Within a week Florence realized that she had a challenge on her hands. Forty workmen showed up to build the seven-foot-high stone wall. Mr. Wang was an elderly Christian, and his chief concern was to preach to the workers. The workers, who were paid by the hour, were more than happy to encourage Mr. Wang to preach to them for hours at a time, and little progress was made on the wall.
Although Florence tried to get Mr. Wang to allow the stonemasons to get on with their work, he found it impossible to stop preaching to them. Eventually Florence sent Mr. Wang on a preaching tour and took over supervising the building process herself.
This led to more frustration as the workmen tried many tricks on Florence, who soon learned that they were chipping the stones into shape by day and stealing them at night. Florence hired a night watchman to watch over the pile of cut stones, but he slept soundly all night and feigned surprise that the pile of stones was growing smaller and smaller each morning. A young schoolboy then offered to watch over the stones at night, and sure enough, he sounded the alarm at 2 A.M. the first night he was on duty.
The three missionary women in the house bounded out of bed and threw on their tunics. Christine was the fastest runner, and she sprinted after the robber, catching him by his queue and dragging him back to the mission house. There she and Florence reprimanded the man and warned him that if they ever caught him stealing from them again, they would take him to the mandarin. The threat seemed to have the desired effect, and the wall was completed without any more theft.
The next challenge was building the new mission house. Mr. Orr-Ewing had promised to send a male missionary to help with all of the negotiations for the house building, but none could be spared. In the end Florence drew up her own plans for the house and submitted them to the CIM board in Shanghai. The plans were revised, and the superintendent then advised Florence to go ahead and supervise the building project herself.
Florence was reluctant to do this. The stone wall had created so many difficulties for her that she dreaded to think what building an entire house would be like. But the house had to be built, so in the end Florence hired Mr. Iao’s son T’ai-ho to help her with the building project, and they boldly began.
The first task was to find a builder to build the house. The mission had budgeted $600 for the purpose, but no builder in An-ren would take on the job for less than $1,000. Eventually Florence found a builder in the country who agreed to come to town and erect the house for $615. The plans called for a nine-room house with balconies back and front. The downstairs would be one large room where meetings could be held, and upstairs would be eight rooms. The plans specified the dimensions of the house in feet, but as there was no standard measurement system in China at the time, Florence and the builder had to agree on how long a foot was. Once this was agreed upon, two five-foot-long measuring rods called changs were made, one for the builder and one for Florence so that she could check that the builder was building the house to the proper specifications.
Finally construction of the house began, and stonemasons began to erect the sandstone walls of the first story. When the walls were complete, the builder summoned Florence to approve the beams that would support the upper story. With her chang, Florence measured each beam to make sure it met the specifications called for. Those beams she approved she wrote her initials on. Those beams that did not meet the specifications were set aside, and the builder assured her that not one of them would be used in the construction of the house.
Two days later the beams were in place and the builder was ready to begin construction of the second story. For some reason Florence was suspicious. She asked T’ai-ho if he had personally witnessed the beams being put in place. When he told her he had not, Florence ordered him to get a ladder and check to see that each beam that had been used had her initials written on it. Florence soon learned to her dismay that the builder had used every beam she had rejected.
Florence ordered the builder to take down the rejected beams and replace them with ones that met the specifications called for. This time she watched the men closely as they worked. Once the beams were replaced, work began on the second story.
The roof was to be made of clay tiles, and Florence ordered twenty-five thousand tiles for the purpose. Half were to be delivered by the tile maker to An-ren on December 3, the second half on December 22. When no tiles arrived on December 3, Florence began to worry. Finally on December 13 the tile maker arrived in An-ren, but he brought no tiles with him. He apologized for missing the delivery deadline but assured Florence that the tiles were all made, although for some reason he was unable to deliver them. He asked Florence to send a convoy of wheelbarrows to his tile works to take delivery of the tiles and ferry them to An-ren. But before they could do this, he explained that he needed to be paid in full. This was not a customary practice, and Florence refused to pay him until she had taken delivery of all the tiles. The tile maker protested, but Florence held firm. Finally the tile maker relented, and T’ai-ho arranged for a convoy of eight wheelbarrows to go to the tile works and collect the tiles.
Florence was very frustrated when T’ai-ho reported that when he arrived at the tile works, the tile maker sheepishly admitted that he had not yet made the tiles. The man’s son had offended his workers several weeks before, and the men had been on strike since then. To make matters worse, it was now too late in the year to make tiles. Winter was descending on the land, and the tile maker could not produce the sun-baked tiles until the spring. This made Florence furious. The growing mission station desperately needed the extra living space, and now the house would have to lie unfinished through the winter.
Several days later, however, T’ai-ho brought some good news. The tile maker’s brother also made tiles, and he had a supply on hand that could be purchased for the roof. Florence quickly bought the tiles and had them brought to An-ren, where the builder got to work installing the roof.
Finally, after much frustration, the new house was complete and the missionaries moved into their new quarters. The new house was set back from the busy street, and Florence marveled at how much quieter it was than the old mission house.
Once the move was complete, the old mission house was remodeled into a larger church meeting hall. Soon after the remodeling was finished, seventeen new converts were baptized at An-ren. This made Florence feel that all of her hard work and the inevitable misunderstandings that came with trying to achieve things in a foreign country had been worthwhile.
In early summer 1900 Florence began to hear rumors of serious fighting in the north. Letters from CIM missionaries followed, telling how many secret societies had been formed with the goal of getting rid of all foreigners from Chinese soil. Florence, Christine, and Emma held a meeting and decided the best thing to do in the face of this new situation was to remain calm and continue to work as usual. This became increasingly more difficult to do, especially after the morning of Sunday, July 15, 1900. At ten o’clock in the morning, Florence was conducting a Bible class for beginners in the old mission house when suddenly two strangers burst into the room. A throng of nosy local people followed them.
One of the strangers gestured to Florence, who quickly asked a student to lead the class in a hymn. While the students sang, Florence led the two men from the meeting room and down a narrow hallway away from the prying throng. As she did so, she felt one of the men slip a note up her sleeve.
Florence continued walking. When they reached the kitchen, she offered the men some rice. While they ate, she turned her back to the window, away from the faces that now peered in at them, and read the note. The note, written by Dr. Judd, a fellow missionary upriver, was short and to the point:
Miss Young, The provincial magistrate here at Rao-cheo Fu has received an edict from the Empress ordering the extermination of all foreigners and offering a reward of money or official position to anyone who helps to kill us. The magistrate has promised me that he will keep this edict secret for three days in order for us to escape, but after that he must announce it to the people. He has urged me to flee immediately, and to warn you and the others to do the same.
Florence drew a deep breath and reminded herself once again that panicking was the worst thing to do in an emergency. She thanked the messengers for visiting her, slipped the message back up her tunic sleeve, and returned to the Bible study. By now the meeting had ended, and the crowd had moved on into the chapel for the morning church service. Florence breathed a prayer of thanks that Mr. Wang was scheduled to preach at the service. It would give the missionaries time to decide what they should do next.
Half an hour later Florence was back in the kitchen, this time with Christine and Emma. The women fastened the shutters on the window, lit a lamp, and huddled together. Florence handed the note around for each woman to read. “We will need to speak softly,” she said when they had read it.
Every aspect of the note was discussed, and the three women came to the conclusion that they should await instructions from the mandarin who was in charge of the nearby town of Kuei-k’i. The mandarin supported the thriving China Inland Mission station in Kuei-k’i, and the women knew that he would alert the missionaries straight away if things were as serious as Dr. Judd supposed them to be. In the meantime they agreed that two new European workers who were passing through An-ren should continue on their way south immediately. There was no reason to put anyone in unnecessary jeopardy. It took several days to arrange for them to leave, and on July 27 Florence wrote to her sister Emily:
It was a great relief when they were gone. The responsibility of other people’s lives is very heavy…. Rumors and threats are flying about. We go to bed each night with everything prepared for sudden flight. We have a ladder by the wall, and a few clothes entrusted to a friend of Siu-li; but we are so hemmed in that it is impossible to do anything secretly in China…. I cannot write more now; and perhaps it is as well. “It is better to trust,” and better to praise; and we have been doing both…. Poor China! The people are full of fears and lying reports. If it is so here, so far from the scene of real conflict, how terrible it must be in North China.
As Florence signed the letter and slid it into an envelope, she did not know that the empress’s edict was being pasted up on the public walls of An-ren. By morning the town was divided between those who wanted to kill the missionaries and those who were sympathetic toward them. Since the edict extended across all of China, Florence felt that she was probably safer staying in An-ren than traveling through unknown territory to the coast. At the best of times, bands of robbers made the trip dangerous, and now every foreigner’s head had a price on it.
Florence soon learned that Dr. and Mrs. Judd had made a similar decision, but things had not gone well for them. Their CIM station was attacked, and they barely escaped with their lives. Their Chinese helpers went into hiding, and one by one they made their way to An-ren, as did the workers from one of Florence’s outstations. More bad news soon followed. The Catholic mission at Rao-cheo was burned to the ground, and thirteen missionaries and their children were murdered north of An-ren.
Two nights later a special messenger arrived at midnight with an urgent telegram from CIM headquarters in Shanghai. All women missionaries and children were to make their way to the coast as quickly as possible. Florence understood why. Shanghai was a treaty port protected by well-armed foreign troops. People would be safe there from the turmoil in the rest of the country.
