Shimenkan Intro

The villagers of Shimenkan are composed of Miao minority (more specifically the Flowery Miao), Yi minority and Chinese Han people. These three people groups have fought each other for thousands of years in the southwestern part of China. In the late 1880’s and early 1900’s when the first missionaries came to this region, the Miao were the most oppressed and poverty-stricken in the region. They owned no land, and were under the dual subjugation of both the Yi and Han people, and were forced to live on the barren mountain tops, rather than in the fertile hills or valleys.

British missionary Samuel Pollard came to China in 1887 at the age of 22 and died at his post in 1915 while he was caring for infected Miao villagers in Stone Gateway. The respectable personality and devoted spirit of Pollard helped Christianity spread throughout the region of Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou provinces. A large number of Miao people in these areas converted then to this religion. Pollard was honored as a national hero in a popular folk book and named as the “Savior” of Miao People.

In 1905, Pollard started building churches and schools on this desolated hillside. Within less than 50 years, Christianity’s influence here helped the Miao people to overcome difficult barriers and make a substantial difference in their quality of education and social welfare. This was something Chinese Confucianism hadn’t been able to accomplish in the previous 2000 years. However, today the name of Stone Gateway is again disappearing into this poorest Wumeng mountain area, no longer as known to the public as before. Stone Gateway had the earliest co-education and bilingual teaching system in contemporary China. The Stone Gateway school was equipped with all kinds of facilities, including dormitories, an auditorium, a swimming pool and a playground. The community here also developed quickly under Pollard’s influence so that it soon possessed an orphanage, hospital, leper house, post office and so on. Due to the elevation, the mountain-top village Stone Gateway lacked essential crops and large portions of the villagers perished due to famine.

In 1906, missionaries Rev and Mrs. Harry Parsons brought potatoes into this area for the first time. Potatoes were easy to grow, even in the harsh climate, and its harvest time was earlier than the other crops so that the people had a more consistent supply of food. Even now, along with corn, potatoes are the main food source for the villagers around Stone Gateway. Today, the church’s population is no more than 100; the number of Christian believers has dropped sharply compared to in Pollard's period when thousands of people were coming to church. There are only 3 churches in the whole Shimenkan area, with less than 6 hundred believers altogether. Most of the church population consists of women because the Miao men must migrate for work in order to support their families.

After almost half a century's isolation and poverty, the phenomenon of early marriage and early pregnancy is once again prevalent in Shimenkan. With Pollard's influence the church popularized adult-marriages rather than child-marriages for health, respect and practical reasons. In Pollard’s time, schools were so developed in Shimenkan that two thirds of the Miao population in the Wumeng Mountain area became literate. Two students even went on to get a doctoral degree in medical studies. Now, the illiteracy percentage of Miao people here is far higher than the Han and Yi people (less than 10%), and not a single university student has come from Shimenkan since 1949.