郑安娜 · 1860 – 1913 · Norwegian
Anna Sofie Jakobsen (郑安娜) was born on 8 November 1860 in Kristiansand, Norway. She was originally a maid in the household of a merchant named Christian Rasmussen. In 1879 her employer Rasmussen established contact with the China Inland Mission of Britain. Four years later, the Swedish-American evangelist Fredrik Franson came to the city and held meetings in the Rasmussen home; Anna was one of those who responded to the call. In 1884 she attended the first evangelistic training course that Franson held in Christiania (now Oslo), and in the same year she went to Britain and was accepted by the China Inland Mission.
On 18 November 1885 she set sail together with Sophie Reuter, becoming one of the first Norwegian women missionaries to come to China. She was sent to Shanxi Province and worked in Huozhou County. This was one of the China Inland Mission's important bases in North China; more than ten years later Evangeline French and Mildred Cable also ran schools in this area.
Then she made a decision that the Western missionary world of the time found hard to accept: she announced that she would marry a Chinese preacher, Zheng Xiuqi (郑秀琪). When the news got out, the North-China Herald, an English-language newspaper in Shanghai, launched a fierce attack on her. Such an interracial marriage was not tolerated at the time by mission leadership or the Western expatriate community, and she was forced to resign from the China Inland Mission.
The couple did not stop because of this. They set up on their own at Zezhou (now Jincheng), Shanxi, and founded an independent mission called "Anna Cheng's Mission". In 1900 she took her husband back to Norway on furlough; to her deep disappointment, some Christians in Kristiansand were cold toward her Chinese husband. Even so, financial support for the mission from Norway was never interrupted, and it continued even after her death in China in 1913.
In the autumn of 2010, a memorial plaque was unveiled on the wall of her former home in Kristiansand, nearly a century after her death. Her life was not prominent in mission history: she founded no university, translated no Bible, and left no writings. She was simply a Norwegian woman who had started out as a maid, who lost the protection of her mission because of a marriage that was not permitted, and who started again with her husband in a corner of Shanxi. And it is precisely that choice that has kept her name remembered a hundred years later.