James Hudson Taylor, an English missionary who made his mark in China
Born in a mining town in the north of England, James Hudson Taylor found his calling as a missionary in China. Helen Leavey looks at the long legacy of a Christian pioneer.
On a chilly, rainy June day in Barnsley, a former mining town in the north of England, about 50 people have gathered in a walnut-panelled room in the town hall, a building that, when it was erected in the 1930s, was criticised by Animal Farm author George Orwell as having cost too much when so many people in the town lived in poverty.
Inside the still imposing building, a mixture of young and old are milling around. Several have travelled a long way to be here: an 82-yearold woman from the United States, a middle-aged couple from Canada and a mother with her 12-yearold son from Taiwan. They nibble sandwiches and crisps, and sip cups of tea while chatting under a large painting of Queen Elizabeth II.
A hush descends as a line of suited, mostly elderly men, stand to welcome the crowd. One is the mayor, a plain-speaking Yorkshireman wearing a heavy gold chain across his shoulders. Another is the bilingual Reverend James Hudson Taylor IV, who has flown in from Hong Kong. A third begins proceedings by addressing the crowd with a “ni hao” and then “‘ey up”, an old-fashioned Yorkshire greeting.
The visitors have come to commemorate the achievements of a Barnsley-born man who left his home and family in the 19th century, aged 21, to travel to China to convert its people to Christianity. James Hudson Taylor would spend several decades in China and introduce hundreds of other missionaries to the country before his death in 1905, in Changsha, Hunan province, at the age of 73. Those who have gathered to remember him include descendants, Christian converts and locals proud that such an inspiring figure came from Barnsley.
The town-hall gathering is being held almost 150 years to the day after Taylor set up the China Inland Mission. It is just one of a series of events to mark the anniversary, many of them overseen by the Reverend Taylor, the missionary’s great-great-grandson, who even gave a religious service in Putonghua in Barnsley’s Salem Wesleyan Reform Church, to a congregation of 90 people, mostly Chinese Christians living in Britain.
“This is a very special time,” says the Reverend Taylor, a father-of-three who grew up in Taiwan. “Barnsley is where our roots are.”