1900 - Stewart & Kate McKee and Children

July 12, 1900

Datong, Shanxi

Stewart & Kate McKee with their daughter Alice.

Thomas King first established Protestant Christianity in Datong, the northernmost city in Shanxi Province, in 1885. A few years later Stewart and Kate McKee took charge of the work, assisted by Charles and Florence I’Anson. The McKees and I’Ansons experienced a decade of fruitful ministry before suffering martyrdom for the sake of Christ in 1900.

Stewart McKee found Christ at a tent meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1882. He was a tramway conductor and had often been invited to attend evangelistic meetings by Christian passengers. He reluctantly agreed to go to one meeting, and was gloriously converted. Before the end of the year he had led a dozen of his workmates to faith in Christ. God placed a strong desire in his heart for missionary service in China. He applied to the China Inland Mission, but told friends that his desire to obey God was so powerful that he would make his own way to China and find a way to support himself if no mission wanted him. He was accepted by the CIM and sailed for China with other Scottish recruits in 1885.

In God’s perfect plan a young Glaswegian lady named Kate McWatters also accepted Christ in 1882. Having never met McKee, she too was called to serve in China. After undergoing training, she arrived in 1887. The two Scots met and fell in love, but the CIM had a mandatory probation period for any of their workers who showed a romantic interest in another missionary. Stewart and Kate were finally permitted to marry in 1889. Stationed at Datong for ten years, the McKees laboured unceasingly in a difficult location and saw a number of men and women come to faith in Christ.[1]

On June 24, 1900, news reached them that the Boxers were planning to slaughter the Datong missionaries. The McKee family took refuge with a friendly local magistrate. A mob of Boxers surrounded the magistrate’s house, baying for the blood of those inside. For three days the official refused to hand them over, until a command from a superior arrived, ordering the missionaries to return to their residence. The magistrate sent his foreign friends with an armed guard in the dead of the night, and set the guard outside the gate of the mission compound.

The stress of the ordeal overwhelmed Kate McKee, and she gave birth prematurely. There were now four children and a new-born baby inside the small house, while outside the mobs grew larger and more violent every day. The guards who had been posted outside the gate soon lost heart, and only two remained at their post by July 12th. At seven o’clock in the evening an official knocked on the door and demanded a list of the names of everyone inside. They were provided, and

“An hour later three hundred soldiers arrived on horseback in support of the Boxers. Stewart McKee went out and tried to reason with them. Instead of listening, they hacked him to pieces, then set fire to the house. In the flames and confusion, only little Alice McKee managed to escape. In the morning the mob discovered her in a cowshed and slashed the defenceless child to death.”[2]

Because of the isolation of the Datong mission station, it was an agonising eight months before the missionaries’ families back home received confirmation of their deaths. In addition to the missionary martyrs, “eighteen Chinese believers offered themselves for baptism while the Boxer storm was mounting. Five died with the missionaries a few days afterwards.”[3]

1. See Isabella C. MacLeod Campbell, Through the Gates into the City: Memorials of Stewart and Kate McKee, Martyred Missionaries of the China Inland Mission (London, no date).
2. Hefley, By Their Blood, 22.
3. Hefley, By Their Blood, 32.