Daily TERRORS Dogged Caroline Gates and the Glovers Across China
IN 1900, “the Buddhists’ Patriotic League of Boxers,” campaigned to kill “foreign devils” and their Chinese associates. Many Chinese blamed a prolonged drought on the intrusion of foreign religions. They especially resented the British because Britain had forced China to buy opium.
A party of missionaries from Lu-Ch'eng in Shan-si province (today’s Shanxi) attempted to get to the coast. Among them were Caroline Gates, Archibald Glover, his wife Flora, and their two children. Flora, needed medical attention for her pregnancy and local Christians urged all missionaries to leave as it was easier for the Chinese themselves to hide from the Boxers if they did not have to protect foreigners.
Terrible persecution accompanied the little band as it headed south. Although local leaders assisted them, they did so reluctantly and plotted to have the foreign devils killed by mob violence. Gates had a deep understanding of Chinese and was able to thwart malignant plans by warning the others of attempts to get them to sit where they could be trampled or to sleep where they could be suffocated.
Even so, they were jostled, beaten, starved, threatened, and hounded by mobs. Once Archibald was left naked from the waist down until someone took pity and threw him an undersize pair of pants. In a humiliating incident one moonlit night, four Boxers threatened immediate death and stripped the women of their shirts,. Archibald reprimanded the men: “You are human beings, it is true; but you have not the feelings of your kind.” The women's shirts were returned.
The four Boxers went for reinforcements and the missionaries fled. The next day they suffered terribly from direct sun and desperate thirst. After their recapture, they eventually were brought to the Yellow River. On this day, 11 July 1900, they were told they would not be allowed to cross the river from Shan-si into Honan province (today’s Henan). Archibald Glover wrote:
At this moment [God’s] promise was borne in powerfully upon my heart, “Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify Me.” ... [Realizing] that the assigned cause of their rage against us was the long continued drought, we were moved, under the impulse of the promise, to make a united cry to God to interfere for His great Name’s sake on our behalf, by sending rain enough to satisfy the need of these poor sufferers and, because of our extremity, to send it now. Accordingly, kneeling up upon the k’ang [brick bed], we poured out our hearts before Him in Chinese, that the [jailers] might know exactly what we were doing, and what we were asking.
The jailers mocked them as fools. Couldn’t they see the sky was cloudless, promising another day of devouring heat?
Scarcely had we risen from our knees, when the windows of heaven were opened, and down upon the howling mob swept the sudden fury of a torrential flood of waters. In a few seconds the street was empty, and not a sound was to be heard but the swish of the rushing rain.
Three days later they were in Honan province where officials showed them kindness as they passed through—feeding, housing, and clothing them. Ten weeks after their ordeal began, they reached Hankow (now merged into Wuhan) on the Yangtse River. There on 18 August, Flora Glover gave birth to a baby girl. A week later, the baby stopped eating and soon died. Flora lived to reach Shanghai where she died on 25 October. The terrible journey had taken such a toll on Archibald’s health that he had to leave China. However, Caroline Gates returned to Shan-si in 1902 to continue her ministry.
Glover and Gates both wrote accounts of their harrowing escape. Gates’s was in form of a long letter but Glover penned the best-selling book A Thousand Miles of Miracle.
—Dan Graves