In her youth, Taylor taught a Bible class for "factory-girls" in
Bromley-by-Bow in the
East End of London where they lived. She attended meetings at "Berger Hall" named after
William Thomas Berger. At the age of 23, she joined the China Inland Mission and made plans to go to China as a missionary. She left London for China as a second-class passenger on the P&O vessel
Kaisar-i-Hind I in January, 1888, age 22.
The Hundred missionaries had all sailed to China the previous year. Among the 25 passengers (16 men, 5 ladies [sic]) aboard the steam ship with her were Miss Mary Reed (daughter of Mrs Henry Reed and sister of Mrs Harry Guinness), Mr and Mrs Hunt (travelling to
Hanzhong) and the
Pigott family of
The Sheo Yang Mission (who were eventually killed during the
Boxer Rebellion). As recorded in
In the Far East (1889), the
Kaisar-i-Hind took a route passing Gibraltar (10:30pm, 31 January 1888), calling at
Naples and then passing the
Straits of Messina, stopping for a day at
Aden and then onward to
Colombo,
Ceylon. At
Colombo the missionary party boarded the P&O vessel
S.S. Deccan, bound for
Shanghai. A stop in
Penang,
Malaysia, allowed Geraldine a first contact with many Chinese who came on board. Then a stop at
Singapore followed. Her first time on Chinese soil was later at a stop at
Hong Kong where she was received by Dr and Mrs Chalmers of the
London Missionary Society, who introduced them also to Mr and Mrs Bender of the
Basel Mission. Shanghai was reached next. But Shanghai was not their final destination. Staying only long enough to exchange their European clothes for the national Chinese costume, the missionaries started on again, leaving this first station of the China Inland Mission behind them and travelling on the boat
Fuh-ho ("Happy Harmony") in the substantially cheaper Chinese accommodations up the
Yangtze River to
Zhenjiang. Lastly on to a barge some 6 hours to
Yangzhou, finally arriving at Yangzhou on 23 March 1888. She wrote to her sister after a short time in China: After training in China, Geraldine was eventually stationed in
Henan Province. While in China, she met up with Frederick Howard Taylor, a medical doctor who had also travelled to Asia with CIM; they got engaged and were married in 1894. She had an ability for writing and was asked to write a history of the CIM and a biography of her father-in-law; she went on to write over 20 books about missionaries in China. ==Published works==