The most disastrous famine in recent Chinese history took place between 1876 and 1879, afflicting all five provinces of North China [Shantung, Chihli, Honan, Shensi, and Shansi] and claiming no fewer than nine and a half million human lives . The hunger, pestilence, and violence brought about by the famine presented an overwhelming challenge to government and foreign relief efforts. Despite these obstacles, however, Timothy Richard of the Baptist Missionary Society succeeded in organizing an effective, systematic scheme of relief distribution in several districts of Shantung and Shansi. His work on the scene in turn stimulated the foreign community to organize the China Famine Relief Fund Committee, and his method of rendering aid set the pattern of foreign almsgiving which did much to ease the suffering of thousands. This study analyzes Richard’s role in the North China famine and evaluates his contribution to the relief effort. It concentrates on Richard’s initial distribution attempts in Shantung, 1876-1877, and his more extensive activities in Shansi, 1877-1879. By comparing Richard’s relief measures with those of the Ch’ing government as well as with those of the foreign distributors supported by the China Famine Relief Fund Committee, the study attempts to describe the various approaches to the problem of famine relief and to illuminate the many difficulties encountered by Chinese and foreigners in the relief work. Richard emerged from the calamity convinced that he must urge China’s leaders to eradicate the basic causes of famine and similar natural disasters and to elevate the physical as well as the spiritual welfare of the rural masses.

In War and Famine uses a small key - the author's family letters and infant memories - to unlock a whole world. Erleen Christensen was a "mish kid," the daughter of one of about two hundred missionaries who remained in China's Honan province during World War II and the civil war that followed. She provides an eye-witness account using letters, diaries, and personal accounts, many still in private hands, of one of the worst famines in China's history and the great devastation caused by advancing Japanese troops. Christensen chronicles how a religiously diverse group of Westerners tried to distribute famine relief and conduct humanitarian and educational missions in the face of rising nationalism, autonomy, and resistance to foreign intervention. While the principle narrator is Christensen's father, a young missionary doctor who, in a hair-raising journey, smuggled his family behind Japanese battlelines the year before Pearl Harbor, Christensen also tells the story of the many other missionaries who also sought to relieve the suffering of innocents caught in the crossfire of war and revolution - brave women who marched orphans through enemy lines, missionaries turned OSS intelligence officers, a Canadian Anglican cleric, a Swiss trainer of seeing-eye dogs, and a diplomat who travelled the province by bicycle.

Provides a history of the China International Famine Relief Commission, an organization of western residents, particularly missionaries, in China that assisted the victims of famines that persisted in North China.