Four years in Upper Burma

by W. R. Winston

I knew a missionary and his wife, earnest, devoted, exceedingly kind to the people, and successful. From the first of their settling in the country, their asceticism was so marked that their friends, who saw it, pleaded with them to eat more food and better food, but in vain. Being new to the country, they did not know the risks they ran. After barely two years of earnest work, ill health compelled their retirement from the field, with scarcely any prospect of ever returning. And yet there was no kind of necessity for them to live thus. They appeared to think there was some virtue in self-denial of this type, merely for its own sake.

Another case of the same kind was that of an unmarried missionary lady, with a strong natural tendency to asceticism. She was an able and diligent missionary, and well acquainted with the language. After some years of missionary life, the tendency grew upon her to such an extent, that she withdrew more and more from association with her own people, lived with none but natives, on native food, and broke off one comfort after another, until even bread was too much of a luxury! After a year or eighteen months of this ascetic life, her health broke down so completely that she had to return home to America or die.

One of our brethren in India has told us his story of a similar attempt. It was a sense of duty that urged him to come down to native diet, native dress, and general mode of life; and very loyally to this sense of duty did he persevere for many months. But, to his infinite sorrow, he found that instead of bringing him any nearer to the people, it seemed only to increase the distance; for it aroused their suspicions as to his motives for doing so. He found at length that he could have reached them better if he had moved amongst them in the ordinary way. But meanwhile the penalty of all this had come; his health so completely broke down, clearly in consequence of this method of living, that he had to leave India, and now for several years he has been laid aside completely in England, unable to do any regular work. He is the victim of an honest, and very persistent, but mistaken attempt to live an ascetic missionary life.

As regards the wearing of the native dress, it has often been assumed that to do so must needs place a missionary more in touch with the natives. But in India it is not found that such is really the case. With the exception of the Salvation Army, this is the only case in India where I ever heard of its being attempted, and it had quite the contrary effect. I have heard that a venerable missionary once tried it in Burma, but the peals of laughter that greeted his appearance in the streets instantly convinced him that he could gain nothing by that method. There are probably cases where it is advisable, and even almost necessary, to assume the dress of the country. Each case should be judged upon its own merits, and it greatly depends what kind of a dress it is. In India and Burma they like to see the man be himself, and they respect you for keeping to the customs you have been brought up with.

The following is a faithful account of an heroic, but ill-judged and disastrous, missionary enterprise in Burma, in substance as I had it from the lips of one of the survivors, who paid me a visit in Mandalay, a few of the particulars being supplied by another missionary well acquainted with the facts. I wish that all my readers could have heard the touchingly simple recital, and witnessed the gentle and refined Christian bearing of this excellent brother. It is the narrative of a small mission, sent out by evangelical Christians in Denmark to the Red Karens, an independent tribe of demon worshippers, dwelling in Karennee, on the eastern frontier of Burma. My informant is a Dane. It will be observed that the bane of the whole enterprise was the ascetic idea, imbibed at home, and in this case carried out to the bitter end. The case serves to show also what a formidable difficulty to foreign evangelism we have in the mere matter of the climate.

Near the close of 1884, two young men, Danish missionaries, Hans Polvsen and Hans Jansen, arrived in Burma, with the purpose of establishing this mission. On their arrival they looked the very picture of health. They had both been inured to hard work from their youth, and they were devout men, and entirely given up to work for the Master. Though receiving aid at first from home, they hoped soon to make the mission self-supporting. They therefore undertook to do all the manual labour themselves. Where others rode they would walk. Where others employed natives they would do their own work. They would cook their own food, and live in the simplest manner, even like the natives of the land. Had the sphere of their mission been the wilds of America, or any country at all similar in climate to their native Denmark, it would have been the right policy, and they might have succeeded. But they soon had painful proof that there are laws in Nature, from which even missionaries are not exempt; and one of these laws is that we cannot do with impunity in the tropics what we may do in the temperate zone.

Some time after their arrival, an opportunity occurred for going into Karennee, and they prepared to start for their destination. By way of preparation they gave away all their extra goods, medicines, clothing, etc., fancying that Matthew x. encouraged such a course. We cannot but place in contrast this conduct with that of a man like Livingstone. His was a self-denying work, if ever there was one; he believed in doing the work God called him to do, no matter what difficulties stood in the way. But he was no believer in asceticism—i.e., needless suffering for suffering’s own sake. He relates in his “Last Journals” how, when he found his medicine chest was hopelessly lost, through the carelessness of a native carrier, he felt as if his death warrant were sealed. But these people thought it right to give away their medicines and goods on leaving the confines of civilisation. Before leaving Toungoo they were faithfully warned by experienced missionaries of the American Baptist Mission, that such a course as they were entering upon, at the beginning of the rains, was exceedingly hazardous; but their notions of trust in Providence prevented them from paying any heed to this counsel.

They reached Karennee, after a rough journey over the mountains and through the jungles, and proceeded at once to put up for themselves a house, and establish the mission according to their ideas. It is difficult for any one not knowing the country to conceive how hard their lot would be. Their sufferings were extreme. Hard work and exposure, together with poor food, and only the shelter of a bamboo house, that afforded no proper protection from the pitiless rains, and damp, cold blasts, soon broke down their health. Fever, the great bane of tropical malarious regions, soon found them out. Hans Polvsen died before the rains were over, and Jansen was brought into Toungoo by the American Baptist missionaries, more dead than alive, and kindly nursed and brought round. A new party from Denmark now reached Toungoo, consisting of Knudsen, his wife, and Miss Jansen, the sister of Hans, and the four set out for Karennee. Here the former experiences were renewed; for the party had not yet learnt wisdom, even by such terrible sufferings. Soon they were all very ill. Miss Jansen died: after that a babe, born to the Knudsens after reaching Karennee, was also taken. The stricken father had to get up from his sick-bed to make the coffins. They could get no meat, no bread, no milk, none of the ordinary comforts of civilised life, nothing but an inferior kind of rice, which they could not eat when sick, and which no European could thrive and work upon, even in health. Jansen was warned by an English doctor passing through the place with troops, that he must get away from Burma, or he would soon die. He went to Toungoo again, recovered a little, and, against the earnest advice of the doctor there, who warned him that he went at the peril of his life, he determined to start on a third journey for their chosen mission field. But he never again entered Karennee. On reaching the foot of the great mountain range, he seated himself beneath the shade of a beautiful arching clump of bamboos, and there breathed out his devoted life. It is characteristic of the popular, but false ideal of the missionary life entertained by many people at home, that, as my informant put it,—for by that time his eyes were opened to see the matter in its true light,—“They were inclined to make more of the ‘heroism’ of that unwise act of returning, and dying on the way, than they would if he had fulfilled a long career of useful service.”

The Knudsens became so completely broken down in health that they too were compelled to leave Karennee. Thus this little mission, begun with the highest of motives and carried on with quenchless, self-sacrificing, prayerful zeal, was entirely and hopelessly wrecked, through its adherence to ascetic principles, and had to be finally abandoned, after five years of heroic, but utterly wasted, labour and suffering, and without any appreciable impression being produced upon the natives of that region.