Two months ago I left Sophie and Jimmy Graham (my great grandparents) in Zhenjiang, where they were immersed in language study. Those who have followed this saga—and its digressions!—may recall that they arrived in Shanghai in December 1889, then traveled to Suzhou, where they stayed with Hampden and Pauline DuBose for a month. From there they went to Zhenjiang, on the Yangtze River, where they studied under the tutelage of Samuel Woodbridge. By the spring of 1890 they were in Qingjiangpu (present-day Huaiyin), which would be their homebase for the next forty-six years. At the time the city’s name was romanized variously as Tsingkiangpu or Tsingkiang Pu or Tsing Kiang Pu. Among themselves, the missionaries commonly referred to it as TKP.
The Xijin ferry terminal in Zhenjiang, restored today for tourists
Up the Grand Canal
Now the Grahams were at the river terminal, where the Grand Canal intersected with the mighty Yangtze. Assisted by Samuel Woodbridge, they must hire a houseboat to take them and all their worldly goods north, up the Grand Canal. Claire Malcolm Lintilhac, whose parents in the early 1900s were stationed just ten miles south of the Grahams’ destination, recalls the scene in Zhenjiang:
The cook, newly engaged for the trip, became a self-appointed middleman. First he would support my father by remonstrating with the boatman, exhorting him to be more reasonable in his demands. We were good customers and had no desire to beat anybody down. The next minute he would appeal to my father’s generosity on behalf of the poor hard-working boatman, who had such a big family with so many mouths to feed and times were hard.1
The Grand Canal was an inland highway. From Zhenjiang one traveled north some 130 miles to reach the city of Qingjiangpu. If traveling all the way from Shanghai, one could reach Zhenjiang by steamboat via the Yangtze River, and then transfer to a houseboat.
One of the greatest public works projects in the world, the Grand Canal had been built by imperial initiative over the centuries. Carved out by backbreaking labor, it was testimony to one of China’s great renewable resources: the countless masses of poor laborers. In all, the Canal stretched over 1,100 miles, cutting through the terrain from north of the Yellow River to the Yangtze River in the south and beyond. The earliest sections dated back to the fifth century B.C., the latest to the early seventeenth century A.D. One of its chief functions was the transport of rice from the south to Peking in the north. The movement of the imperial grain fleet up the Canal was a great springtime event, as we will see in a future post.
But the Canal was not without its perils. Periodically, it would breach its banks. And since its water level in many areas ran above the surrounding terrain, there was a recurring threat of catastrophic flooding of fields and towns. When motorized boat traffic was introduced around the turn of the twentieth century, the danger increased. When the water was high and running swiftly, wakes from steam-powered boats eroded the banks. And outraged citizens might take things into their own hands. For flooding, and a subsequent loss of crops, brought on devastating famine and suffering. Lorenzo Morgan, a Southern Presbyterian medical doctor stationed at Qingjiangpu in the early 1900s, testified, “I have seen a barge literally smashed to pieces by bricks, stones, clubs, axes or anything else that would smash because a trip was attempted during high water.”2 And as we shall see, both floods and famines called for missionary responses.
But up until the late 1890s, boat traffic on the canal was propelled solely by wind or muscle power. Tediously slow by modern standards, it was still more direct and efficient than land travel. So in 1890, from Zhenjiang to Qingjiangpu, one could count on eight to ten days of travel by houseboat, barring low water and groundings in drought time, or hazardous flooding in the spring, or blockage by ice in the winter. Where the wind would not drive the sails, the boats progressed along the canal by rowing, sculling, poling, or by trackers hauling the boats by ropes, from a path along the shore. Fortunately for passengers, the houseboats could be made quite comfortable.
Qingjiangpu and Its Environs
Over the years, Jimmy Graham would devote much of his time to itinerant evangelism in the outlying countryside from Qingjiangpu. (Later, we will follow him on a trip into outlying towns and villages.) He would become deeply familiar with the networks of villages and towns throughout the agricultural plain called the Subei. Even after thirty years in China, he would still strain to give his friends back home some sense of it:
Comparing this place with the Valley of Virginia, where I was born and ‘raised,’ I should say that for every separate farmhouse in that country [in Virginia], there would be a dozen villages at least in this part of the country. The population is simply incredibly great. And we speak of working a section fairly well when we pass from one point where there are Christians to another such point and have to pass literally thousands of villages on each side of the road (within a few miles of the road, I mean).3
Graham describes the whole territory as “fairly teeming with people, an agricultural district, raising almost exactly the same food crops that are raised in Virginia and North Carolina—except that in the southern part of this section enormous quantities of rice were also raised.”
Arthur Henderson Smith’s Village Life in China would be published in 1899, a decade after the Graham’s arrival in China. Smith, an American, had been a missionary in China since 1872 and would serve for over fifty years. Based on an estimate taken in an area fairly representative of the region, he calculated an average population of 2,129 people to the square mile.4 By Graham’s estimate, the northern four-fifths of Jiangsu Province (approximately the size of Virginia and North Carolina), had “a population of between twenty and thirty million people.” Thus, from between the Yangtse River to the south and the Shantung border to the north, he estimated that in 1890 there were “probably not a hundred church members” or Chinese who even understood the gospel. Of course, like most Protestant missionaries of that day, he would have excluded Roman Catholic missionaries and churches. But his estimate reveals his perception of the immense evangelistic task ahead. It must have seemed impossible.
1896 Map of Missions in Jiangsu (Kiangsu) Province. (Tsing-Kiang-Pu is in the upper middle.)
Qingjiangpu, literally “Clear Water Port,” was a walled city on the Grand Canal, about ten miles north of the larger, and more significant, city of Huai’an. Roughly twenty-five miles to the west of Qingjiangpu was Hongze Lake, the fifth largest freshwater lake in China. With a population of about 130,000, Qingjiangpu would have been somewhat smaller than the old Chinese city of Shanghai. And outside the city walls an equally populated suburb was enclosed by a mud rampart. It was in this suburb that, beginning in 1887, Southern Presbyterian missionaries found homes to rent near the Canal and established a mission station.
And their relationship with the Grand Canal was intimate indeed. Countless were the times they traveled on it, north and south. And it ran in their veins. For the water of Clear Water Port, polluted in every imaginable way, was their water source. Claire Malcolm Lintilhac, whose parents were stationed in Huai’an, recalls the process of rendering potable water from the canal:
Water was carried in wooden buckets from the canal to the house. Here the water carrier emptied it into the first of three gongs, large crocks three feet in diameter and about as deep. Into each was stirred a measure of alum, an astringent that drew the mud to the bottom. When it had settled, the first gong was literally half mud. The water from the top was then syphoned off into a second gong and more alum was added. After it had settled for a second time, it was syphoned once more into the third gong. Although the water now looked clear, it was just as polluted as ever.
Now began the tedious process of purifying it. First, bottles had to be found and scoured, then boiled. We didn’t have the beautiful wide-necked bottles of today but instead dark green, narrow-necked things. After the water had boiled for a good 20 minutes, it was filtered through cotton into a jug which too had been boiled beforehand. When the water had cooled a little, it was poured into the bottles.
Still hot, the bottles were hung by their necks in the breeze, with wet cloths wrapped around them to encourage cooling by evaporation. I was forever drinking lukewarm water, especially in the hot weather when the supply of cool water could never keep pace with the demand.5
The most mundane things of life could be utterly complicated and potentially perilous. Is it any wonder that illness took so many lives, especially children? Or that household help was regularly employed?
In the next post we will meet the original missionaries at Qingjiangpu. (And there’s at least one surprise.)
Claire Malcolm Lintilhac, China in Another Time: A Personal Story (Rootstock Publishing, 2019), 16.
Lorenzo Morgan, letter of July 11, 1909.
James R. Graham, letter of April 24, 1920.
Arthur Henderson Smith, Village Life in China: A Study in Sociology (F. H. Revell, 1899), 19.
Lintilhac, China in Another Time, 22-23.