It was to China’s borderland of Yunnan Province that the Guilds were first assigned.  The year was 1932.

The year before, the wives of C. B. Miller and Dallas White had been slain there in Yunnan as they slept.  Two little White girls sleeping in an adjoining room were not molested during this tragedy.  Dallas White didn’t ask to leave China, but he did request to be reassigned.  It was to fill this gap that Cecil Guild was called.

Our first home in the mission field was the Dallas White home and the place where the two ladies had been killed.  The place had been vacant since that time.

To the north of Yunnan is the Province of Szechwan.  We were transferred to there after two years. Cecil was director of the East Szechwan Mission.  We lived in the city of Chungking.  For a year we filled in at the West China Training Center at Dabau near Chunking. Later Cecil was appointed director of the West Szechwan Mission where we lived in the city of Chengtu.

It was while we were living in Chengtu that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The Chinese and the Japanese had been in conflict for some time, but now America was drawn into the war.  We were also living in Chengtu when Elder George Wilkinson, Director of the Honan Mission, died.  Cecil was asked to fill that vacancy.  So we left the rice-eating area of China and moved to where the fields were waving with wheat and where we ate noodles and steamed bread called Mo Mo.

We felt awed to work in the Province where Dr. H. W. Miller and Drs. Selmon had pioneered Adventist work as early as 1903.  The first Mrs. Miller is buried in Honan.  Honan was a peaceful country and yet within 60 li (3 li=1 mile) was positioned a segment of the Japanese army.  For a time this “door” remained open for the purpose of trade.  But we knew that if the push came, that we needed to move quickly.

We had instructions that in the case of emergency we were to evacuate to Chungking and we were instructed as to the route of travel.  The trip, which took three months, was made under very stressful circumstances.  It began with horse-drawn carts.  Later it included a span on the railway, another short bit by truck and ended with a two-week trip in a sail boat down the Kailing River to Chungking.

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek had moved his wartime headquarters to Chungking. So we experienced repeated bombings by the Japanese but that part of West China was never occupied by the Japanese. It was on an August Friday evening that we were sitting on our veranda when we heard shouting and much commotion on the streets below.  Could it be that the war was over, we wondered?  We turned on the radio, and sure enough—the armistice had been signed. We had stayed in China during the entire period of World War II.

We were living in Shanghai in l949.  Cecil was in charge of the Voice of Prophecy Bible Correspondence School. That was the year the Communists swiftly, and without much resistance, marched in and took over China.  All was confusion.  Many people evacuated.  But not all left.  Cecil and I were among twelve Seventh-day Adventist families who stayed in China during the turnover in government.  We were there six months.  During that time there was no incoming and no outgoing mail.  But up to the time we let the city, telephone, wire, and cable communication to the outside world had not been cut.

The United States negotiated with the Communists and the Nationalists asking for a truce, a truce long enough for a United States troop ship to come into Shanghai and take out non-Chinese citizens.  It took some time to work out a truce but eventually it was arranged. The General Gordon, on a Friday afternoon, sailed up the Hwangpo River to Shanghai.  But it was the next afternoon, on Sabbath, that one thousand people boarded that ship.  Adventists, as were other mission bodies, were given space for a definite number of people

For Cecil and me that ended our 17 years of work in China.

It was in 1981, 49 years after I had lived in that house where the two ladies had been slain, that my China mission experience came full circle.  I was working in the Ellen G. White Research Center at Andrews University.  It was closing time for that day and I was putting things away.  That afternoon a couple from Battle Creek had been doing research there at the White Estate.  Now they, too, were gathering up their papers preparing to return to Battle Creek. 

Suddenly the lady asked, “What is your name?”

”Nora Guild,” I told her.

“Are you related to the Guilds who once worked in China?” the lady wanted to know.

”I am the one,” I said.

The lady then introduced herself as Jean White, the youngest daughter of Dallas White.  Jean was six months old when her mother was killed.  Dallas White, the daughter said, never talked about the tragedy that killed his wife.  When he died (he was killed in a plane accident while on a mission trip in Mexico) the girls found two cardboard boxes in the garage.  Those boxes held the story of the White family in Yunnan,  pictures and letters.  The girls had put the pictures together to the best of their ability.  So now Jean asked if I could help them identify places and faces.

A time was set when both Jean and her husband came to my home in Berrien Springs. They brought their pictures and with mine we journeyed back in time.  That began a friendship that continues.  China’s borderland of Yunnan Province binds us together!