马尔昌 · 1882 – 1933 · British
Percy Cunningham Mather (马尔昌) was born on 9 December 1882 in Fleetwood, a fishing port north of Liverpool, England. He grew up by the sea, in a town that lived from the sea, and so had a strong spirit of adventure; he also loved music and was skilled on the violin and other instruments. He came to faith in Christ in 1903, joined the China Inland Mission in 1909, and received two years of theological training at the Bible Training Institute in Glasgow, Scotland. He left Britain on 10 September 1910, arrived in Shanghai on 24 October, and went straight on to Anqing in Anhui to study the language. During that time he escorted a Finnish fellow student to the hospital in Wuhu for an operation, was caught in the rain on the way and contracted malaria. He survived, but the malaria recurred often from then on.
In May 1911, after passing the first-level Chinese examination, he was posted to Ningguo Prefecture in Anhui. There his musical gift proved very useful for mission work, and so did his medical knowledge, which was entirely self-taught: because he was interested in medicine, he had brought a good number of medical books with him, and in China, where doctors and medicines were scarce, he treated illnesses and gave out medicines by following their instructions. Time and again it worked, and he was especially good at dealing with external injuries such as sores and swellings.
In 1913 he read "Missionary Methods: St. Paul's or Ours?" by Roland Allen, a missionary of the Anglican Church in China (中华圣公会), and was deeply inspired by it. Western missions at the time usually followed the "mission station" model: once missionaries had set up a station, they stayed there for the long term. Mather held instead that a missionary should stay only for a time, hand the work over to local preachers once it was established, and go on to open new fields elsewhere. That same year he also read the diaries of George Hunter (胡进洁), a China Inland Mission missionary in Xinjiang, who had already been holding on alone in Xinjiang for ten years. Linking "the method of Paul" with Hunter's situation, he wrote two letters: one to the General Director, D. E. Hoste (何斯德), asking to be sent to Xinjiang, and one to Hunter asking to be accepted as his co-worker.
His wish was granted. In early January 1914 he left Ningguo with only simple luggage and that violin: first walking twenty-five miles, then by boat to Wuhu and along the Yangtze to Hankou, by train into Henan, then by cart to Xi'an, through Lanzhou into Xinjiang, and finally meeting Hunter at Hami. In late May the two of them reached Dihua (now Ürümqi); the whole journey had taken five full months. His diary records the road: on 22 February they met a heavy snowstorm and covered only ten miles in a day, the cold making the mountain road hard going; on 22 March they passed Ganzhou, and seeing how desolate it was he wrote, "I want to go to the place of greatest need, that is, where the work is hardest"; on 5 April in Suzhou (now Jiuquan) he stood in the main street and played his violin, and within five minutes two or three hundred people had gathered. He stood there preaching, selling Gospels and handing out tracts for a full two hours.
For the next nineteen years he worked side by side with Hunter on the northwestern frontier, and the two were like father and son. At that time Muslims made up 96 percent of Xinjiang's population of about two million, and preaching the gospel was extremely difficult. After the Russian October Revolution (1917), large numbers of White Russian refugees poured in from around 1918, and Western missionaries faced more restrictions and were at times not even able to go out to preach. Mather turned his gift for languages fully to translation, and within a few years completed three major works, a Mongolian-English dictionary, a Mongolian textbook, and a Manchu dictionary and grammar; he also compiled a handbook of Manchu and Mongolian idioms, a Tatar dictionary and a West Mongolian dictionary, smoothing the way for later missionaries to learn these languages. In January 1933, as the revolt of the Hui general Ma Zhongying (马仲英) spread, he, Hunter and six newly arrived missionaries, led by Dr. Emil Fischbacher (巴富羲), threw themselves entirely into caring for wounded soldiers. After months of exhausting work, he and Fischbacher both caught deadly typhus, and they died three days apart, on 24 and 27 May. Hunter, then seventy years old, conducted their funeral, and a Russian émigré Baptist choir sang. A Muslim at the funeral remarked: "Missionary Ma was worth ten men. For wherever he went, whether in the city, in the countryside or in the mountains, there was no place where the people did not know him and respect him."