Hudson Taylor-A School Built from a Shipwreck

By Mary Vee

Year: April 1879 

Hudson Taylor: age 46

From J. Hudson Taylor's Notes

Photo Courtesy

We had a field to start building a school for missionary children, a hospital, and a place for missionaries to come and rest. Time to get busy.

Building supplies can be difficult to get. Charles Judd and I prayed, asking God to give us what we needed.

Neither Charles nor I had experience building a house. We kinda made steps up as we went. We hired some local men to chisel out stones out of the gully on our property. 

Next we made bricks from the surface soil on the land. 

We heard about a sunken ship called the Christian. The wreck had oak and Norwegian pine. We bought the damaged ship and used the deck for rafters in our new house and the oak for heavy beams. 

God then showed us another wreck called the Ada. We bought teak from that ship and made the floors of our building. The cabins, doors, locks, cupboards, from the ship also worked well with our building. We only had to pay two dollars for a hundredweight. 

We still had work to do like squaring the door, making keys for the locks, and working with some of the teak that had holes left from bolts. We laid the teak, moving pieces around to keep the holes from landing in places where people would walk.

The house didn't have the master builder look to it, but it will do. We built five rooms upstairs and five downstairs with an outhouse and a lean-to. 

The European onlookers were surprised at how fast we built the house. Well, we weren't experts, but the house is still standing!

This building served as the China Inland Mission school for missionary children. Within a short time, the boys and girls filled the school.

At the end of the year, 1879, mostly due to sicknesses that kept bothering me, I moved the CIM office to Yantai. By living in a place that kept me healthy, I could do much more for the service of God.

Praise God for His help and support.

J. Hudson Taylor

Missionary to China--Inland China!

So Very Blessed by God

Research resources: J. Hudson Taylor, An Autobiography by J. Hudson Taylor; It is Not Death to Die, a new biography of Hudson Taylor by Jim Cromarty; Hudson Taylor Founder, China Inland Mission by Vance Christie; J. Hudson Taylor, A Man in Christ, by Roger Steer, and Hudson Taylor's Spiritual Secret by Dr.and Mrs. Howard Taylor