Annie Royle Taylor

Annie Royle Taylor was born in 1855 in the north of England. She grew up in a well-to-do family, and she trained as a nurse. In the 1880s she felt a call to serve Christ in China, and she joined the China Inland Mission, the society founded by Hudson Taylor. She went to China in 1884 and worked in the region in the west, where she was drawn to the land of Tibet, a country closed to foreigners and almost wholly unreached by the gospel.

She became convinced that God wanted her to carry the message of Christ to the Tibetan people. Tibet was forbidden to outsiders, and those who tried to enter risked being turned back or killed. Annie was not deterred. She studied the Tibetan language and learned what she could of the country. She traveled to the borders of Tibet, to the town of Tatsienlu, in the west of China, which was a center of trade between Tibetans and Chinese.

In the early 1890s she set out on an attempt to enter Tibet and to travel as far as Lhasa. She dressed in Tibetan clothing and took with her a Tibetan convert as a companion. She went by the roads that were open and tried to avoid the notice of officials. She endured harsh cold and hunger, and the hardship of high-altitude travel. She was robbed of her goods and ran into trouble with bandits, and she became sick. She came within a few days of Lhasa before she was stopped by officials and sent back.

She did not give up. She later returned to the border regions and worked among the Tibetan people on the Sikkim side, where she set up a base. She started a small pioneer mission to reach the people of Tibet, and she gathered volunteers for the work. She also wrote and spoke in Britain to raise support. She was an energetic organizer and a stubborn woman who did not take no for an answer.

She also made mistakes. Her missions were sometimes plagued by shortages of money and of workers, and some who joined her found her hard to work with. She was criticized for the daring of her schemes and for the dangers she exposed others to. She herself admitted that her plans had not always been wise.

The detailed record of her life is thin, and the account here should be checked against fuller sources. What can be said is that she was one of the first Western women to attempt the journey to Lhasa and that she stands among the pioneers of the mission to Tibet. She died in 1922. The Tibetan Plateau remains one of the least reached regions of the world, and those who follow in her steps still honor the courage of the woman who first tried.