China Chronicles from a Lost Time: The Min River Chronicles

Upriver missionary families were forced to evacuate their stations, on average, once every five years--often through a gauntlet of rifle fire--as their clumsy rice boats rushed headlong down the narrow rapids. Nonetheless, they persisted, building up a network of churches, chapels, schools, and hospitals that brought literacy, higher education, modern medical care, and a religious faith that liberated thousands of isolated country folk from ignorance, superstition, and opium addiction. This rough territory could be traversed only on foot--over the ancient stone-paved trails following the contours of the mountains--or by river boat--towed upstream by teams of coolie boatmen. For instance, Joseph Walker--for 50 years one of the itinerant Shaowu station missionary pioneers--covered thousands of miles on foot, keeping detailed journals of people and problems, as he traveled his village circuits year after year. His--and the other missionary journals featured in this book--speak vividly of successes and failures, converts and backsliders, joys and heartbreaks. China Chronicles from a Lost Time relates the work of the China missionaries sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to the Shaowu Prefecture of north Fujian, a remote mountainous region 200 miles long and 100 miles wide, with a population at the time of over a million. Presenting the journals and letters of individual missionaries--written during the final decades of the Manchu Empire (the Qing Dynasty) leading up to the War of Resistance (1937 1945)--this is a true documentary history of the life and work of the Protestant missionaries who opened their first station in the upper Min River region in 1874. These firsthand personal accounts of missionary life and work illuminate an entire community in one district of one province, from inception to closure. China Chronicles from a Lost Time thus offers unique insights--well-beyond those found in more formal histories--into a lost time.