1926 - Tang & Pan

September – November 1926

Liuzhou, Guangxi

The success of the Protestant missionary efforts in rural China was largely due to the thousands of colporteurs; Chinese Christians who travelled widely preaching the gospel and distributing evangelistic material to people. The southern province of Guangxi was overrun with bandits and disease in the 1920s, and many of these faithful workers succumbed to these dual dangers. In 1926 the Christian & Missionary Alliance lost four of their colporteurs just in the Liuzhou area of the province. A man named Lin died of smallpox, while Yang was struck down by an illness and died alone in the mountains. Two more colporteurs, named Tang and Pan, were murdered by bandits.

Tang and Pan were family men, who left wives and children at home in order to travel over a wide area bearing the good news. Two years previously Tang had been attacked by bandits while travelling in an isolated region. He was robbed and badly beaten up and required months of recuperation before he was fit enough to head out again with the gospel.

Tang gladly bid his wife and little son farewell as he set out on his journey, which was expected to take two or three weeks. As the weeks passed by and no word was heard from him, men were sent to trace his steps to discover what had happened. For the first 50 miles (81 km) it was easy to see Tang’s progress, as there was a steady flow of gospel tracts that he had distributed to families along the way. An inn was found where he had spent the first night, but from that point on no clues could be found as to his whereabouts. In one village the people obviously knew something about his fate, but nobody was willing to help with the investigation. The investigators believed that Tang had been martyred in that location and his body thoroughly disposed of.

The second colporteur, Pan, was murdered a few months later. He had served alongside the missionaries for more than a decade, proving a capable and faithful follower of Christ. He left the mission station in Liuzhou in late November 1926, planning to walk through a territory inhabited by members of the Zhuang minority group, hoping to return to Liuzhou by Christmas. Pan had still not returned by the start of 1927. A search party was dispatched to discover what had happened, but they lost all trace of him and the Zhuang tribesmen were determined not to assist the Chinese in their enquires. It was surmised that he, too, had been killed by bandits somewhere in the rugged mountains of Guangxi.

The two Zhuang tribesmen who wore bamboo crosses on their backs.

The deaths of Tang and Pan did not conclude the fruitfulness of their lives. Many months later a Zhuang tribesman named Wei from a remote mountain village visited the church in Liuzhou. He said that some time before a colporteur had visited his village,

“and had left some books with him; and that one of his fellow tribesmen who could read had been telling his people about a Way by which they might obtain a happy life beyond the grave…. The tribesman pulled out a little bamboo cross that he was carrying…. On one side it read, ‘Kneeling before the cross of my Saviour, I constantly trust and will never depart from Jesus Christ. With my whole heart I will bear the Lord’s cross, and fear not the world though it heap contempt and cursings upon me.”[1]

A small group of believers had emerged in that isolated Zhuang village. It was later found that the colporteur who had left a good spiritual deposit behind in that place was the slain Brother Pan. Without any outside human intervention since, the new believers had followed Christ the best they knew how. Missionaries visited the village and found two men wearing bamboo crosses on their back, believing they were obeying the Saviour’s command to take up the cross and follow Him. Believers stayed with these simple-hearted tribesmen and patiently instructed them in Biblical truths, establishing them in the faith.