Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission
Hudson Taylor founded the China Inland Mission in 1865, adopting Chinese dress and pushing missionary work for the first time into China's vast interior provinces.
James Hudson Taylor was a Yorkshire-born doctor and Methodist lay-preacher who first reached Shanghai in 1854. Unlike most Protestant missionaries of his time he wore Chinese dress, queued his hair, and travelled into provinces where no Westerner had been seen. Ill-health forced him home in 1860, but in 1865 he founded the China Inland Mission (CIM) — a non-denominational, faith-based agency whose missionaries went without guaranteed salaries and were governed from China rather than London.
CIM grew into the largest Protestant mission organisation in the world, with more than 800 missionaries by Taylor's death in 1905 working in every inland province. It pioneered the recruitment of unmarried women for frontline mission work — at one point making up more than half its field staff.
The mission survived the trauma of the 1900 Boxer Uprising, in which 58 CIM missionaries and 21 of their children were killed. Taylor publicly refused to seek compensation from the Chinese government — a decision that significantly improved local relations with surviving stations. CIM was reorganised after 1949 as OMF International and continues today across East Asia.