On February 24, 1902, Gladys Aylward was born into a working-class family in north London. From her early teenage years, she worked as a domestic servant, or parlor maid. But in her 20s she attended a revival meeting in which the preacher spoke of dedicating one's life to the service of Jesus Christ.
Aylward read a newspaper article about China and the millions of people who had never heard the Gospel of Christ. The article changed the direction of her life. She became convinced that she was called to preach the Gospel in China.
She associated with the China Inland Mission Center in London, and studied to be a missionary. She had little formal education, however, and was bewildered by the biblical languages they wanted her to learn. She did not pass muster with CIM and, despite her pleas, they would not sponsor her. The chair of the CIM committee reported:
"It is with great regret that I have to recommend to you that we do not accept Miss Aylward. She has a call to serve God—she is sincere and courageous—but we cannot take the responsibility of sending a woman of 26, with such limited Christian experience and education, to China."
She was also too old, he felt, to learn the Chinese language. Nevertheless, she felt strongly that she was called to China as Christian missionary. CIM recommended her as a housekeeper for a retired missionary couple who had just returned from China; she learned a great deal from their stories of their experiences, and their deep faith in God.
Aylward next went to work as a “Rescue Sister” of prostitutes near the docks of Swansea in South Wales. There, the five-foot, 110-pound Aylward witnessed to the homeless, penniless women and girls, and led them back to a hostel run by the mission. The younger girls thanked her; the older ones began treating her with "tolerant amusement."
Gladys heard about a 73-year-old missionary in Yangchen, China, Mrs. Jeannie Lawson, who was looking for a younger woman to carry on her work. Gladys wrote to Mrs. Lawson, who replied that if Gladys could get to China on her own, she would be welcome. Aylward did not have enough money for an ocean liner, but was able to raise enough for train fare, and so in October of 1930 she set out from London with her passport, her Bible, her tickets, and two pounds ninepence, to travel to China by the Trans-Siberian Railway.
At the time, Russia was under the control of Soviet communists and was in an undeclared war with China. After ten days of rail travel, Aylward crossed into Siberia. As the train progressed, soldiers got on and civilians got off at each stop. At the town of Chita, a railway official tried to persuade her to disembark, but Aylward could not understand what he was saying, and insisted on staying aboard. Hours later, the train halted, the lights went out, and the soldiers got off. Aylward was now alone, and at the front line of a war. With no choice other than to make the long walk back down the tracks to Chita, she carried her baggage through the freezing snow, trusting in God to protect her.
From Chita, Aylward managed to find her way to Vladivostok, where she was to make another connection. Though she had paid her fare from London to Tientsin, it soon became apparent that her ticket was useless. She was also nearly penniless, and the Soviet commissars, desperate for skilled factory workers, wanted to keep her in Russia (unbeknownst to Aylward, an official had changed the occupation listed on her passport from “missionary” to “machinist”).
While in her hotel, she was approached by an English-speaking woman who warned her that if she did not get out of the country immediately she might be sent to a remote part of Russia and never be heard from again. The woman arranged for Aylward's escape and travel by the first ship out. Its destination: Japan. In Kobe, Japan, Aylward was able to stay at the Mission Hall before turning in her unused vouchers for a steamer to Tientsin.
Arriving in Tientsin, Gladys was told that Mrs. Lawson was in a mission at Tsechow in Shaanxi province, north of the Yellow River in northwest China, many weeks away by train, bus, and mule. A Mr. Lu offered to escort her. When they arrived at the mission, they were told that Lawson was in Yangchen, a walled town two days away, along an ancient mule trail. The country, she was warned, was un-penetrated by Christianity. Wild and mountainous, the area was filled with bandits, immense stretches of lonely roads, and primitive people who thought all foreigners were devils.
Yangchen was an overnight stop for mule caravans that carried coal, raw cotton, pots, and iron goods on six-week or three-month journeys. It occurred to the two women that their most effective way of spreading the gospel would be to set up an inn. Their building had once been an inn, and with a bit of repair work could be used as one again. They set up the building to be an inn, and laid in a supply of food for mules and men.
When next a caravan came past, Gladys dashed out, grabbed the rein of the lead mule, and steered it into their courtyard. The other mules followed, and the muleteers followed their animals. They were given good food and warm beds at the standard price, their animals were well cared for, and there was free entertainment in the evening--the innkeepers told stories about a man named Jesus.
After the first few weeks, the muleteers turned in at the inn by preference. Some became Christians, and many of them remembered the stories, and retold them to other muleteers at other stops along the caravan trails.
Gladys practiced her Chinese for hours each day, and was becoming fluent and comfortable with it. Then Mrs. Lawson suffered a severe fall, and died a few days later, leaving Gladys to run the mission alone, with the aid of one Chinese Christian, Yang, the cook.
A few weeks after the death of Mrs. Lawson, Gladys met the Mandarin of Yangchen. (Traditionally, Mandarins were local rulers, appointed by the emperor after passing a rigorous examination; Mandarin is also the name of the dominant Chinese dialect, spoken in northern and northwestern China.) He arrived in a sedan chair, with an impressive escort.
The Mandarin told Gladys that the Nationalist Chinese government wanted her help in stamping out the practice of foot binding, the ancient custom of preventing the full growth of a girl’s feet. It crippled women for life, but in that culture was considered aesthetically pleasing. The Mandarin wanted Gladys to become the regional foot-inspector because, because, as a woman, she could enter the women's quarters without scandal and, because her own feet had not been bound, she could walk the necessary miles to patrol the district and enforce the ban. Gladys accepted the job, realizing that it would give her tremendous new opportunities to spread the Gospel.
Later, the Mandarin summoned Gladys to deal with a riot that had broken out in the men’s prison. She arrived to find that the convicts were rampaging in the prison courtyard, and several of them had been killed. The soldiers were afraid to intervene.
The warden of the prison said to Gladys, "Go into the yard and stop the rioting." Gladys replied, "How can I do that?" The warden said, "You have been preaching that those who trust in Christ have nothing to fear."
She walked into the courtyard and shouted: "Quiet! I cannot hear when everyone is shouting at once. Choose one or two spokesmen, and let me talk with them." The men quieted down and chose a spokesman. Gladys talked with him, and then came out and talked to the warden.
"You have these men cooped up in crowded conditions with absolutely nothing to do. No wonder they are so edgy that a small dispute sets off a riot. You must give them work. Also, I am told that you do not supply food for them, so that they have only what their relatives send them. No wonder they fight over food. We will set up looms so that they can weave cloth and earn enough money to buy their own food." A few friends of the warden donated old looms, and a grindstone so that the men could work grinding grain.
The people began to call Gladys, "Ai-weh-deh," a phonetic approximation of Aylward that means "Virtuous One" in Chinese. It was her name from then on.
One day, Gladys saw a woman begging by the road, accompanied by a girl about five years old covered with sores and suffering severe malnutrition. She satisfied herself that the woman was not the child's mother; rather, she had kidnapped to use as a panhandling prop. Gladys bought the child for nine pennies. A year later, "Ninepence," as Aylward called her, came in with an abandoned boy in tow, saying, "I will eat less, so that he can have something." Thus Ai-weh-deh acquired a second orphan, whom she named "Less." And so Gladys began to assemble a small orphanage.
Ai-weh-deh was a regular visitor at the palace of the Mandarin, who found her religion ridiculous, but her conversation stimulating. In 1936, she officially became a Chinese citizen. She lived frugally and dressed like the people around her, a major factor in her effective outreach.
Then the war came.
In the spring of 1938, Japanese planes bombed the city of Yangchen, killing many and causing the survivors to flee into the mountains. A bombing raid destroyed most of the town, as well as Aylward’s inn; Ai-weh-deh was rescued from beneath the rubble. The Mandarin gathered the survivors and told them to retreat into the mountains for the duration. He also announced that he was impressed by the life of Ai-weh-deh and wished to make her faith his own.
There remained the question of the convicts at the jail. The traditional policy was to behead them lest they escape. The Mandarin asked Ai-weh-deh for advice; she devised a plan for relatives and friends to post a bond, guaranteeing their good behavior. Every man was eventually released on bond.
As the war continued Gladys improvised a hospital and established small Christian communities in the region, sometimes visiting villages under Japanese occupation and reporting any observations on her travels that might prove useful to the Chinese Nationalist army.
She met and became friends with "General Ley," a Roman Catholic priest from Europe who had taken up arms when the Japanese invaded, and led a guerilla force. Ley sent her a message: “The Japanese are coming in full force. We are retreating. Come with us." She scrawled a Chinese note, Chi Tao Tu Pu Twai ("Christians never retreat!") But Ley sent her a Japanese handbill, which promised a reward of $100 each for the capture, dead or alive, of (1) the Mandarin, (2) a prominent merchant, and (3) Ai-weh-deh.
Glady became aware that Madame Chang Kai-Shek had started a fund for government-run orphanages; she wrote for help and was told that the children would be looked after if she could get them to Sian, in Free China, so she decided to flee to Sian, bringing with her about 100 orphan children. (An additional 100 had gone ahead earlier with a colleague.) With the children in tow, she walked for twelve days. Some nights they found shelter with friendly hosts, but other nights they spent unprotected on the mountainsides.
On the twelfth day, they arrived at the Yellow River, with no way to cross it. All boat traffic had stopped, and all civilian boats had been seized to keep them out of the hands of the Japanese. They were stranded on the shore for three days. Then one of her young charges asked Aylward if she believed the story of Moses taking the children of Israel across the Red Sea. When Aylward said that she did, the girl asked, "Then why don't we go across?" Aylward replied, because "I'm not Moses." The child responded, "Of course you're not Moses, but God is God! He can open the river for us." The words renewed Aylward's faith, and she knelt down to pray.
Then they sang. A Chinese officer with a patrol heard the singing and rode up. He heard their story and said, "I think I can get you a boat." After a few days of rest in the town of Mien Chu, Aylward and the children continued their journey by foot and by rail, then crossed another mountain range until they finally reached Sian in late April 1940. They had traveled for 27 days, only to find that the city was full and closed to more refugees. They journeyed another day, to an orphanage in the nearby town of Fufeng. After turning the children over to the orphanage, Aylward collapsed of fatigue and illness.
Days later, an oxcart stopped outside the Scandinavian-American Mission in Xingping to deliver a fragile 38-year-old Western woman who was delirious and on the verge of death. Across her back, she bore the scar of a recent bullet wound. Sent to the hospital in Sian, she was diagnosed with typhoid fever and internal injuries, but a month passed before she was identified as Aylward.
As her health gradually improved, she began a Christian church in Sian, and worked elsewhere, including a settlement for lepers in Szechuan, near the border of Tibet. She never fully recovered her health and in 1947 she returned to England for a badly needed operation. She remained in England, preaching when she could.
In 1957, Alan Burgess wrote a book about Aylward, “The Small Woman.” It was made into a 1958 movie called “The Inn of the Sixth Happiness,” starring Ingrid Bergman. Of course, it was “Hollywood-ized” and Gladys was greatly embarrassed by the liberties taken with her story, starting with the casting of the tall, blonde Swedish actress, whereas Aylward was a short, petite brunette, with a north London accent. The movie also minimized her difficulties in getting to China; Aylward's dangerous, complicated travels across Soviet Russia, China and Japan were reduced to a few rude soldiers, after which, "Hollywood's train delivered her neatly to Tientsin." Most mortifying to Aylward was that the movie introduced an entirely fictional romantic subplot.
Aylward could not stay away from China, but of course no foreign missionaries were allowed inside the country after the 1949 communist takeover. In 1957, after the death of her mother, Aylward traveled to Hong Kong, working among the refugees from Communism, and then later to the island of Formosa, known today as Taiwan, which was the home of Free China. Over the following years, she ran mission halls and orphanages and traveled the world on speaking and preaching tours, raising money for her work. She settled in the city of Taipei and adopted many children.
On January 3rd, 1970, “Ai weh deh,” the virtuous one, passed to her rest. She is buried in a small cemetery on the campus of Christ's College in Guandu, New Taipei, Taiwan.
Gladys Aylward’s grave in Taiwan
"He said to them, "Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.” Mark 16:15