Evangeline French

Evangeline Frances "Eva" French 馮貴珠 (Alternative name: Feng Guizhu 馮貴珠) (1869-8 July 1960) was a British Protestant Christian missionary in China. She served with the China Inland Mission (CIM).

Evangeline was born in Algeria, the eldest daughter of an English couple, John Erington French and his first cousin Frances Elizabeth French. Eva was educated at a secondary school in Geneva, Switzerland. When the family later returned to England, Eva apparently disliked the rigid and provincial Victorian society. She described herself as "the fervid nihilist, the incipient communist, the embryonic Bolshevist." It surprised her family when she became a Christian and applied to become a mssionary for the CIM. The missionary society initially found her too unconventional in education and overly fashionable in dress, but finally accepted her. She was assigned to the Shanxi mission.

After seven years at her station the Boxer Rebellion in summer 1900 forced her to flee China. She returned to China in 1902. At her mission station of Huozhou 霍州, Shanxi, she formed a lifelong partnership with Alice Mildred Cable who had recently arrived. She was joined by her younger sister Francesca French in 1908, after their mother had died.

Cable and the French sisters traveled constantly in the surrounding area. They became known as the "trio." After 20 years in Huozhou, they believed that the mission should be turned over to Chinese leaders and the three applied to work in relatively unknown, largely Muslim western China. Although there were doubts that women should be assigned to this region their proposal was finally accepted in 1923.

For the next thirteen years, in the words of Mildred Cable: "From Etzingol to Turpan, from Spring of Wine to Chuguchak, we ... spent long years in following trade-routes, tracing faint caravan tracks, searching out innumerable by-paths and exploring the most hidden oases. ... Five times we traversed the whole length of the desert, and in the process we had become part of its life"

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