Responding to my latest article here on the blog, Mr. Liu Hong wrote me the other day. He told me he had just recently visited Hancheng, the town where Robert fought so hard to rent a house for the mission. Hong had never been before, but now he had at last been able to make... Continue Reading →
A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from Mr. Liu Hong, a passionate researcher of Swedish missionaries in China. He shared with me a passage about my great-grandfather Robert’s challenges in establishing a mission station in Hancheng, Shaanxi. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was incredibly difficult for foreigners to... Continue Reading →
Being a missionary in China around the turn of the last century, one had to be quite resourceful. When missionaries settled in a village, they first had to find a house that could serve as a mission station and then they would look for buildings where they could hold services, start schools or opium asylums.... Continue Reading →
Time has come to read the last document of the three, sent to me by my aunt Carin. The paper is slighly yellow, translucent but quite sturdy compared to the thin air-mail paper on which Robert noted the details about Dagny's surgery. It's not dated, but it must have been written on the 25th of... Continue Reading →
As we're finally leaving the dark, cold and poor January behind us in Scandinavia, the Chinese are about to enter their big festivity of the New Year. In 2022 the year of the Tiger starts on the 1st of February. In 1905, the newly baked missionary Olga spent her first Chinese New Year celebrating the... Continue Reading →
From the stories my grandmother used to tell me when I was little, there is one I often think about come Christmas. It was 1895 and my grandfather's parents, Dagny and Robert, were newlyweds. They lived in a small Chinese mountain village called Hancheng in the northwest. There were no other Europeans there, and it... Continue Reading →
Thérèse Amnéus 