On this day 75 years ago, a small group of people gathered in Liverpool, England, to send a parlour maid, Gladys Aylward, off to China as a missionary. Some years before, she had vowed to give her life to the service of Jesus, to be used in whatever way he saw fit. She had applied for a probationary position with the China Inland Mission, but was rejected for service.
Determined to follow God’s calling, she was accepted as an assistant to a 73-year-old missionary to China, Mrs Jeannie Lawson. She was unable to afford the ship fare, so she travelled by the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok, then sailed to Japan and from Japan to Tietsin, then travelled by train, bus and mule to Yangchen in Shansi, south of Beijing, where she and Mrs Lawton ran an inn.
Gladys soon learnt to speak Chinese, and after the death of Mrs Lawson she was appointed by the government as a foot inspector, travelling throughout the district to enforce the new law against footbinding. She started looking after an increasing number of orphans, and in the late 1930s as China was being invaded by the Japanese, she led 100 orphans on a gruelling 27-day trek across the mountains to safety. She returned to England after the second world war, then moved to Taiwan in 1958 to run another orphanage until her death in 1970.