Our scholarship in memory of this courageous NZ missionary to China.
Kathleen Hall RGN, RM (1896 - 1970)
Kathleen Hall was a New Zealand missionary nurse in China who was swept up in the war against Japan. Not only did she nurse the sick and wounded, but time and time again she smuggled medical supplies through the Japanese lines to Dr. Norman Bethune, the Canadian surgeon who was in charge of medical services for the Chinese 8th Route Army.
The He Ming Qing (Kathleen Hall) Memorial Scholarship was established by the New Zealand China Friendship Society Inc. to provide three-year scholarships for Chinese from poor rural areas enabling them to complete nursing training in order to return to their villages and work for improved health standards. This scholarship replaces the previous Kathleen Hall Centennial Memorial Scholarship, which ran for ten years.
This picture of Kathleen Hall was probably taken at Songjiazhuang, 1936.
Kathleen Hall – Biography
Kathleen Hall was born in Napier, New Zealand in 1896 and later moved to Auckland. There she trained at Auckland Public Hospital.
In 1922 she was accepted by the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel for missionary work in China. Before leaving New Zealand she successfully undertook midwifery training at St Helen’s hospital in Christchurch.
In North China at that time there was one outstanding hospital where western medicine was practised, the Peking Union Medical College (PUMC). It was a very advanced institution, funded by the American Rockefeller Foundation and operated by British and American Protestant missions.
After several years language training and professional practice there, Kathleen was appointed Sister-in-Charge of a provincial hospital at Datong, later being transferred to the same position at Hejian and Anguo in Hebei Province.
She became acquainted with the deplorable living conditions in the Hebei mountains and in 1934 she obtained the permission of her Bishop to leave the cities and set up her own cottage hospital in the mountain village of Songjiazhuang.
Kathleen Hall with four of her nurses, probably at Anguo Hospital, 1937.
In 1937 she had to return temporarily to take charge of the hospital at Anguo on the plains and she was in charge there when the Japanese invaded.
There was a great battle nearby, the Chinese were defeated and hers was the only hospital for hundreds of miles. The doctors fled and with a few Chinese nurses she was left to deal with many hundred casualties.
As the Japanese pushed southwards, she was able to return to her own hospital in the mountains, to find that it was now in “no-man’s land” between the Chinese guerilla forces and the Japanese. With her British passport she could move comparatively freely, and before long she was making long journeys to Peking to purchase medical supplies, much of which she passed on to the Chinese army, until caught by the Japanese.
Kathleen Hall’s statue at Songjiazhuang
They put her on a ship for New Zealand, but she disembarked at Hong Kong and joined the Chinese Red Cross. She made a dangerous journey through inland China to rejoin the 8th Route Army. Eventually she was struck down with beriberi, and repatriated to New Zealand.
After the war the helped to establish a model leper colony in Hong Kong, and in her final years of service she worked with the Anglican Maori Mission at Te Kuiti and Waitara.
In retirement she devoted her life to telling New Zealanders the truth about China. She worked very hard to bring the various Friendship groups in Auckland, Hamilton, Napier, Wellington and Christchurch together to form the NZ-China Friendship Society, which was inaugurated in Wellington in 1958, with Kathleen as a member of the first National Committee.
She was able to revisit China twice more, in 1960 and 1964. She died in Hamilton in 1970.
In 1993 a delegation of friends and relatives carried her ashes back to China in accordance with her wishes.
In 1996 the local people of Quyang County celebrated the centennial of her birth by creating a beautiful marble statue and setting it up in the village of Songjiazhuang where she had established her clinic.
A China Today article published in 1997 describes this moving event, and gives more details of Kathleen’s life.
In 2000, her clinic was rebuilt with a donation of $15,000 from our Society, which has been tripled by a subsidy from the N.Z. Government. The completion of the rebuilding project was celebrated in June 2000 and the clinic was officially reopened in July 2001. Click here to view pictures of both celebrations.
