My grandfather worked as a medical missionary in Zhaotong, a small walled city in the Yunnan Province of China, from 1896 until his death there from typhus in 1918. My father spent his early childhood there too, returning to school in England when he was 12 years old. By then typhoid and chronic malaria had turned him into an animated human skeleton.
Later my father described in his unpublished memoirs how hard life had been in remote China in the early 1900s. He remembered seeing the decapitated heads of malefactors, stuck on spikes near the city gates. Rats scuttled around indoors; and the howls of wolves and jackals could be heard as they dug up the corpses of the Chinese poor from shallow graves just outside the city walls. Smallpox lurked in and around the city.
My grandfather found it difficult to convert anyone to Christianity, and put much of his energy into building a new, two storeyed, rectangular hospital. At one point, thieves stole its drains, so that the mud brick walls collapsed—but eventually the hospital was finished, and my father was one of its first inpatients. My grandfather worked in the hospital until his death, but since then no member of my family has been there.