Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission

James Hudson Taylor first sailed for China in September 1853, sent by the Chinese Evangelisation Society, and landed at Shanghai on 1 March 1854 (Taylor, A Retrospect ch. 8–9). He resigned from the society because it was often in debt, which he believed Scripture forbade, and went on working at Ningpo, depending, as he puts it, on God alone for supplies (Taylor, A Retrospect ch. 15).

Ill health forced him back to England, where, he writes, a map of China hung on his study wall, and he came to the conviction that a special agency was needed to evangelise the inland provinces, though for a long time he shrank from leading it (Taylor, A Retrospect ch. 18). On Sunday 25 June 1865, staying with a friend at Brighton, he left a congregation of a thousand or more and walked out alone on the sands (Taylor, A Retrospect ch. 18). He says that there he gave himself up for the work and asked for twenty-four fellow workers, two for each of eleven inland provinces that had no missionary and two for Mongolia, and that he wrote the request in the margin of his Bible (Taylor, A Retrospect ch. 18).

That year he wrote China’s Spiritual Need and Claims, and a later edition recalls that in the first he had asked for twenty-four European and twenty-four native evangelists (Taylor, China’s Spiritual Need and Claims prefatory note and p. 49). He writes that the China Inland Mission was organised in 1865, with a friend, W. T. Berger, directing it at home, and that he had resolved never to use personal solicitation or collections for its funds (Taylor, A Retrospect ch. 19). On 26 May 1866 a party of sixteen missionaries, with his four children, sailed in the Lammermuir (Taylor, A Retrospect ch. 19).

The mission’s history, quoting the letters of the party, records that they anchored off Shanghai on 30 September 1866 (Guinness, Story of the China Inland Mission vol. 1, p. 282) and that on the journey inland all of them put on Chinese dress (Guinness, Story of the China Inland Mission vol. 1, pp. 292–293). At the end of November, it says, they reached Hangzhou, where another missionary lent them a house (Guinness, Story of the China Inland Mission vol. 1, pp. 294–295).

Writing in 1894, Taylor set out how the mission worked: candidates were accepted without restriction as to denomination and were promised no income, the mission would not go into debt, and its expenses were met by gifts sent without personal solicitation (Taylor, A Retrospect ch. 20). By May 1893, he says, it had 552 missionaries and had opened stations in ten of the eleven provinces that had been without Protestant missionaries (Taylor, A Retrospect ch. 20).