grown or lengthened with false hair into a long plait, as Chinese men were then required to wear it. The practice had been begun by Hudson Taylor himself nearly thirty years earlier, and it was still mocked by many Europeans in China, who thought it lowered the dignity of the white man. For Taylor that was exactly the point. The Mission’s workers were to go among the Chinese as guests and learners, not as members of a ruling race. Studd took to it with enthusiasm. He was always more at ease with a practice that cost him something.

The Shadow of the Opium Trade

There was another reason why a missionary in China needed humility. Britain was, in the 1880s, the chief supplier of opium to China. The drug was grown under government monopoly in British India, shipped to China by British and other merchants, and sold there under treaty terms that the Chinese government had been compelled to accept. Millions of Chinese people smoked it, and it ruined many families. Missionaries were constantly told by the Chinese they met that the same nation that sent them the Bible sent them opium. Hudson Taylor had campaigned against the trade for years. Studd’s own family fortune had come from a different crop in a different part of India, but he was a son of the same empire, and he could not have been unaware of the contradiction. It is part of the background of everything the Seven did in China.

Up the Han River

The Seven were divided. Studd and the two Polhill-Turner brothers were sent west, up the Yangtze to Hankou and then by boat up the Han River towards Hanzhong, in Shaanxi province, where the Mission had a station. It was a journey of many weeks. The river boats were slow, cramped and uncomfortable, and the three young men used the time to study Chinese. They had been told to learn the language before they did anything else, and they were in earnest about it.

The language was hard. Studd had never been a scholar, and nothing in the record suggests that study came easily to him. He learned to speak Chinese well enough to live and work in it, but he never became one of the Mission’s linguists. He was a man of action, and his gift was not for patient study but for wholehearted commitment.

Later, he was moved north to Shanxi, the province where several of the Seven eventually worked. Shanxi had been devastated by the great famine of 1876–79, in which millions died, and the Mission had gone there partly in response. It was also the province of one of the most remarkable Chinese Christians of the century.

Pastor Xi

Xi Shengmo, known to English readers as Pastor Hsi, was a Confucian scholar from southern Shanxi who had been an opium addict. He had been converted in about 1879, through reading the New Testament, while helping a missionary with an essay competition, and he had broken his addiction through prayer. He took the name Shengmo, “conqueror of demons,” and set up refuges where opium addicts could come to be cured, with medicine, care and prayer. By the late 1880s there were refuges in many towns, run by Chinese Christians. In 1886 Hudson Taylor recognised him as a pastor of the churches in his district.

Several of the Seven worked closely with Xi. Stanley Smith and Dixon Hoste were with him for years in the district of Hongtong, and Hoste in particular learned from him a respect for Chinese leadership that shaped the whole of his later direction of the Mission. Studd’s connection with Xi was less close, though some accounts say that it was Xi who conducted his wedding. The point to grasp is that the church in Shanxi was already being built by Chinese men and women. The young foreigners who arrived in Chinese gowns were joining a work that Chinese Christians were leading, often at great cost to themselves. Many of the converts in Shanxi were former opium smokers who had been rescued in Chinese-run refuges. The missionaries brought money, medicine and Bible teaching. They did not bring the church. Its life was Chinese from the beginning.

Hudson Taylor’s Principles

The China Inland Mission that Studd joined was built on a few clear principles, and they shaped him for life. Its workers were to go inland, to the provinces where no Protestant missionary was at work, rather than staying in the coastal cities. They were to adopt Chinese dress and, as far as possible, Chinese ways of living. They were to be led by directors in China, who knew the field, rather than by a committee in London. They were to receive no fixed salary, and the Mission would not make public appeals for money or go into debt; it would share among its workers whatever God sent, and trust him for the rest. And it was interdenominational: Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians and Brethren worked side by side.

Every one of those principles appears again, in a sharper form, in the mission Studd would found in Africa a quarter of a century later. He took from Hudson Taylor the idea of going to the unreached, of living close to the people, of trusting God for money without appeals, and of leadership from the field rather than from home. What he did not take, or did not take enough of, was Taylor’s patience, his willingness to consult, and his deep respect for the judgement of others, including his Chinese colleagues. Taylor was a strong leader and could be immovable. But he built a mission that could survive him. Studd would build one that very nearly did not.

There is a further lesson in these first months that is easy to miss. For the first time in his life, Studd was a beginner at something. At Eton and Cambridge he had been a star; in the cricket world he had been admired; at the meetings of 1885 crowds had hung on his words. In China he could not ask for a cup of tea without help. Every child in the street knew more than he did. The China Inland Mission deliberately put its new workers in that position, because it believed that a missionary who had not first been a learner would never be a servant. It is a position that every cross-cultural worker knows, and that most find humbling. Some of Studd’s later difficulties may be traced to the fact that, in Africa, he came as a leader from the start, and never had to spend long years as a learner among the people he served.

Thirty years after Hudson Taylor, then a young and unknown missionary, first put on Chinese dress in 1855, the practice was still controversial. Some missionaries of other societies regarded the China Inland Mission’s workers as eccentric, and some officials thought they were deliberately provoking trouble by going where foreigners were not expected. To Taylor and those who followed him, the question was simple. Chinese people would listen more readily to someone who honoured their customs than to someone who despised them. The Seven accepted that from the start, and Studd never forgot it.

Free and a Servant

Paul wrote, “For though I was free from all men, I brought myself under bondage to all, that I might gain the more.” A few verses later he said, “I am become all things to all men, that I may by all means save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22, ASV). Paul was a free man, a Roman citizen, a scholar with every reason for pride. He chose to live as a servant, adapting himself to the customs of the people he wanted to reach, so that nothing about him would stand between them and the gospel.

Wearing Chinese dress was a small thing, and it did not make Studd Chinese. He remained a wealthy Englishman, with a family fortune behind him and the protection of the British consul if he needed it. But it was a sign that he understood something important. A messenger who refuses to change anything about himself is saying, without meaning to, that his own ways are the gospel. The Seven, for all their naivety, had grasped that the gospel must cross into the culture of those who hear it. Christ himself “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:7, ASV).

It was a lesson Studd would carry to Africa. It was also, in a way, the beginning of the next great step of his life. If he was to be a servant, what was he doing with a fortune?