The Parlor Maid Who Crossed a Continent

In 1930, the China Inland Mission told Gladys Aylward she wasn't qualified. Too old at twenty-eight. Too uneducated. Too ordinary. She was a parlor maid from Edmonton, north London — small in stature, slight in frame, with nothing on her resume that impressed a missions board.

But Gladys knew something the board didn't. She knew whose child she was.

She saved her wages penny by penny and bought a one-way ticket on the Trans-Siberian Railway. She traveled alone across Europe and through war zones to reach Yangcheng, China, where she opened an inn for muleteers and told them stories about the God who called them beloved. The local mandarin appointed her foot inspector, tasked with ending the brutal practice of foot-binding — and she did it, village by village.

When Japanese forces invaded in 1938, Gladys led nearly a hundred orphans on a harrowing twelve-day trek over the mountains to safety. She was wounded, starving, and feverish — but she would not abandon children she had claimed as her own.