The Letters of Hazel Todd of the China Inland Mission, 1920-1941
In 1920, twenty-seven-year-old Hazel joined the China Inland Mission and for most of the next two decades dedicated her life to the rigorous evangelical project conceived of by her sponsoring agency. At the time of her arrival, China was a nation in search of itself (the last Chinese dynasty was overthrown less than a decade before), a brutal process that inevitably defined her own life and missionary career. During her tenure there, Hazel Todd experienced epidemic warlordism, the rise of militant Nationalist and Communist political movements, and in 1937 the outbreak of full-fledged war between China and Japan.
“This volume of Hazel Todd’s letters offers us . . . descriptions and narratives of the lives of ordinary rural Christians in these years. The tempo of rural missionary life is evident in these letters. Hazel . . . also . . . gives us a profile of the rural Christian communities which grew around the foreign missionaries and the mission station. Relations between missionary and pastors and elders within the church reveal unexpected complexities. Gardella has done a very competent job of editing and annotating this volume . . . Historians of Christian mission probably will find this work extremely valuable.”
— Daniel Bays in The China Quarterly,
Robert Gardella, Professor of History Emeritus at The United States Merchant Marine Academy is the author of Harvesting Mountains: Fujian and the China Tea Trade, 1757-1937 (1994), and co-editor of Chinese Business History (1998) and Contract and Property in Early Modorn China (2004).
ISBN 978-0-9836599-9-0 $45.00 pbk
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