Page:The Chinese Empire. A General & Missionary Survey.djvu/52

18 consecrated Bishops. The remarkable work among Chinese girls carried on by Miss Aldersey, who had left England as early as 1837 for Java, whence she removed to Ningpo, must not be forgotten; nor the lamented Mr. Lowrie, who was murdered by pirates at sea.

At Shanghai some nine or ten Societies commenced work, the details of which would weary the general reader. Among the outstanding men at that centre, mention should be made of Drs. Medhurst, Lockhart, Muirhead, Edkins, Griffith John, and Mr. Wylie, all of the L.M.S.; Bishop Boone, the Rev., afterwards Bishop, Schereschewsky of the American Episcopalian; Dr. Bridgman of the American Board, who had removed there from Canton; and the Rev. J. Hudson Taylor of the Chinese Evangelisation Society, who removed to Ningpo in 1856.

To summarise the period. During the eighteen years between the Treaty of Nanking and the Peking Convention, some seventeen Societies had commenced work in China, having, with the other Societies already on the field, sent out some 160 to 170 workers, not counting wives. Of these, seventy had either died or retired during the period, while of the seventeen Societies mentioned, at least five of them have no work in China to-day.

The two outstanding events which materially affected the missionary work of this period were the outbreak of the Taiping Rebellion and the second war which preceded the Treaty of Tientsin.

Hong Siu-ts'üen, with whom the Taiping Rebellion originated, was born in 1813, the year that Milne reached Canton. At the age of twenty he received a tract from Liang A-fah, Dr. Morrison's convert and helper. The tract was, however, neglected for some ten years, during which time his annoyance at repeated failures to obtain his degree greatly aggravated an illness which assumed the form of cataleptic fits and visions. Connecting these visions with what he subsequently read in the tract, he started upon a crusade against idolatry and the reigning dynasty. An attempt to arrest him resulted in his finally