Henrietta Hall Shuck

Marriage and Coming to China

Henrietta Hall Shuck was born in 1817 into a Baptist minister's family in Virginia, USA. In 1835 she married Jehu Lewis Shuck, and the two at once dedicated themselves to overseas missions. In 1836 the couple set out from Boston and, travelling by way of Singapore, reached Macau, making her the first American woman missionary resident in China.

A Girls' School in Macau

Soon after arriving in Macau, while learning Chinese, she opened a school for girls in her home, taking in girls from poor families and teaching them the Bible and basic subjects such as reading, writing and arithmetic. This was one of the earliest attempts at Western-style education for girls in South China. She also helped her husband with evangelism among the Chinese and with classes teaching Chinese characters, and wrote letters to churches in America describing the situation of Chinese women, which drew the Southern Baptist Convention's lasting attention to mission work among Chinese women.

Moving to Hong Kong

After the Treaty of Nanking between China and Britain was signed in 1842, Henrietta Shuck moved with her husband to the newly opened port of Hong Kong, where she continued running the school and caring for the growing Chinese congregation. In 1844 she died of complications after childbirth, aged only twenty-seven, leaving several young children, and was buried in the Happy Valley Cemetery in Hong Kong. The example of girls' education and women's ministry she left in her brief eight years in China deeply shaped the pattern of service of later Southern Baptist women workers in China. A Memoir of Mrs. Henrietta Shuck (1846), a biography compiled by J. B. Jeter largely from her letters and journals, circulated widely among Christian women in America and inspired generation after generation of women missionaries to give themselves to China.