Gladys Aylward

Called to China

Gladys Aylward was born in 1902 into an ordinary working-class family in Edmonton, on the northern outskirts of London, and resolved as a young woman to become a missionary. She applied to join the China Inland Mission but was turned down for lack of schooling, so she worked as a housemaid in London to save money and, paying her own fare, travelled alone to China by the Trans-Siberian Railway, reaching Yangcheng in Shanxi in 1932. Together with an older British missionary, Jeannie Lawson, she ran the "Inn of the Eight Happinesses", telling Gospel stories to passing merchants and travellers, and at the order of the local magistrate she went out to the villages to enforce the ban on foot-binding.

The Inn and the Orphans

Lawson died soon afterwards, and Aylward carried on the inn, the Gospel work and the orphan work on her own. She worked hard to learn the dialect of southeastern Shanxi, and local officials appointed her a "prison inspector", in which role she intervened to mediate among prisoners. In 1936 she formally became a Chinese citizen, one of very few Western missionaries to take Chinese nationality. The Japanese army invaded Shanxi in 1938; in 1940 she led nearly 100 orphans on foot over the Zhongtiao Mountains and across the Yellow River to Fufeng in Shaanxi, where she continued to care for them. This episode was later told by Alan Burgess in the biography The Small Woman, which in 1958 was made into the Hollywood film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, starring Ingrid Bergman.

Later Years in Taiwan

In 1949 Aylward returned to Britain; in 1957 she sought to return to mainland China but was refused entry and stayed for a time in Hong Kong, settling in Taiwan in 1958. From 1958 she ran the Gladys Aylward Children's Home in Taipei (first in Beitou, later moved to Muzha), and settled in Taipei in her later years. She died of illness in 1970 and was buried on the campus of Christ's College in Guandu. She is remembered for her independent missionary work, her courageous faith and her deep commitment to China's poorest people, and is one of the best-known women missionaries to China in the 20th-century English-speaking world.