Emily Blatchley (c. 1842 – 26 July 1874) was a British Protestant Christian missionary to China with the China Inland Mission. She pioneered the work of single women missionaries in China and served as personal secretary to the founder of the mission, Hudson Taylor.Tucker (1983), page needed
Biography
Blatchley lost her mother and father before her experience as a missionary. She was an 1865 graduate of the Home and Colonial Training CollegeBiographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity, Emily Blatchley along with her friend Jane Elizabeth Faulding. Hudson Taylor's family unofficially adopted her as one of their own. Her attendance at the weekly prayer meeting for China at Coborn Street in Bromley-by-Bow, East End of London (as well as Taylor's book "China's Spiritual Need and Claims") soon led to her volunteering to join the largest party of Protestant missionaries to ever yet set sail for China, the Lammermuir Party, in 1866. Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity website, Jennie Faulding Taylor
In China, she dressed in Chinese clothes along with the rest of the China Inland Mission (CIM) missionaries, including all of the single women. Blatchley was a governess for the Taylor children: Grace Dyer Taylor, Herbert Hudson Taylor, Frederick Howard Taylor, and Samuel Dyer Taylor. She taught them daily lessons and freed Maria Taylor to participate in more missionary work with her husband. She was also the "right hand secretary" of the mission and took charge of much of the correspondence with William Thomas Berger at the home headquarters in England.
Blatchley traveled with the Taylors as a fellow pioneer missionary and survived the Yangzhou riot in 1868. She struggled with tuberculosis throughout the last period of her life. In 1870, at the request of Hudson and Maria Taylor, she chaperoned the Taylor children back to England for their own health and safety; she also assumed many responsibilities of an acting home-director (a "guardian secretary") in England of the China Inland Mission while Taylor was still in China.
After the death of Maria Taylor (from tuberculosis) she once privately hoped that Taylor would seek her hand in marriage. However, her health deteriorated and she died of the same illness as her friend in 1874. Reaching Chinese Worldwide website, What can we learn from the Life of Emily Blatchley?, article dated July 16, 2019 She died on July 26, 1874, and was buried in the eastern side of Highgate Cemetery on one of the narrower north/south paths. The inscription on her grave (plot no.20165) has completely worn away.
Quotations
From: Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission, Growth of a Work of God: A Quote from The Christian eulogizing Blatchley:
After the Lammermuir party survived two typhoons she noted:
Notes
References
Further reading Historical Bibliography of the China Inland Mission
External links Christian Biography Resources OMF International (formerly China Inland Mission and Overseas Missionary Fellowship) https://web.archive.org/web/20070926212919/http://www.genealogy.com/users/y/o/r/Brian-York-Burnsville/?Welcome=1091209026