Who Was Hudson Taylor? His Life, Faith and the China Inland Mission
James Hudson Taylor was an English missionary to China and the founder of the China Inland Mission. He was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, in 1832, the son of a chemist who was also a Methodist preacher. He gave his life to Christ as a teenager, trained in medicine in Hull and London, and sailed for China at twenty-one. In 1865 he started a mission to carry the gospel into the inland provinces where no Protestant missionary lived. By the time he died in China in 1905, hundreds of missionaries had gone out with it, and the work still goes on today under the name OMF International.
What made him known was not only what he did but how he did it. He would not go into debt, and he would not ask anyone but God for money. He told God his needs and expected God to answer.
The fullest account of his early life is Hudson Taylor in Early Years: The Growth of a Soul, written by his son Howard Taylor and his daughter-in-law, Mrs. Howard Taylor, and published in 1911. Taylor told the same story more briefly in his own words in A Retrospect. Both are free to read in TheWay Library.
A praying home in Barnsley
Taylor's family had followed Christ for three generations before he was born. His great-grandfather came to faith through the Methodist preaching that swept Yorkshire in John Wesley's day. His father, James Taylor, ran a chemist's shop in Barnsley and preached on Sundays. Before Hudson was born, his parents gave him to God, and his father prayed that a son of his might one day work in China.
The biography records the birth simply:
And just as definitely the Lord responded, giving them faith to realise that He had accepted the gift; that henceforth the life so dear to them was their own no longer, but must be held at the disposal of a higher claim, a deeper love than theirs.
Hudson Taylor in Early Years, chapter III
He was a frail child, often ill, and his parents taught him at home for much of his boyhood. Later in life he looked back on that home with deep thanks:
For myself, and for the work that I have been permitted to do for God, I owe an unspeakable debt of gratitude to my beloved and honoured parents, who have passed away and entered into rest, but the influence of whose lives will never pass away.
A Retrospect, chapter 5
Conversion through a tract
As a teenager he drifted from the faith of his home and listened to skeptical friends. One afternoon in June 1849, with his mother away, he picked up a gospel tract in his father's library. He meant to read the story and skip the sermon. A phrase stopped him: "the finished work of Christ." If the work was finished and the debt was paid, what was left for him to do? He saw that there was nothing left but to receive the Savior and praise Him.
At that same hour his mother, many miles away, had locked herself in her room to pray for her son until she knew God had answered. When she came home two weeks later, she already knew. His sister had also been praying for him daily. Taylor drew a lesson from it that shaped the rest of his life:
Brought up in such a circle and saved under such circumstances, it was perhaps natural that from the commencement of my Christian life I was led to feel that the promises were very real, and that prayer was in sober matter of fact transacting business with God, whether on one's own behalf or on behalf of those for whom one sought His blessing.
A Retrospect, chapter 5
The call to China
Not long after his conversion he gave himself to God without reserve, and he became certain that God wanted him in China. He was seventeen, working in his father's shop. He knew almost nothing about China and had no idea how he would get there. So he began to prepare. He studied, slept on a hard bed, gave out tracts, taught Sunday school and visited the poor.
He also decided that medical training would be the best preparation. In 1851 he moved to Hull to work as an assistant to a doctor there. He lived in a cheap room in a poor neighborhood called Drainside so he could give away more of his money. In 1852 he went on to study at the London Hospital, living on brown bread, apples and water.
These were the years when he set out to learn to trust God for everything before he left England. The stories from this time, like the half-crown he gave to a starving family in Hull, are told in Hudson Taylor's faith and money.
Shanghai, Ningpo and Chinese dress
Taylor went out with a small society called the Chinese Evangelisation Society. China was in upheaval from a great rebellion, and the society wanted him to go at once, before he finished his medical course. He sailed from Liverpool in September 1853 on a small sailing ship, the Dumfries, and reached Shanghai at the start of March 1854.
The early years were hard. Shanghai was at war, prices were high, and the society often failed to send what it promised. He was lonely and often short of money. But he learned the language, made trips into the country to preach and give out Scriptures, and came to love the Chinese people.
In 1855 he did something few missionaries of his day would do. He put on Chinese clothes, shaved his head and wore the long braid, so that he could live among the people without drawing crowds. He kept to it for the rest of his life. For some months he worked alongside the Scottish evangelist William Burns, who had a deep influence on him.
In 1856 he settled in the city of Ningpo. The next year he resigned from the society because it borrowed money to pay its missionaries, and he could not square debt with Scripture. From then on he looked to God alone for support. In January 1858 he married Maria Dyer, a missionary teacher in Ningpo whose father had been one of the earliest London Missionary Society workers among the Chinese. A small church grew up around their home. When the Scottish doctor in charge of the mission hospital in Ningpo had to go home, Taylor took on the hospital as well, trusting God for its needs.
Home to England and the founding of the mission
By 1860 his health had broken down, and he and Maria returned to England. Doctors told him he could not go back to China for years. It looked like the end of his work. Instead it became the beginning of a much larger one. He finished his medical training, helped revise the New Testament in the Ningpo dialect, and kept a large map of China on his study wall. He could not stop thinking of the millions inland who had never heard the gospel.
In June 1865, staying with a friend in Brighton, he walked out on the beach alone and settled the matter with God:
There and then I asked Him for twenty-four fellow-workers, two for each of eleven inland provinces which were without a missionary, and two for Mongolia; and writing the petition on the margin of the Bible I had with me, I returned home with a heart enjoying rest such as it had been a stranger to for months.
A Retrospect, chapter XVIII
That same year he wrote China's Spiritual Need and Claims, which drew many young men and women to China. In May 1866 he sailed again with his family and a party of sixteen missionaries on the Lammermuir. The China Inland Mission had begun.
His later years
The rest of his life was spent building the mission in China and traveling to raise up workers in Britain, North America and elsewhere. Maria died in China in 1870, and he later remarried. The work grew steadily. By 1893 the mission counted more than five hundred missionaries in fourteen provinces, all serving without a promised salary. Taylor described the terms plainly:
But we praise God that during the past twenty-eight years such ministry has always been possible; our God has supplied all our need, and has withheld no good thing.
A Retrospect, chapter XX
He died in Changsha, in the province of Hunan, in 1905.
Where to read his story
Start with Hudson Taylor in Early Years. It covers his family, his conversion, his training and his first six years in China, ending with his return to England in 1860. Our chapter-by-chapter summary of the book will help you find your way around it. A Retrospect is his own short account, and it carries the story on to the founding of the mission.
For his own teaching, read Union and Communion, his thoughts on the Song of Solomon, and Separation and Service. Mrs. Howard Taylor also wrote Pastor Hsi of North China, the life of a Chinese believer connected with the mission. For memorable lines from all of these, see our collection of Hudson Taylor quotes.