1900 - Zhang Yong & Family

June 1900

Zhang Yong & Family

Beijing

Zhang Yong and his family.

Zhang Yong grew up in the Dong’an district between Beijing and Tianjin in north China. As a child a country preacher and his wife adopted him. The missionary Joseph Stonehouse, who was martyred in March 1901, took a keen interest in Zhang Yong and arranged for him to attend the Beijing Boys’ High School.

Later, after training to be a preacher, Zhang Yong was married to the eldest daughter of Pastor Shao of Yanshan in Hebei Province. Zhang Yong’s wife, who alone survived the carnage, best tells the cruel tortures the Zhang family suffered at the hands of the Boxers in 1900. Mrs. Zhang had long before been a student at the London Missionary Society School in Beijing. By the start of the new century her husband was a fulltime preacher in the west of the city. A baby girl had been born to them, and her husband’s aged blind mother also lived in their home.

When the Boxers started searching for door-by-door for Christians, Zhang Yong went into the countryside to find a hiding place for his whole family to move to. When he returned to the capital on June 13th, the massacre had already begun. Mrs. Zhang, along with her child and sightless mother-in-law, were forced out into the street, and wandered about the city disorientated and full of fear. As morning broke,

“…she wandered on, her baby on one arm, the blind, feeble mother clinging to the other. A Boxer seized her by the sleeve, saying ‘Follow me.’ Pushed and dragged by a hooting crowd, she lost sight of her mother-in-law. Soon the Boxer was seized by one of the strange fits to which these demon-possessed murderers were subject. Throwing himself on the ground in a paroxysm of rage, he fumed and raved, then rising and pointing a stiff finger at his captive, he shrieked…’I am going to kill you.”[I]

Mrs. Zhang was taken to one of the city gates for execution. The place where she stood

“…was slippery with blood; a pile of dead bodies, sadly mutilated, lay beside her. She clasped her baby to her breast and looked into its face, thinking, ‘This is one of the places where the Christians are murdered, and here they are going to kill me and my precious baby.’ ‘O Lord,’ she prayed, ‘give me courage to witness bravely for thee until the end.”[II]

Mrs. Zhang was asked if she was a Christian. Without hesitation she replied, “Yes.” The Boxer chief placed a stick of incense in her hand, and told her if she would burn the incense before the idols her life would be spared. “Never!” Mrs. Zhang boldly proclaimed. The blood-thirsty crowd started to shout “Kill! Kill! Kill!” Mrs. Zhang turned to them and in a confident voice said, “My body, cut in pieces, will remain scattered on the ground, like these, but my soul will escape you, and go to be with Jesus.”[III]

God miraculously opened a door of escape for Mrs. Zhang and her baby. As the Boxer chief went to fetch the sword that would end her life, a soldier called out, “You hateful thing, you deserve to die; but it is a shame that the baby should be killed; and if you die who will care for it? Quick! Run for your life!”[IV]

Mother and daughter found a hole to huddle in throughout the night, as screams of terror reverberated around the city. Thousands of Christians were slaughtered before daybreak. By now Zhang Yong had returned to Beijing to find his house ransacked and his entire family missing. Fearing they were dead, he walked the streets all night, hoping to find their bodies. In the morning he found his traumatized wife and child, but no sign could be found of his blind mother.

Realizing they faced certain death if they remained in the capital, the Zhangs attempted to reach his childhood home. No inns would allow them to stay, and no villagers would let them drink from their wells. The Zhang’s precious little daughter developed a fever and her skin cracked all over her face. She died, and her tiny body was left on the side of the road.

Zhang’s relatives paid a ransom to the Boxers to spare the lives of the Christian couple, but Zhang Yong could not bear the thought of his blind mother walking around Beijing alone, so he decided to return to look for her. For six long months his wife “waited in her country refuge for tidings of her husband. Then she was brought back to Beijing, and found that husband, child, father, mother, younger sister, and the blind old mother-in-law were all numbered with the dead. She alone had been saved.”[V] Writing soon after Zhang Yong’s death, his close friend and coworker Joseph Stonehouse said,

“It was a great joy to me when Zhang Yong joined me in Beijing. He was not a brilliant man, but he was good, and his life and work were beginning to tell. I do not think he had a single enemy. I cannot estimate his loss. I loved him as I have never loved any other Chinaman. He was worthy of the crown of life.”[VI]

I Miner, China’s Book of Martyrs, 143.
II Miner, China’s Book of Martyrs, 143.
III Miner, China’s Book of Martyrs, 354.
IV Miner, China’s Book of Martyrs, 144.
V Miner, China’s Book of Martyrs, 145. For another version of this testimony see Smith, China in Convulsion, Vol.2, 665-671.
VI Bryson, Cross and Crown, 41.