Mary Ann Aldersey

Mary Ann Aldersey (Chinese name Ai Disui, 艾迪绥; June 24, 1797 – 1868) was the first Protestant woman missionary to China. In Ningbo, Zhejiang, she founded China's first mission girls' school (the forerunner of the later Yongjiang Girls' Middle School).

Aldersey was born into a wealthy Nonconformist family in England. Her father, Joseph, was a local wholesale stationer; her mother was named Elizabeth. When Robert Morrison (马礼逊) was home on furlough from 1824 to 1826, Aldersey studied Chinese with him, preparing to join the missionary ranks. But in 1832 her sister-in-law died, forcing her to take on the care of the children of her brother Richard in London. During this time her friend Maria Newell (who went to Malacca in 1827 as a London Missionary Society missionary and married the missionary Karl Gützlaff, 郭实腊) encouraged her to join the missionary ranks.

In 1837 Aldersey went as an independent missionary to Surabaya, Java, where she was welcomed by the German lay preacher Johannes Emde (1774–1859) and his Javanese wife. She began to learn Malay and to preach to the local overseas Chinese, and there she opened a school for Chinese girls. In 1843 she moved the school to Ningbo, a Chinese port city newly opened to foreigners; the school was called the Ningbo Girls' School (宁波女塾), and she worked there until 1861.

She never joined any mission society, but kept close ties with the London Missionary Society. Some of her colleagues at the school were daughters of Chinese-speaking missionaries; at least 4 of them became missionaries' wives, among them the sisters Burella Hunter Dyer (May 31, 1835 – August 1858) and Maria Jane Dyer (January 16, 1837 – July 23, 1870). The elder sister, Burella, married John Shaw Burdon, later an Anglican bishop; the younger, Maria, married Hudson Taylor (戴德生), founder of the China Inland Mission, in 1858, against Aldersey's wishes. Another co-worker, Mary Ann Leisk (who had come with Aldersey from Surabaya to Ningbo), later married William Armstrong Russell, bishop of North China.

In 1861 Aldersey announced her retirement, handed the school over to the Church of England, and went to McLaren Vale in South Australia to live with her brother's family. There she built a house, naming it Tsong Gyiaou (三桥, “Three Bridges”) after a former preaching station in Ningbo. She died at McLaren Vale, South Australia, on September 30, 1868. The house is now part of the McLaren Vale & Districts War Memorial Hospital.