Communities of Faith SECTION A


the help of her Chinese cook, who had become a Christian, Aylward decided to continue her work. However she was on a financial knife-edge and just barely keeping the inn open. She wondered how much longer she could keep this up.


Then the mandarin of Jincheng came to see her.


Mandarin was the title given to a town governor in China. He also served as the judge in the local law court.


It was at this time that the prison riot occurred. As we read earlier, Aylward persuaded the prisoners to put down their weapons, brought a swift end to the violence and negotiated better conditions for them. Afterwards, she regularly visited the prison to ensure that both sides were keeping their word. She also won some converts among the prisoners. One of these had been the leader of the rioters, a man named Feng, while another was the prison warden himself.


The mandarin asked Aylward to work with him. The government had outlawed the practice of foot-binding. For centuries it had been the custom that a female’s feet should be tightly wrapped in bandages from infancy, to prevent them from growing fully. Many Chinese men considered small feet attractive. However, women’s foot-binding often led to deformities and crippling disabilities. Knowing the harm caused by this practice, Aylward agreed to act as his inspector. She travelled around the neighbouring villages enforcing the law. She also had the mandarin’s permission to preach about Christianity as she did so.


REMEMBER! To preach means to explain or to spread ideas.


In the days that followed, Aylward was successful because she won the local people’s trust. Like them, she lived a simple life, wore the same kind of clothing, ate the same kind of food, spoke the same language and felt completely at ease in their company. Indeed, she so identified with them that in 1936 she decided to become a Chinese citizen. However, she never lost sight of her role as a missionary and succeeded in attracting a small but ever-growing number of converts to Christianity.


REMEMBER! A convert is someone who chooses to join a religion.


Soon after the riot, a chance encounter set Aylward’s life on a new course. She saw a woman begging by the roadside, accompanied by a sick and undernourished five-year-old girl. The woman did not want the child and offered to sell her. Horrified by this attitude and worried about the child’s safety, Aylward gave the woman what little money she had and took the little girl into her home. She named the child Mei-en (meaning ‘Beautiful Grace’). She would be the first of one hundred unwanted children that Aylward would rescue from being abandoned or sold. All would find a loving home at The Inn of the Eighth Happiness.


Then in 1937 Japan declared war on China. Aylward offered her home as a place for wounded soldiers to recuperate. She helped care for between thirty and forty of them at a time, in addition to her other responsibilities.


Jincheng was thought of as too out of the way for the Japanese to attack it. However, in the spring of 1938, Japanese warplanes bombed the town, killing many inhabitants. As Aylward helped organise care for the wounded, word reached her that Japanese troops were on their way to kill anyone who had survived. She was also warned that the Japanese knew about her and had put a price on her head. The mandarin urged her to leave. Then he gathered the townspeople and told them to take refuge in mountain caves until the Japanese had left.


But what should be done to protect the nearly one hundred orphans, some of whom were mere infants, living with her at The Inn of the Eighth Happiness? Aylward was worried that the Japanese might decide to permanently occupy the town. If so, the children would starve in the mountains. She decided that the best thing to do was to take them to a place that was at a safe distance from the fighting. This meant taking the children on a journey of nearly 240 miles to the refugee centre at Xian, in the neighbouring province of Shaanxi.


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