The Fire at Our Chinese Press

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Feb 24, 1910

The Fire at Our Chinese Press

LETTERS from Shanghai tell of the fire, on December 28, at our Chinese press quarters. The Chinese press has the burden of printing for four hundred million people. It is the greatest of the mission fields. Yet, after sixty-six years of the message, we have not yet a publishing house of our own in China. Provision for such a plant is made in the $300,000 Fund. Small though this fire loss was at Shanghai, the experience calls upon us to make haste in the establishment of a proper printing-office in safe and sanitary quarters, to take up in real earnest the printing of the message for China's millions.

Quartered as they were, in native houses, our brethren of the press were continually threatened with disaster. Dr. H. W. Miller wrote of experiences just before the fire:—

During the last week three fires have occurred within a small radius of us; the first was two rows of Chinese flats. As we watched them burning, our minds turned to our office, and we thought that if a fire started in that series of flats, it would sweep us out. Last Saturday night a fire broke out in the drying-room of the Commercial Press, adjoining us,