Korea, Manchuria, North and Central China
By R. C. PORTER
Accompanied by Elder F. H. De Vinney, C. N. Woodward, and Mrs. Porter, I have just made a tour through the northern portion of the Asiatic Division territory. Our first stop was at Seoul, Korea, where the foreign and native laborers, together with a large delegation of the Korean brethren and sisters, had gathered for their annual meeting. It was a novel sight to see the men and women, all dressed in their queer white costumes, come into the chapel and take their seats on the floor, using small mats for seats. We soon became used to their peculiar customs, and entered with them into the spiritual work of the meeting. We found them a devout people, responsive to the teaching of the Word of God. The business passed off harmoniously, and the spiritual meetings greatly refreshed all in attendance. The people returned to their homes with renewed courage to press forward in the finishing of the work. The past year shows that the work has a solid basis and is advancing along all lines. At Soonan, the new school and chapel building, two dormitories, and the dispensary are most “beautiful for situation.” They are located well up on the side of the hill, and above them on the crest of the hill, overlooking the valley and surrounding country, are twenty villages. In this place the small dispensary has done excellent work. Dr. Riley Russell and wife have made it decidedly a missionary dispensary, as God designed that all our sanitariums and treatment rooms should be, and it has been the means of winning many souls to the message. Such small dispensaries conducted in this way are of far more practical value to the cause of present truth in the Asiatic field than sanitariums would be. Institutions requiring a number of nurses, and facilities for boarding patients, are usually found to require a continual budget to meet the loss in operating, while the small dispensary is self-supporting, and often aids in providing funds with which to carry forward other branches of the work. At Mukden we were much pleased to find the old headquarters of the Manchu dynasty (under which 11,000,000 people by their sagacity and courage secured and held control for so long a period, of China’s 400,000,000 people) still like the sons of Anak, a land of giants, with their walled cities and great wall separating North China from Mongolia. It was with a view to opening the Manchurian field in the near future that we visited this section on our return from Korea. Mukden, with a quarter of a million people, mostly Chinese, and Harbin, another great business center composed of a large number of Chinese and 30,000 Russians, are the two large cities of the province. One cannot pass through Manchuria, with its large, fine-looking people, its broad fields operated on quite modern methods, and its air of general intelligence and prosperity, without feeling that the time has come that this important field should be entered. We are planning to send a Chinese worker there at once, and two foreign families expect to be in the field before the close of the year. Think of riding twenty-four hours on an express train, from Mukden to Peking, through a fertile country of enterprising Chinese people, without passing a single lighthouse from which the light of the third angel’s message is shining to dispel the heathen darkness in which this people are sitting. Then there is Peking, the capital city of the great Chinese Republic, in which the first note of the message has not yet been sounded. It is hard to travel in such territory, peopled with millions of our unclaimed brothers and sisters who greatly need the message, and not pass the word on to the loyal supporters of the work in the homeland that there is still need of lengthening our cords and strengthening our stakes in order to meet the pressing demands of these unentered fields. The work in Central China was never more prosperous. A good class of Chinese workers are pressing the literature and evangelistic work, and from every part of the field a spirit of courage and confidence in the speedy triumph of the message prevails. Although the work is well begun in many places, the great unworked territory must constantly stand with outstretched hands in its appeal for workers until in God’s providence its needs are supplied.