Guling – Kuliang

The Pilley Family Story

Edward and Emma Poteet Pilley

John Allen Pilley and Muriel Caldwell first met each other when they were students at the Shanghai American School (SAS) in the early 1920s.   John had been born in Shanghai to Edward and Emma Pilley, missionaries to the Hangchow area. Edward and Emma Poteet Pilley were natives of Texas, but they met in Kobe, Japan, where Emma had gone as a missionary.  Edward fell in love with the vivacious dark-eyed Emma and courted her through correspondence from Hangchow where he was stationed.  They were married on April 26, 1904.  Tragically, Emma died from cerebral meningitis in December of 1909, leaving four young children under the age of five.  Edward married again in 1911 to another Emma, a piano teacher who raised the four children as her own.

Muriel Caldwell was born in Ngu Cheng, the daughter of Harry and Belle Caldwell, missionaries to Fukien (Fujian) Province.  Harry was from the hills of east Tennessee and Belle had been the 1898 beauty queen of Chattanooga.  Harry had gone out to China in 1901, followed by Belle in 1902.  They were married in the little stone church on Kuliang, the resort on Drum Mountain near Fuzhou.

Harry and Belle Caldwell, Kuliang 1902

Both children grew up loving China and speaking the dialect of their respective provinces.  In 1904, John’s father built a summer house in Moganshan, four hours from Shanghai.  Harry Caldwell, Muriel’s father, built a summer house in 1912, on Kuliang, the resort on Drum Mountain near Fuzhou. He later sold the house, but the family continued to stay there during the summers.  Here is how Muriel described life on Kuliang in her book, The Hills of T’ang.

“The former Lacy house on Kuliang, where Mother’s wedding bell had hung in 1902, was large enough for our family reunion. Off the stone porch were four bedrooms, besides the “turret room”, which overlooked a ravine of rice paddies. Through tall pines on the opposite hill, one could see beyond a cleft of the mountains to the Plains, misted by distance.

There was neither electricity nor running water. At dusk, Da Hua brought in the lights, a small one for each bedroom, and the hanging lamp with the wide wick and porcelain shade to illuminate the turret. Candles sufficed for the bathroom, where toilets were seats over earthen slop jars, accessible from outside by small doors in the masonry. Each morning village women collected the “night-soil” and carried it away to fertilize fields of sweet potato, spinach and beans. Every bathroom was furnished with a wash stand, bowl and pitcher, and a glazed earthenware tub, which Da Hua kept filled with water from a well below the house. We heated bath water with charcoal in small grates on the brick cook-stove in the kitchen. Here, too, equipment was simple. There was a rectangular tin box without top, constructed from kerosene containers. When inverted over one of the grates and piled with glowing charcoal, this box became an oven. Thus Abo made all our bread. In a corner of the kitchen was another glazed water tub, while on a porch outside the back door hung our “wind closet”, a screened box which let breezes circulate without flies and rats. Under the kitchen in the basement of the turret, were the servants’ rooms.

Joyce and I, supported by Dah Hua and Abo, ran, as it were, a boarding house for family and visitors. When Abo was busy, we looked after his three-year-old son, Golden Dragon, whose mother had stayed in the village. The little boy followed us about, talking interminably. If one of us was out of sight, he asked, “Where’s the other person?” We gave him baths, which he hugely enjoyed.  There was much coming and going. Papa made frequent trips to Futsing, while John was up and down the mountain almost on a commuter basis, attending meetings at A.C.C. (the Anglo-Chinese College in Fuzhou)  and taking part in Kuliang activities.”

After graduation from SAS, John went on to Washington and Lee University in Virginia.  Muriel finished high school at Garfield High in Seattle, Washington and attended the University of Washington before transferring to Oberlin College in Ohio, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa.

They returned to China after graduating from college and both became teachers at SAS, the Shanghai American School.  John, who was very popular among the lady teachers, began to court Muriel.  In the spring of 1931, John hosted a house party at his Moganshan home and Muriel was smitten.  That summer, John visited Muriel on Kuliang where they became engaged and were married on December 22, 1931, in the little stone Episcopal Church in Fuzhou.

Muriel, 1931

John on Moganshan 1931

Wedding, December 22, 1931, Fuzhou.

They continued teaching at SAS until the fall of 1934, when they accompanied some SAS graduates returning to the U.S. for college.  John enrolled at Syracuse University and took courses in teaching.  They went back to China in 1935, in order for John to begin teaching at the Anglo Chinese College (ACC) in Fuzhou.  Muriel was pregnant with her first child, but the baby was stillborn that summer.  Kuliang became a refuge for grief and healing.

While Muriel and John were starting their life together, Japan was expanding its authority in China after invading Manchuria in September of 1931.   China resisted Japan’s efforts to control the entire country and in July of 1937, the conflict broke into serious fighting in Shanghai.  The Pilleys and the Caldwells were vacationing together at the Pilley home at Moganshan.  From their mountain top eyrie the family could see and hear the explosions of war.  Family meals became tense and loud as they discussed what the Christian response to war should be.

Moganshan, July 1937 L – R First row: Harry Caldwell, Muriel Pilley, Oliver Caldwell, Joslyn Caldwell, Eda Caldwell Second row: Morris Caldwell, Belle Caldwell, Laddie, Clara Steger (John’s step aunt), John Pilley

In August, the family split up.  Harry and Belle Caldwell and John and Muriel Pilley hired a car to take them back over the mountains to Fuzhou, because it was too dangerous to travel by sea.   Morris went back to the U.S.  Oliver sent his wife Eda and daughter Joslyn back to the U.S., while he went on to Nanjing where he was teaching at the University of Nanjing.  In December of that year, he moved with the university to Chengdu just ahead of the Japanese invasion of Nanjing.

John and Muriel continued their teaching at the Anglo-Chinese College amid anxiety and uncertainty over the expanding war.  In the fall of 1938, ACC moved to Yangkow, a small village 150 miles up the Min River, to escape the relentless Japanese bombing of Fuzhou.

The Guild Hall, where they had classes when they were evacuated to Yangkou, 1938.

That year in Yangkow, Muriel wrote a play for Christmas.  This is how she described it many years later in 1978.

“Christmas, 1938.  Forty years ago John and I were refugees from the Japanese invasion of China.  To escape the bombings of Foochow where we were teachers in a mission school, faculty and all senior high classes moved, in an armada of small boats, one hundred and fifty miles up the turbulent Min River to a remote village in the Bohea Hills.  The students were housed in drafty guild halls.  With Edith, our co-worker, John and I lived in a small thatched house on a hillside above town.  Across a parade ground, where students and soldiers drilled daily, the little Methodist Church also clung to the steep hill.  When the siren sounded an air plane warning we all ran to the hideout above the settlement, among grasses, shrubs and graves, a place visited by tigers and leopards at night.

I wrote a play that Christmas – “And Myrrh”.  John spent hours coaching a student choir to sing “The Hallelujah Chorus”.  There was no electricity, but I wanted the Cross to glow and lead our Seekers after they had found the Babe and the Watchman had explained the meaning of myrrh.  So Sie Hui, our physics teacher, made a dimmer and a cross of flashlight bulbs.  We lit the church with candle chandeliers.  Cold rain fell, but the glowing sanctuary was filled with students and townspeople.  And the Holy Spirit filled our young actors and singers.   While our Seekers, led by a winged angel, climbed a black hill toward the slowly brightening Cross, ushers passed a candle to each person in the audience.  Reverently the people went out with lighted candles into the rain and the dark uncertainties of a war-ravaged China, singing “In the Cross, in the Cross, Be my glory ever.”  There have been many happy Christmases.  That dark night of 1938 in the mountains of China shines out above all others.”

In May of 1939, Muriel was once again pregnant and moved to Shanghai to get away from the terror of the Japanese bombs.  John joined her in July and their son John Caldwell (Robin) was born later that month.   The couple with their infant son then traveled to the United States, where they were officially appointed as educational missionaries.  Robin celebrated his first birthday in Nashville, Tennessee.  Just before his birthday in July of 1940, the Caldwell family had a final reunion.  It was the last time they were all together.

Back row: L-R: Morris Caldwell, Oliver, Eda Caldwell, Joyce Caldwell, Arlean Widner (Muriel’s college roommate) John Caldwell, John Pilley Front row: L-R: Shirley Gray Caldwell, Joslyn Caldwell, Belle Caldwell, Harry Caldwell, Robin Pilley, Muriel Pilley

In spite of the worsening international situation John and Muriel went back to China in October of 1940,  and ignored requests to evacuate.  In 1941, the Japanese occupied the city of Fuzhou.  Muriel and John were desperate to get out of the city and rejoin the faculty at Yangkow.  In September, the Japanese left and the couple was able to travel up the Min River once again.  Muriel was pregnant with her second child.  In November, Gail was born.  For the next three years, the family lived at Yangkow until Japanese advances in 1944 forced them to evacuate, first by truck, then by plane to India.  In the high peaceful Himalayas, they found temporary peace.  John taught fourth grade at the Mt. Hermon School in Darjeeling.  Muriel was a house mother in the little boys’ dormitory.  She wrote this memory of their time in the mountains:

“We were safe and warm, the four of us together in Fernhill, a Himalayan chateau.  The little boys whom I was to mother while John taught in the school nearby were beginning to understand us.  We would soon teach them self-government and the meaning of equality.  Even Bobby Rana, a prince of Nepal, had begun to understand democracy.  While the winds of war raged like a hurricane about the earth, we were safe and isolated, for Mt. Herman School is 8000 feet above the plains and several miles from the hubbub of Darjeeling.  Happily, I sorted the laundry brought each day by the “dhobi”, putting it in marked shelves, while the children played with a wild black kitten their “ayah” had found.

Fernhill stood on a promontory above deep valleys.  Tall cryptomaria climbed from the glens through morning mist, to march, stately up steep slopes.  There was a white balustraded swimming pool below a fountain terrace, and a fence aglow with morning-glories.  Rambling nasturtiums tumbled over ornate stone urns; while along the sandy paths bloomed starry crocuses and hedges of white cosmos.

Mist rose slowly from bottomless valleys, billowing about the great mountains until it pleased the sun to touch with golden shafts the hidden ranges, to reveal gilded snow pinnacles and mighty bastions of rock and glacier.  Eagerly we would watch for a glimpse of towering Kanchenjunga, glistening beyond our fragile world.

Then came the telegram to John.  “You have been nominated for first lieutenant commission assigned to OSS… Release will be secured from Mission.  Reply Box 9039, Calcutta, India”.  The war had caught us.

So one evening we went down the mountain on the little train that zig-zags and crosses beneath its own tracks.  From beyond a ridge the sunset streamed into the valleys below us, suffusing the rising foam of mist with pink and gold splendor, swirling about us, slowly fading into a fog as we descended into the night.”

Muriel, her parents and the children left India for the United States, leaving John behind as an officer in the U.S. Army, a member of the Office of Strategic Services.  Muriel did not see him again until December of 1945, after the war was finally over.

In 1946, the family left again for China, this time bringing trunks of supplies for the war impoverished families in Fuzhou.  They resumed teaching at ACC and in 1947, their third child Marilyn was born.  Once again Kuliang became a much loved refuge of peace and recreation for the family.

Marilyn and Chek Saw

Gail and Robin on Kuliang, 1948

But China was not at peace.  The civil war between the Communists and the Kuomintang grew more intense, with the Communists winning city after city.   Finally, in May of 1949, the family left Fuzhou and sailed on the “SS Heinrich Jessen” to Hong Kong.  There they received permission to relocate to Sarawak, Borneo, where they could continue their educational work with a Chinese population.  On June 28, 1949, they arrived in Sibu, a small town up the Rajang River in Sarawak, then a British colony.

The story continues with The Pilley Family in Borneo.