After a few days of intensive preparation they left Canton and sailed along the coast and then up the Min Jiang River to Fuzhou, the City of the Black and White Pagodas. Hamberg had arranged for them to receive a letter of introduction to the chief mandarin of the city, who had previously shown himself to be well disposed to Christian missionaries. To his astonishment, San watched as Elgstrand and Lodin didn’t hesitate to kneel down and touch the ground with their foreheads before the mandarin. He gave them permission to work in the town, and after a thorough search they found a base suitable for their purposes. It was a gated compound containing several houses.
The day they moved in Elgstrand and Lodin knelt down and blessed the compound, which would be their future home. San also bent his knee, but uttered no benediction. It occurred to him that he still hadn’t found a suitable place in which to bury Guo Si’s foot.
It was several months before he found a place near the river where the evening sun shone over the treetops until the ground was slowly swallowed up by shade. San visited the spot many times and always felt very much at peace as he sat there, his back leaning against a boulder. The river flowed slowly past at the bottom of the gentle slope before him. Even now, although autumn had already set in, there were flowers blooming on the riverbank.
Here he would be able to sit and talk to his brothers. This was where they could come to be with him. They could be together. The dividing line between life and death would disappear.
He dug a deep hole in the ground and buried his brother’s foot bones. He filled in the hole meticulously, removed all traces, and on the spot placed a stone that he had brought back from the American desert.
San thought that perhaps he ought to recite one of the prayers he had learned from the missionaries; but since Wu, who was also there in a way, had not become acquainted with the God to whom the prayers would be addressed, he merely mentioned their names. He attached wings to their souls and empowered them to fly away.
Elgstrand and Lodin generated amazing energy. San had more and more respect for their unrelenting efforts to lower all barriers and persuade people to help them build up their mission. They also had money, of course. They needed money to carry out their work. Elgstrand had an arrangement with an English shipping company that regularly visited Fuzhou and brought deliveries of money from Sweden. San was surprised to note that the missionaries never seemed to worry about the possibility of thieves, who wouldn’t hesitate to kill them in order to gain access to their riches. Elgstrand kept the money and bills of exchange under his pillow. When neither he nor Lodin was around, San was responsible.
On one occasion San secretly counted the money, which was kept in a little leather bag. He was surprised by how much there was. For a brief moment he was tempted to take the money and run away. There was enough for him to travel to Beijing and live as a rich man on the interest his fortune earned.
But the temptation was overcome when he thought about Guo Si and the kindness and care the missionaries had shown him during his final days on this earth.
San was leading a life he could never have imagined. He had a room of his own with a bed, clean clothes, plenty of food. From being at the very bottom of the ladder, he was now in charge of all the servants in the house. He was strict and decisive, but never resorted to physical punishment when anybody made a mistake.
Only a couple of weeks after they arrived in Fuzhou, Elgstrand and Lodin opened their doors to one and all. The courtyard was crammed full. San remained in the background and listened to Elgstrand explaining, in his faltering Chinese, about the remarkable God who had sent His only Begotten Son to be crucified. Lodin handed out coloured pictures, which the congregation passed around to one another.
When Elgstrand had finished, the courtyard emptied rapidly. But the following day the same thing happened, and people came again, some of them bringing friends and acquaintances. The whole town began talking about these remarkable white men who had come to live among them. The most difficult thing for the Chinese to understand was that Elgstrand and Lodin were not running a business. They had nothing to sell, and there was nothing they wanted to buy. They simply stood there and spoke in bad Chinese about a God who treated all human beings as equals.
In these early days there was no limit to the missionaries’ efforts. They nailed Chinese characters to the arch over the entrance to the courtyard, declaring that this was the Temple of the One True God. The two men never seemed to sleep but were constantly active. San sometimes heard them using a Chinese expression meaning ‘degrading idolatry’, declaring that it must be resisted. He wondered how the missionaries dared to believe that they could persuade ordinary Chinese people to abandon ideas and beliefs they had lived with for generations. How could a God who allowed His only son to be nailed to a cross be able to give a Chinese peasant spiritual comfort or the will to live?
A few weeks after they’d arrived in Fuzhou, early in the morning San drew the bolts and opened the heavy wooden front door to be confronted by a young woman who bowed her head and announced that her name was Lou Qi. She came from a little village up the Min River, not far from Shuikou. Her parents were poor peasants, and she had fled her village when her father decreed that she should be sold as a concubine to a seventy-year-old man in Nanchang. She had begged her father to release her from that obligation, since rumour had it that several of the man’s previous concubines had been killed when he had grown tired of them. But her father had refused to listen to her protests, and so she had run away. A German missionary based in the outpost of Gou Sihan had told her that there was a mission in Fuzhou where Christian charity was available to anybody who sought it.
San looked her up and down when she had finished her story. He asked a few questions about what she was capable of doing, then let her in. She would be allowed to see if she could assist the women and the chef who were responsible for feeding the residents of the mission. If things turned out well, he might be able to offer her a job on the household staff.
He was touched by the joy that lit up her face.
Qi did a good job, and San extended her contract. She lived with the other female servants and was liked because she was always unruffled and never tried to avoid tasks allocated to her. San used to watch her as she worked in the kitchen or hurried across the courtyard on some errand or other. Their eyes occasionally met, but he never treated her any differently from the other servants.
One day shortly before Christmas, Elgstrand asked him to hire a boat and appoint some oarsmen. They were going to travel downriver to visit an English ship that had just arrived from London. The British consul in Fuzhou had informed Elgstrand that there was a parcel for the mission station.
‘You’d better come with us,’ said Elgstrand with a smile. ‘I need my best man when I’m going to collect a bagful of money.’
San found a team of oarsmen in the harbour who accepted the assignment. The following day Elgstrand and San clambered down into the boat. Just before, San had whispered to his boss that it was probably best not to say anything about the contents of the parcel they were collecting from the English ship.
Elgstrand smiled.
‘I’m no doubt gullible,’ he said, ‘but not quite as naive as you think.’
It took the oarsmen three hours to reach the ship and pull up alongside. Elgstrand climbed the ladder with San. A bald captain by the name of John Dunn received them. He eyed the oarsmen with extreme mistrust. Then he gave San a similar look and made a comment that San didn’t understand. Elgstrand shook his head and explained to San that Captain Dunn didn’t have much time for Chinamen.