Gladys Aylward: How a Rejected Missionary Ended Footbinding and Carried Hundred Orphans to Safety

In 1930, a London parlor maid with no formal education, no missionary training, and a total of ninety pounds saved through years of scrubbing floors and waiting tables made a decision that would carry her across two continents, into a warzone, and eventually into the pages of history. Gladys Aylward had been told, plainly and more than once, that she was not qualified for missionary service. The China Inland Mission rejected her outright. She could not learn Chinese in a classroom. She had no medical training, no theological degree, and no institutional backing of any kind. What she had instead was a promise she had made to God as a young woman, and a stubborn refusal to let that promise go unanswered. This book follows Gladys Aylward from her working-class childhood in Edmonton through her extraordinary and often perilous journey to China, a journey that included arrest in Siberia, a night escape from a drunken guard, and a Japanese sea captain who declared her his prisoner in order to save her life. It traces her unlikely years in the mountain town of Yangcheng, where she ran an inn for stubborn mule drivers, became China's Official Foot Inspector by virtue of her own unbound feet, talked a rioting prisoner into lowering his axe, and slowly built a family of adopted and orphaned children that would eventually number over a hundred. At the center of the book is the event for which Gladys Aylward is best remembered: her trek across the mountains of war-torn China with nearly a hundred children in her care, the only adult responsible for their survival, facing hunger, enemy soldiers, and a river crossing that seemed impossible until help arrived from an unexpected direction. Readers will also follow her into the years that followed, her uneasy brush with international fame, and her later work establishing children's homes in Hong Kong and Taiwan that continued for the rest of her life. This is a book for readers who are drawn to true stories of ordinary people who did not wait to feel qualified before answering a call larger than themselves. It offers a clear, chronological account of one of the twentieth century's more remarkable missionary journeys, grounded firmly in the documented record of Gladys Aylward's own words and the recollections of those who knew her. Readers interested in missionary history, wartime rescue stories, or the history of modern China will find here both the drama of her most famous journey and the quieter, sustained years of service that gave that journey its meaning. Gladys Aylward never considered herself extraordinary. This book invites you to decide that for yourself