The Kienow Mission

This map belonged to a report which documented the Dominicans' missionary work in the province of northern Fujian. According to the report, by 1948 the area held 2,106 Catholics, 258 catechumens, and 762 auditors among a population totaling just over 1.3 million.

The report also listed the types of personnel (including eight Sisters from St. Mary of the Springs), administrations (baptisms, confirmations, marriages, etc.), establishments, and the names and locations of the mission staff.

The convent of the Women's Compound was built in 1936. The Sisters moved into it on October 15th during the Feast of St. Theresa.

The Holy Rosary Dispensary provided healthcare to the people cared for by the mission and to those who came from the city (who did not belong to the compound). They gave medication and treated illnesses such as malaria, leprosy, and roundworm infestation.

Vaccinations against smallpox and the bubonic plague were also given here, which was especially instrumental as "the black death" arrived every year in the area during the four to five months of the rainy season--and would take many lives with it each year too.

The orphanage was a large part of the Sisters' mission. It took in children without any relatives, Christian girls taken from polytheistic homes where they had once lived with their future husbands, children given up by their families due to extreme poverty or disability, and babies abandoned at the compound’s gates. The children usually stayed at the orphanage until they were old enough to marry.

Many of the mission's first orphans had fled communist attacks on their mountain homes which had either killed their parents or left their parents too impoverished to care for their children.

The mission also took in many abandoned babies, mostly girls, who were were either given to the Sisters directly or left at the compound's gates. The infants that were beyond help received baptism and as much comfort as possible until they passed away. Sr. Virginia holds one such infant in this image. Healthy babies would be placed with a nurse until they turned three-years-old, and then the child would return to live at the orphanage.

Handwriting on the back of this photograph shows the adoration the Sisters held for the children under their care, as the Sister addresses the orphans in this picure as her "darlings."

When conflicts in China would later force the Sisters to place the children in other missions or Christian homes, the March 1945 publication of the Pittsburgh Bulletin of the Holy Childhood Association reported that both sides shed heartbroken tears, as neither wanted to part from the other.

Four native Chinese girls stand here as Novices. Around a month after this picture was taken, on March 19, 1947, these Novices would take part in a Retreat and Profession inside a chapel filled with the Dominican Sisters, the Novices' families, a newspaper reporter, and others. Father Dominic Chang, O.P., performed the Retreat in Chinese. The Profession of Sisters was the first of its kind at the mission.

The new Chinese Sisters began teaching Doctrine five days after their profession. They would teach women who came to the compound for classes, teach in homes on the outside where two to three people who could not travel to the compound would gather for religious classes, and would teach to old ladies who lived in government homes.

Two of the Chinese Sisters, Sr. M. John and Sr. M. Annunciata, are teaching Doctrine to local elderly women--some of whom belonged to the compound. The Women's Compound housed widows and elderly women in buildings built for such a purpose, like the Old Ladies' Infirmary.