贾兰珍 · 1861 – 1929 · Australian
Annie Garland was born in 1861 in Melbourne, Australia, and was raised by devout parents. As an adult she worked as a dressmaker. Later she and her sister Susie together set themselves apart as holy, giving themselves to Christ and his service. The two sisters joined the China Inland Mission and sailed for China, arriving on September 26, 1891. They went at once to the language school in Yangzhou for their first training in Chinese, and a few months later were sent to Qinzhou (now Tianshui) in Gansu.
Qinzhou was the first mission station the China Inland Mission opened in Gansu. At that time the station was led by Mr. and Mrs. Henry W. Hunt, together with six women missionaries. Annie often went with them to preach in the surrounding towns and villages, and from 1896 she also taught in the station's primary school. In May 1899 the sisters returned to Australia on furlough and used the opportunity to study nursing. The timing of this furlough proved especially providential: it meant they escaped the Boxer upheaval.
A record from early 1900 shows what things were like then: Western missionaries had worked in Qinzhou for twenty years, and in this city of 40,000 people 87 had been baptized; there were 6 paid Chinese workers and 2 volunteers; the two schools had 10 boys and 16 girls; and there was also a dispensary used for medical evangelism. The sisters returned to China in November 1901 and reached Qinzhou in 1902, where they reopened the boys' school and resumed the women's meetings. In the summer of 1903 Annie took a woman evangelist named Li and several others over the mountains to the villages in the south, preaching along the way and visiting the believers there.
Not long afterwards Mr. and Mrs. John B. Martin were also sent to Qinzhou. According to Martin's diary, the mission station consisted of two adjoining houses. One served as the chapel, where worship was held on Sunday mornings and where about ten men also met for Bible study; the other was kept for the women's meetings, attended by 30 believers and enquirers. Everyone sat on the kang (heated brick bed) to study the Bible. When the Bible study ended, a gong was struck and everyone gathered in the chapel for Sunday worship, men and women sitting on separate sides. After the service the men and women went back to their own houses for lunch, and in the afternoon each group again studied the Bible on its own. At four in the afternoon the church's preaching band went out into the streets to preach and hand out gospel tracts, or used gospel posters to explain the message on street corners. The meeting after supper was more informal, with hymn singing and teaching and exhortation from the speaker. This was how the believers spent the Lord's Day.
In 1909 Annie stayed for a time at the preaching point in Zhangjia village. The Sunday meeting was held in the home of a new believer, and 10 men and a large crowd of women came. After the meeting they asked her many questions about the faith, which greatly encouraged and delighted her—such things did not happen often. In the autumn of 1910 Qinzhou was flooded, the harvest failed and prices soared; with a nationwide revolution about to break out and society growing more unsettled, the Western countries ordered their people to withdraw from the interior. After a long journey by land and water, the sisters reached Shanghai in May 1912, then went back to Australia on furlough and took further training in nursing. Once things had settled, the missionaries gradually returned to the interior, and Annie came back to Qinzhou in November 1913, resuming her itinerant work in the countryside, leading women in Bible study and preaching the gospel to them. In May 1917 Jessie G. Gregg, a well-known woman evangelist of the China Inland Mission, held meetings across Gansu and was in Qinzhou from May 7 to 10; many people made decisions for Christ during the meetings, 50 of them women.
On December 16, 1920, a great earthquake struck Gansu, causing heavy loss of life and property in more than 30 towns and many villages. According to a report by the Rev. Leslie C. Whitelaw, who was then in charge of the mission station, the missionaries of all 12 mission stations threw themselves into relief work at once. In May 1921 Annie went to a remote village in Xihe County, 125 miles from Qinzhou, and spent five months in intensive evangelistic work, which sparked a revival at that station: besides the daily meetings, more than 50 people attended Sunday worship, and the believers in the church earnestly repented and returned to the Lord, and eagerly took up service.
The first Gansu Christian Workers' Conference, in 1918, had decided to launch a "Home Study Course for Chinese Christian Women" and elected Annie chair of its executive committee. The second conference was held from July 26 to August 3, 1924, at the Christian and Missionary Alliance station in Didao (now Lintao), and several of its resolutions concerned the two sisters. Annie gave her work report in Chinese; the plan she proposed for carrying the course forward was adopted on the spot, and she was again elected head of the committee. In an age when the great majority of women could not read, turning "home study" into a course used across the whole province was no small piece of work.
In July 1922 the sisters returned to Australia for their last furlough, coming back to China in January 1924. That summer they left Qinzhou and went south to open a new field in Huixian (Hui County). The area was sparsely populated, with high mountains and deep valleys, and travel was extremely hard; daily food was nothing but bean pods, pickled vegetables and steamed buns. At first no one dared to take them in; only gradually did the girls and women begin to have dealings with them. Even in such circumstances Annie could still write: "How happy we are to be able to bring the gospel to these women and girls who are so poor in spirit!"
She went from village to village in Huixian, practising medicine as she went. She treated every person with love, and so people from near and far came to her for treatment. Take 1925 alone: of the 1,481 people who came to her that year, 1,227 received treatment from her. Everyone who came also heard the gospel, and some of them came to trust in the grace of God. In 1926 the political situation worsened and there was unrest everywhere, yet the series of evangelistic meetings at the Lunar New Year went ahead in Huixian as usual—they set up a tent in the street and preached the gospel to passers-by. In October of that year James O. Fraser came to Qinzhou to lead Bible studies and to baptize.
In 1927, because of the national situation, Annie and the other missionaries withdrew from the interior to the coastal cities, and the situation did not stabilize until 1928. In 1929 they returned to Gansu just as a severe drought struck the region. Answering the call of the international joint famine relief effort, they threw themselves into relief work, distributing grain and necessities to the victims; the China Inland Mission headquarters in Shanghai also sent large quantities of supplies.
No one knew at the time that this would be Annie Garland's last work report. A year of famine relief, together with nursing sick refugees, had long since exhausted her strength; her health declined day by day, and through her prolonged contact with the sick she finally contracted typhus. In those conditions there was no way to obtain effective treatment, and she grew steadily worse. She spent her last Christmas gravely ill and died on December 27, 1929. Counting from her arrival in China in 1891, she had spent 38 years in Gansu, and in the end she died in the land she had served. A few years later the same disease also took Emil Fischbacher, who in 1933, during the fighting in Dihua (now Urumqi), Xinjiang, led the effort to save wounded soldiers, caught typhus and died before he was 30. In an age when famine, war and epidemic came together, those who went first to save others often died in just this way.