BY THE SPRING OF 1938, the Japanese army had invaded and occupied large sections of northern China. Many of the Chinese soldiers in northern areas not yet occupied by the Japanese were ill-equipped and commanded by warlord generals with various and conflicting levels of loyalty to Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. Communist guerrillas randomly attacked Japanese troops from behind. China, disorganized though it was, fought on in whatever ways it could and refused to surrender.
Japan took the war to China’s civilians as they had in Nanking: burning, looting, raping, and killing. By the end of the war, between 80 to 100 million Chinese civilians would become refugees. Many of these refugees were war orphans.
In a bombed-out mission in the northwestern Shanxi province, in the town of Yangcheng, a British-missionary-turned-Chinese-citizen, Gladys Aylward, was caring for more than 100 of these war orphans. Each week children were brought to the mission or wandered in by themselves; anyone who knew Gladys Aylward understood she would never turn away an orphaned child.
Gladys Aylward, shortly before leaving China. The Small Woman by Alan Burgess (Reprint Society, 1957)
Gladys was urged to contact Madame Chiang, wife of Chiang Kai-shek. The generalissimo’s wife was opening orphanages in the Shaanxi province, just west of the Shanxi province.
Madame Chiang replied quickly to Gladys’s letter. “If you can bring the children into Free China to Shaanxi,” she wrote, “we will look after them.”
Soon 100 children were on their way with one of Gladys’s trusted friends. But before a month had passed, 100 more orphans had found their way to the mission.
One day, a Chinese general sent Gladys a message: the Japanese were approaching Yangcheng in large numbers. The Chinese army was retreating. He wanted Gladys to come with them. They would care for the children on the way.
Although Gladys was concerned for the children’s safety, she rarely feared for her own. The children left with the general and his men. Gladys remained at Yangcheng.
Two nights after their departure, a Chinese soldier knocked on her door, telling Gladys he had been sent back to once more persuade her to leave.
“Whether you leave with us nor not, you must leave. We have received certain information.”
“What information?” Gladys asked.
“The Japanese have put a price on your head.”
“You are just saying this to make me leave,” Gladys replied.
He wasn’t. The soldier pulled a paper out of his pocket, one of many, he said, that had been found posted on a nearby city wall. The paper listed three names and stated the following: “Any person giving information which will lead to the capture, alive or dead, of the above mentioned, will receive [a large sum of money] from the Japanese High Command.” One of the names listed on the poster was “Ai-weh-deh,” Gladys’s official Chinese name.
Why did this missionary have a price on her head?
She had come to China in 1932 on the Trans-Siberian Railway during an undeclared war between the Soviet Union and China. After being stopped, nearly attacked, then ordered to work in the Soviet Union, Gladys escaped and completed the trip to Yangcheng—a place where few Europeans had yet ventured—by boat, bus, and mule.
In Yangcheng, Gladys and an elderly Scottish missionary named Jennie Lawson opened a public house they named the Inn of the Eight Happinesses. Here the two women fed and sheltered “muleteers,” men who traveled on months-long journeys by mule caravans, transporting goods and equipment throughout the province.
While the muleteers ate, the women told them Bible stories. Because the men enjoyed the stories and because they traveled so widely, the innkeepers’ fame spread quickly. Gladys longed to speak the local Chinese dialect as well as Jennie, so she studied hard. After she had been in China for one year—during which time Jennie died of an illness related to old age—Gladys was quite fluent.
Shortly after Jennie’s death, Gladys was visited by an important local official, the Mandarin of the Shanxi province. He asked Gladys if she would help him stamp out the practice of foot binding—tightly wrapping the feet of female babies and young girls to give them a permanently hobbled way of walking, then widely considered an important symbol of femininity and crucial for making a good marriage. The province’s warlord had ordered the Mandarin to stop foot binding in that part of the Shanxi province, but the Mandarin didn’t think it proper work for a man. And Gladys was the only woman in the district who could endure long journeys because she was the only woman in the area with unbound feet.
The Mandarin promised Gladys two soldiers for protection, a mule for traveling, and a small salary. Gladys took up the challenge and traveled to many small villages in the Shanxi province. She always broke the initial tension with stories and songs. Then she gently but firmly explained that the villagers had to stop crippling the feet of their daughters. The alternative was prison.
The villagers sensed Gladys was a kind woman, despite the threatening soldiers accompanying her and the consequences facing them if they didn’t cooperate. They often followed her to wherever she stayed for the night and requested more stories. Gladys became known as “the Storyteller.”
By 1936, Gladys had been in China for four years. Her language, appearance, and behavior, even her way of thinking, were now more Chinese than British. She decided to become a Chinese citizen. She took the name the Chinese people had already given her: Ai-weh-deh, which means “virtuous woman.”
Although she thoroughly enjoyed her work, Gladys was often lonely and longed for a family of her own. One day during her travels, she noticed a woman begging by the roadside in the harsh sunlight. Beside the woman was a small child who was dirty, ill, and covered with sores. Gladys warned the woman that the sick child would die if not taken out of the sun.
“Well, if she does,” the woman replied, “I can get another to take her place.”
Gladys was horrified: the woman was using the sick child for money. She purchased the girl for five Chinese coins. Because the amount was about the same as ninepence in English money, Gladys named the girl Ninepence. Nineteen more orphans soon found their way into Gladys’s home, and she adopted them all. She now had a family.
Then, one spring day in 1938, war came to Yangcheng. The villagers ran out of their homes to a sight they’d never seen before: airplanes. But their excitement quickly turned to terror when those planes began to rain destruction and death all over the town.
The inn was hit in several places. Gladys was knocked unconscious and had to be dug out of the rubble by some neighbors. When she recovered consciousness, she helped transform part of the inn into a first aid station. And despite the danger, she continued to travel from village to village, holding Christian meetings that were usually well attended. Some of the attendees were now Japanese soldiers.
Yangcheng changed hands four times from the Japanese to the Chinese, each battle bringing more destruction and misery to the town. Gladys continued to use what was left of the inn courtyard to nurse the wounded, both Chinese and Japanese.
One day, four Chinese men dressed in civilian clothes came to see Gladys. The leader’s name was Linnan. He told Gladys he was working for Chiang Kai-shek’s intelligence service.
“Will you help China?” he asked.
“I’m Chinese—naturalized Chinese—and I care deeply about what happens to this country.” But, Gladys continued, she hadn’t come to China to help it win a war.
Linnan tried to persuade her. “Japanese intentions are evil, are they not? China is fighting to the death in an effort to prevent this evil from spreading.”
Gladys thought about this, then gave her answer: “I will help you as far as my conscience will allow me.”
The next time she traveled through occupied Japanese territory to hold Christian meetings, she took note of how many Japanese soldiers were in a particular area and what sort of weapons they carried. The Japanese didn’t seem to notice her—she looked like another ordinary war refugee. So she passed back and forth through their lines unsuspected, sometimes leading Nationalist troops right into Japanese positions.
As she provided information to Linnan, her patriotism grew, as did her desire to work against the Japanese, who, she would write later, “had despoiled our country, disturbed our way of life and killed our friends.”
Now Gladys had discovered that the Japanese wanted to kill her and were offering a reward for her capture. The Chinese soldier who had been sent to urge her to flee for her own safety awaited her answer.
Gladys was torn by her sense of responsibility for the area. Perhaps there was a good reason she had received this warning. But she longed for more direction, some sort of sign. She opened her Bible. The first words she saw were these: “Flee ye, flee ye into the mountains.” She burned all incriminating documents and pictures and made plans to leave the next day.
But when morning came and her mule was being prepared for travel, a fellow villager gestured to the peephole in the main village gate. “No mule will get out of here today, Ai-weh-deh. They are here; they came last night,” he said. When Gladys looked through the peephole, she saw Japanese soldiers washing their feet.
The only other exit out of the town was the Gate of the Dead, the path reserved for removing dead bodies. Gladys got through it, crossed a stream, and was in an open field before the Japanese spotted her.
She heard them shouting. Bullets flew past her head. She dove to the ground, rolled under a bush, ran, fell, ran, hid, crawled, always moving forward, until the firing stopped.
Within two days she found the village of Cheng Tsuen where the first group of children had gone. They were still not safe. Cheng Tsuen was being bombed regularly. Someone needed to take the children to Sian (now Xi’an), capital of the Shaanxi province.
Gladys decided to take them. Her friends in Cheng Tsuen tried to talk her out of it. It was a 200-mile trip, they said, nearly impossible to accomplish with so many small children. And what’s more, the Japanese now had control of every road along the way.
But Gladys was determined to get the children to safety. If the roads were too dangerous, she would travel over the mountains.
At first, the children were excited and happy, as if they were on an adventure. They walked along the mountain paths and slept in temples or out in the open, huddling together for warmth.
But after a few days, the younger children became exhausted and tearful. The older children couldn’t carry them far before becoming worn out themselves. Gladys tried to distract and energize everyone with songs.
After 12 exhausting days, the great Yellow River—a major milestone on their journey—came into view. They walked down to the riverbank and waited for the expected ferryboat. After hours with no boat in sight, Gladys left the younger children in the care of the older and visited the local military headquarters. They told her the boats were no longer running; they were all on the other side. The Japanese were expected there at any moment, and the Chinese, of course, didn’t want to supply their enemy with easy transport across the river.
Gladys returned to the hungry children at the riverbank. She spent a sleepless, despairing night wondering why she had taken on this task, why she had placed them all in this dangerous and impossible situation.
At dawn, one of the older children, Sualan, asked Gladys if she remembered the Bible story about Moses and the children of Israel crossing the Red Sea.
When Gladys nodded, Sualan then asked if she believed it.
“I would not teach you anything I did not believe,” said Gladys.
“Then why does not God open the waters of the Yellow River for us to cross?” asked Sualan.
“I’m not Moses, Sualan,” Gladys replied.
Sualan reminded her that God hadn’t changed. Gladys suddenly wondered if she had ever really believed her own stories, the ones she’d never stopped sharing since she’d come to China. And what could she say now to this trusting young girl?
“Let you and I kneel down and pray, Sualan,” said Gladys. “And perhaps soon our prayers will be answered.”
A short time later, she heard the children screaming with delight, “Ai-weh-deh, here’s a soldier! A soldier!”
A Chinese patrol officer, who had heard the children’s voices, approached, clearly surprised to see them. The river was closed, he explained. Japanese planes regularly patrolled this area, shooting at anything that moved.
“This will soon be a battlefield,” he continued. Didn’t she realize that?
“All China is a battlefield,” Gladys replied wearily.
He said he would try to get them a boat. He put his fingers in his mouth and whistled sharply three times. Gladys heard three response whistles from across the river. A boat soon appeared and ferried the children in groups until they were all safely across.
After a few days of rest in a nearby village, Gladys and the children set out for Miechin, where they were to catch a train that would bring them closer to the orphanage in Sian.
But the train stopped prematurely; the Japanese had invaded the area, and they always targeted China’s railway system. This train would go no farther.
Gladys was once again stranded. She pleaded with the stationmaster: she had 100 children with her. They had been on the road for 20 days. There must be something he could do.
“Madam,” he replied, “there are millions of refugees all over China.”
“But these are children!” she cried.
“If you wish to go farther,” he said, “the only way is across those mountains.” There was only one pass open, he said, and it ran through a battle line, with Japanese troops on one side and Chinese on the other. But he kindly offered to provide Gladys with two soldiers for protection if she chose to attempt the journey.
Gladys looked up. The mountaintops were so high they were hidden by clouds. It would be a steep trek for the children. But there was no other way.
Gladys, the children, and the soldiers made it safely through the pass with only a few minor injuries due to slipping and sliding. After one final, dangerous train ride in some coal cars through Japanese-controlled territory, they arrived safely in Sian.
But the older children were concerned for Gladys. “For days you have been ill,” they said. “You have carried one child, sometimes two, all day, and you have given nearly all the food to us.”
Gladys ignored their concerns. She also ignored the suggestions of the orphanage workers who urged her to stay and rest. As the children were now in good hands, Gladys thought her job was to continue traveling throughout the villages, holding meetings.
She left the orphanage, found a village … and woke up in a hospital. She had collapsed while preaching. The doctor told her she should have died long before: she was suffering from a combination of fever, exhaustion, malnutrition, typhus, and pneumonia.
It took Gladys many years to fully recover. Yet she continued to speak publicly and help Chinese refugees throughout the war, as well as prisoners and lepers.
As the world war came to a close, a civil war began in China, fought between the Chinese Communists and the Chinese Nationalists. On October 1, 1949, Communist leader Mao Zedong declared victory, while Nationalist leader Chiang Kaishek and his troops retreated to the island of Taiwan.
One day, shortly after the Communist takeover, Gladys witnessed the authorities behead 200 college students, some of them her friends, who were recent Christian converts. Because of their new faith, they had refused to swear loyalty to the Communist Party.
When Communist authorities began to zero in on Gladys as well, she left for Great Britain. There she did all she could to help Chinese refugees: she rescued a wrongly imprisoned Chinese woman in Belfast and opened a Chinese church in London. She also held meetings where she requested clothing donations for those who had fled mainland China and were now crowded into refugee camps in Formosa, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
After 10 years in the West, she tried to return to mainland China but was refused entry. So instead she worked in an orphanage in Taiwan.
In 1957, a writer named Alan Burgess published a biography about Gladys that was made into a film starring Ingrid Bergman. Gladys was mortified by the fictional elements of the film, which portrayed her friendship with Linnan as a romance.
Gladys wrote her memoir in 1970, the same year she died in Taiwan, at the age of 68.
Gladys Aylward: The Adventure of a Lifetime by Janet and Geoff Benge (YWAM, 1998).
The Little Woman by Gladys Aylward, with Christine Hunter (Moody, 1970).
The Small Woman: The Heroic Story of Gladys Aylward by Alan Burgess (Reprint Society, 1957).
“Yangcheng and the Inn of the Eight Happinesses,” CJVlang, https://archive.is/vcX6l. Includes photos taken in 2006 of the inn’s remains.
