's District in Sichuan . Shaded portion is Friends' District. and
Mary Jane Davidson in
Chengdu (Chentu), before 1925 In 1882, an article titled "Shall the Gospel be preached to this generation of the Chinese?" by Dr. George King was published in London. Several members of the
Society of Friends reading it, were impressed with the fact that the Society had no representatives engaged in missionary effort in China. Three years later (1885), two
Irish Friends,
Robert John Davidson and his wife
Mary Jane Davidson, were appointed by the
Friends' Foreign Mission Association (FFMA, belonging to
London Yearly Meeting) as missionaries to work in China. They left England in September, 1886, and reached Sichuan the following year. At a local medical assistant Mr. Sie's suggestion, the Davidsons paid their first visit to
Tungchwan in the end of 1887. .
28,
29; those to the right
John iii.
16; before 1905. In 1889, after a series of problems regarding their long-term settlement with the local authorities of Tongchuan (Tungchwan), they were told that they had "no right to be there". R. J. Davidson had no choice but to turn to
Chongqing, the only place which seemed open to him. There a small house was rented until the following spring, when the large premises in the White Dragon Fountain Street became the first home of the Mission. Opening services were held in March 1890, and a dispensary was opened soon after.
Frederic S. Deane joined the Mission and established a boys' school at the Great Ridge Street in 1892. That winter four more missionaries were added to the band.
Leonard Wigham joined Deane at the young men's house, while
Alice M. Beck and
Margaret Southall went to another mission house; and
Caroline N. Southall had already started a girls' school on those premises. In 1893,
Mira L. Cumber and
Isaac Mason joined the mission. A
meeting house was opened in March 1894. In May 1894, R. J. Davidson and Mason travelled to Yangtaochi in Tongchuan. They rented part of an inn for dispensing medicine. In the autumn of 1894, Mason returned alone to Yangtaochi. He spent several weeks there, living at an inn, dispensing medicine and preaching daily. He had gathered a few people during this period, and with them he held many
meetings in dirty little rooms at the inns where he stayed. These visits subsequently extended to the cities of
Taihezhen (Taihochen) and
Shehongxian (Sehunghsien), which had been developed into an important branch of the Tongchuan work later known as the Mission's Northern District. In 1895, a serious outbreak of
anti-foreign agitation spread throughout the province.
Open-air preaching had been considered dangerous for long periods at a time, and dispensary patients decreased by half the number. The missionaries lived for weeks together in constant fear of an outbreak. In 1897, the FFMA purchased an estate on the hills south of Chongqing and turned it into a school for missionaries' children, which was opened in March 1898. , before 1905 In 1899,
A. Warburton Davidson went to reside at Shehongxian. He was pursued and severely beaten by a crowd after selling books in a temple yard at one of the neighbouring markets named Yu Lung Chen. In consequence of his injuries he was taken to Chongqing for rest. That same year Mason and his party were appointed to live at Tongchuan, they took up residence early in 1900. They opened a dispensary and held
meetings for worship in a very dilapidated chapel made out of unused small rooms. In 1902, Mira L. Cumber and Dr.
Lucy E. Harris joined the Tongchuan mission, the latter being FFMA's first qualified medical missionary in China. The Tongchuan Boys' School was opened before the missionaries taking up residence in that prefecture. The Girls' School was commenced in 1902 by Cumber. It had only eight students the first year, but there were thirty the following year, and by 1905 the number had doubled. During this period, two new mission centres were opened in Chengdu, the capital, and Suining (Sui-ling Hsien), a county situated between Tongchuan and Chongqing. The former was opened by Robert J. and Mary J. Davidson, the work was joined by Dr.
Henry T. and
Elizabeth J. Hodgkin in 1905. Isaac and
Esther L. Mason moved to Suining, work at Tongchuan had been taken up by
Edward B. and
Margaret Vardon. 's
architectural drawing for
West China Union University The Szechwan Yearly Meeting founded in 1904 with 56 local converts, was constituted of five
Monthly Meetings: Chongqing, Tongchuan, Chengdu, Suining and
Tongliang (Tungliang). The university's buildings were designed by the English Quaker architect
Frederick Rowntree.
H. T. Silcock, an FFMA missionary, began to work at the Union University in 1911, and was later appointed as vice president. In 1930,
Clifford Morgan Stubbs, a New Zealand Quaker missionary and Professor of Chemistry at the West China Union University, was stabbed to death by communists. The
Friends' Ambulance Unit sent a team of 40 volunteers to provide medical assistance in China in mid 1941 during the
Second World War, known as the China Convoy, which operated across the provinces of
Yunnan,
Guizhou, Sichuan and beyond, until their responsibility for the relief work there was passed to the
American Friends Service Committee in 1946. Over the five years about 200 Westerners and 60 Chinese had taken part, eight died and others had their health permanently damaged. Most of the Westerners were British nationals, with substantial numbers of Americans, Canadians and New Zealanders, and a handful of other nationalities. The Chinese members were mainly Christian students from the West China Union University. == Tongchuan Monthly Meeting ==