Saving Lives in Southwest China
(By Martin Gordon, article excerpted from
GBCC edited China Review issue 32)
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Fear and ignorance defeated all efforts to fund AIDS
hospitals in China. Until a British charity found God.
FROM THE ASHES of an old missionary hospital has arisen the
first hospital building in China dedicated to Aids education,
prevention, treatment and care – the Peggy Health Centre.
Inaugurated on 27 October 2004 in Dali, Yunnan, the most
Aids-endangered province in China, the building highlights the
co-operation between two English charities and the hospital and
municipality of Dali. It also restores medical links between the
United Kingdom and Dali that stretch back through triumph and
tragedy over more than a hundred years.
Nestling between Lake Erhai and the Cangshan mountain, with its wild
azaleas and camellias behind, Dali has in recent years become one of
the most popular tourist and backpacker centres in southwest China.
It was the capital of the Nanzhao Kingdom which, in its heyday
around 750 to 900 AD, twice repelled the armies of the Tang,
captured Chengdu and Hanoi and ruled the whole of Yunnan. After 900,
the Kingdom of Dali was ruled by the Duan dynasty until it was
betrayed into the hands of Kubla Khan in the thirteenth century, and
it remained under Chinese control – with occasional rebellions –
ever since.
After the brutal suppression of the Moslem Rebellion of 1855 to
1873, Yunnan became open to foreigners and an early target of the
China Inland Mission, founded in 1865 by Yorkshireman James Hudson
Taylor. The first missionaries dispatched to “Tali-fu” were
George W. Clarke and his Swiss wife Fanny, who took up residence in
June 1881. Fanny died two years later and her husband bought a plot
of land outside the town for her burial, which all subsequent
missionaries used to visit. In the early years the missionaries were
mainly devoted to treating opium addiction in addition to spreading
the Christian message.
In 1903 the mission acquired a more serious medical character with
the arrival of Dr Walter T Clark. He is recorded in 1905 as treating
2,878 patients in one year, of whom 780 were women. The missionary
Ethelwyn Naylor came out to marry Dr Clark in 1908 and they
continued until they went on furlough in 1910. The annual report for
1913 reports the “best year in the history of the work of Dali”,
with 17 baptisms, a day school for 20 boys, 2500 patients in the
dispensary, and 150 men breaking off the habit in the opium refuge.
And through the generosity of a friend, the Huston Memorial Chapel
was built, commemorating American missionary Mary Huston who came
out to China in 1895, and was murdered in 1900 in the Boxer
Rebellion whilst nursing opium patients. The missionaries carrying
out this exemplary work from 1913 were William Hanna and his wife
Roxie. Hanna remained until the anti-foreign agitation of 1927 drove
all the foreign missionaries away. Meanwhile the “Talifu
Earthquake” of 1925 had destroyed the town, and the chapel lay in
ruins.
In the absence of foreign missionaries from 1927, the mission in
Dali continued under the Chinese pastor Ting Li-Mei. When the golden
jubilee of the Talifu Mission was celebrated in 1931, the chapel
appears to have been reconstructed and beautifully decorated. The
mission continued to flourish in Chinese hands throughout the
thirties, although the medical work appeared to decline.
In 1941 the most formidable and effective of the modern missionaries
arrived - Dr Jessie McDonald. After she had withdrawn from Kaifeng
in Henan ahead of the Japanese, “Jessie Mac” and her companion
Miss Mabel Soltau managed to bring most of the equipment from the
hospital in Kaifeng to Shanghai, shift it to Rangoon, and eventually
up river and overland to Dali. She established the gospel hospital
as a 40-bed facility “to become the medical centre for a million
people for whom no other up-to-date medical treatment is
available”, and as “the means of meeting the spiritual needs of
the community through the preaching of the Gospel”.
After 1949 it took about a year for the Revolution to penetrate to
Dali and the work of the hospital continued until the beginning of
1951 when Jessie Mac and all her foreign colleagues were forced out.
“We never expected to leave Dali” Dorothy Toop told me recently
in Scotland. “We brought our furniture and curtains from Edinburgh
– we thought the Dali hospital was to be our life’s work – but
it was not to be”. Dorothy and her husband William, both born to
missionary families in China, had arrived in Dali in 1949. Their
second son Ken, now an obstetrician in Middlesbrough, was born at
the Gospel Hospital that year. But by March 1951 they were bumping
out of town in a horse and cart. Others were less fortunate. One of
their neighbour missionaries, who loved and cared for a colony of
lepers, saw all her patients taken out and shot.
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Site
of hospital after the fire and before rebuilding
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The Gospel Hospital was the precursor for the more modern No 2
People’s Hospital of Dali City, and the old Gospel Hospital
gradually fell into disrepair and was burnt down in March 2002, when
some squatters lit a fire in the courtyard. The Peggy Health Centre
has been built on this site, with added land to make a larger and
earthquake-proof structure, still in the Bai architectural style.
The old chapel survived with its bell tower intact right beside our
new building.
I established Barry & Martin’s Trust in 1996 in memory of my
late best friend Barry Chan, with the aim of cooperating between
England and China in Aids prevention, education, treatment and care.
I felt at the time that China would have a major problem with Aids,
and that exchanges of doctors and nurses between England and China
would help. One of our earliest activities was to sponsor, jointly
with the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, a seminar in
Beijing attended by many of the leading Chinese practitioners in
Aids, and with a group of doctors and nurses from the Chelsea &
Westminster Hospital. The only non-Chinese attendees were UNAIDS and
Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO).
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Barry
Chan 1944-1996, to whose memory our Trust is dedicated
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Lifelong nurse Peggy Barnes, an English grandmother in her sixties,
had just been sent by VSO to Dali [see China Review issue 16, Summer
2000]. This “Jessie Mac” for the modern era was attached to the
Dali Medical Centre as a general nurse, and immediately became aware
that Aids was an escalating problem among the Bai people of Dali,
and indeed among most of Yunnan’s minorities.
Peggy was not an Aids nurse but she went on to make Aids work her
principal activity in Dali. Barry & Martin’s Trust sent an
excellent doctor and nurse from Chelsea & Westminster Hospital
to assist in establishing the principles of Aids training there.
There was local opposition related to unwillingness to admit to the
problem of Aids and to its transmission through drug use and
prostitution. However, several local doctors shared Peggy’s
enthusiasm and during her three years in Dali they jointly conducted
Aids workshops in all the county capitals of Dali prefecture. The
Foreign Office, the British Embassy in Beijing and our Trust
combined to fund her third year.
By the time Peggy left Dali, she had imparted sufficient skills,
especially to Dr Zhang Jianbo of Dali, for the work to be continued
in Chinese hands – both Han and Bai. Happily, Dr Zhang Jianbo,
with the help of VSO volunteer Dr Willy Wong, approached Barry &
Martin’s Trust for help to continue the Aids work in Dali. Our
Trust and Mary Kinross Charitable Trust – MKCT – have been
pleased to continue our cooperation ever since.
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Our
Trustee James Lewisohn in the old hospital courtyard before
the fire
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During one of our visits to Dali, fellow Trustee James Lewisohn and
I, plus Elizabeth Shields of MKCT, were shown the old Gospel
Hospital, no longer in use but reflecting the old charm of Bai
courtyard architecture. The dream was born: to rebuild the old
hospital and offer it to Dali as an Aids centre run by Zhang Jianbo.
Soon after we learned about the fire and determined to work with the
local authorities and find the money to rebuild.
Finance was not our only problem. Aids remains a delicate subject in
China. Several efforts in recent years to create Aids hospitals in
various parts of China have all been defeated by local opposition,
including the fear of local people that they would be contaminated.
Even in Hong Kong, where greater understanding might have been
expected. But this is by no means only a Chinese problem: the London
Lighthouse was vigorously opposed by the residents of Notting Hill
– until Princess Diana started walking through the door.
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Opening
ceremony of the new building, Peggy Health Centre, October
2004 |
In moving forward in Dali, we wanted to be sensitive to local
feelings and operate in close cooperation with the municipal and
higher authorities. As a matter of principle, we wanted the local
hospital to contribute at least 50/50 to the cost. We were helped by
our friends in Beijing and our contacts with the provincial health
authorities in Kunming, who were keen to create their own Aids
hospital at a provincial level.
Aiding our cause has been the revolution in Chinese policy towards
public health since the outbreak of SARS in early 2003. The crisis
stimulated the government to tackle other health problems including
Aids, and this occurred politically when Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao
were taking over as President and Prime Minister. Wen’s visit to
Beijing Ditan Hospital on 1 December 2003, to shake hands and talk
with Aids patients on World Aids Day, had immense symbolic
significance in China. He was followed on 1 December 2004 by Hu’s
visit to Beijing You’An Hospital.
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Peggy
Health Centre, No 2 People’s Hospital,
Dali
,
Yunnan
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Plaque
outside Peggy Health Centre, Dali
Yunnan
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The provincial authorities in Yunnan have consistently supported our
plans for Dali. In the context of the new health policies in China,
they have specifically declared that our project in Dali comes well
up to the standard expected under Beijing’s new directives. We
signed an agreement with the No 2 People’s Hospital in Dali in
February 2004. Its President, Dr Yang Tongxin, had precious
recollections of the old Gospel Hospital – the only hospital in
town back in the 1950s. The building was completed in advance of our
planned 27 October reopening ceremony.
The new British Consul General in Chongqing, Tim Summers, joined a
group of 36 supporters and friends of Barry & Martin’s Trust.
This strongly demonstrated to the Dali officials the powerful
foreign support for and the international visibility of the Peggy
Health Centre. The Chinese characters for Peggy are propitious. The
building has attracted much attention at the national level, and we
hope to recreate the Peggy Health Centre as a model clinic in other
parts of China. There is every sign that it will bring distinction
to Dali and set an example of excellence in Aids care that others
around China will follow.
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