In the Asiatic Division

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jun 16, 1910

In the Asiatic Division

This division was formed at the 1909 General Conference, Elder I. H. Evans being elected vice-president for the division, which includes China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, Burma, and India.

The China Union Mission

THE second biennial council of our workers in China was held at Shanghai, in January (1909), at the close of the visit of Elder I. H. Evans to the far East. For effective supervision, the council divided China into ten great mission fields, including Manchuria, Mongolia, Turkestan, and Tibet, and issued a call for twenty families to come to China in the next two years. Nine families sailed in response during 1909, including Elder W. A. Westworth, appointed superintendent, in December.

A GOOD YEAR

In the meantime, 1909 has been a good year, notwithstanding the absence at General Conference and on furlough of a number of our pioneer workers. Dr. H. W. Miller, of Shanghai, says:—

It has not been a strange thing in the history of this message in the past to see the work double in ten years’ time, and in parts of the field the work has doubled in five years. But reports of a doubling in a year’s time have not been common. We believe the facts will justify us in saying that the message has doubled in its extent and effectiveness in the Chinese field during the year 1909. Our mission is young in China, and our workers have had to study the language, with no proper literature to pass out to the inquiring. We have been steadily at work on the foundations; and now we begin to see the structure rising rapidly.

PUBLISHING IN CHINA

Our Chinese paper (the Signs of the Times) has been issued in Mandarin and Wenli, as also have the Sabbath-school quarterlies. The triumphs and trials of our youthful publishing department during 1909 are thus told by Elder R. F. Cottrell:— It is estimated that from the beginning of our work, in 1902, to the close of 1908, the entire circulation of our publications in China was 18,000,000 pages. In 1909 the output was 40,533,400 pages—a very remarkable increase, though an average of only one page to every tenth person. The printing work in Shanghai has been greatly retarded by having no suitable quarters. And to make matters more difficult, half the meager facilities in rented quarters were destroyed by fire in December. Hiring the work done is proving most unsatisfactory. The crying need is the means to build a printing plant to spread the printed page among China’s millions.

Ground for a printing-house and a general headquarters has been purchased in the suburbs of Shanghai.

MOUNTAIN HEALTH RETREAT

This year the mission has added to the little $150 cottage built in 1908 on the mountain of Mokanshan, west of Shanghai, where we have a plot of land, two thousand feet above the sea. This mountain has been a refuge for workers stricken ill on the heated plains. Dr. H. W. Miller writes:—

The need of treatment-rooms was forcibly impressed upon us, and a small two-story stone building was put up at a cost of about six hundred dollars. It is located beside a small stream, just above a cascade, on one of the most beautiful mountains in China. The treatment-rooms are very serviceable, and the sanitarium is nature itself. Those of our workers who were sick last summer made most encouraging progress here. Instead of sending our sick over the sea to a sanitarium, why not carry a sanitarium over to the missionaries, with the necessary medical help, where the institution can stand also amid the darkness of heathenism as a beacon light?