Emily Blatchley

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.

Biography

Blatchley lost her mother and father before her experience as a missionary. She was an 1865 graduate of the Home and Colonial Training College 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.

In China, she dressed in Chinese clothes along with the rest of the China Inland Mission (CIM) missionaries, 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: