When Homer Brown sailed for China in 1912, he was joining one of the most ambitious expressions of Protestant idealism the twentieth century would produce. The Canadian Methodist Mission to West China had been established only twenty years earlier, in 1892, when a small party of missionaries — ministers, doctors, and their wives — arrived in Chengdu, the ancient capital of Sichuan province. The population of the area they undertook to serve was estimated by 1920 as being between ten and fourteen million people. Homer Brown would spend the next three decades at the centre of that enterprise.
Homer graduated from Victoria University in 1906, earned a Master's degree in Education from Columbia University, and pursued divinity studies at the Union Theological Seminary in New York before being sent to West China in 1912. He arrived in Chengdu at a moment of extraordinary upheaval. The Qing Dynasty had collapsed the previous year, the Republic of China had been declared, and the foreign missionary community had only recently returned from a precautionary evacuation. The world Homer entered was volatile, provisional, and alive with possibility.
Muriel Joy Hockey arrived separately, sailing for West China with the Woman's Missionary Society in the fall of 1913. A Victoria University graduate of the class of 1910, she had won the Oration Contest in her first year, the Robertson Canadian Constitutional History Prize in her final year, and received the Prince of Wales' Gold Medal upon graduation. Before sailing, she qualified as a teacher at the Methodist National Training School. Homer and Muriel were married in Chengdu in 1915, the same year their eldest daughter, Isabel Joy, was born.
The Chengdu to which they came was being transformed by missionary ambition on a remarkable scale. West China Union University had been established in 1910, formed by the union of four Protestant missions — American Baptist, American Methodist Episcopal, British Quakers, and Canadian Methodist. It was the only institution with a Christian purpose in a region the size of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany combined.
It was here that Homer Brown made his principal contribution. He became Dean of the Faculty of Education at West China Union University, where he contributed to teacher training and educational development. He also served as superintendent of the City Church in Chengdu and as General Secretary of the West China Education Union — roles that placed him at the intersection of institutional, civic, and religious life in the city.
Muriel's work was no less significant, and in some ways more pioneering. She founded the first Montessori kindergarten in Chengdu and helped establish the Chengdu Dewey School, serving as its principal from 1921 to 1924. She also taught English to refugees at the University of Nanking in Chengdu, and served on the boards of the Y.W.C.A. and the Chengdu Deaf, Blind and Dumb School.
In bringing Montessori and Dewey — the two great progressive educational reformers of the age — to Sichuan, Muriel was doing something genuinely radical: not simply transplanting Western Christianity onto Chinese soil, but engaging with the most forward-thinking ideas about how children learn and how education might serve human dignity.
They had five children, three of whom survived to adulthood: Isabel Joy (b. 1915), Julia Helen Marie (b. 1917), and Muriel Cecelia (b. 1922). Gwendolyn Maude, born in 1920, died in 1923; Homer Grant, born in 1931, died in 1934. The deaths of two children — one at three years, one in infancy — remind us that the missionary life carried personal costs that the institutional record tends to obscure. The letters in this archive speak to those costs with a directness that no biography can fully replicate.
The broader context of Homer and Muriel's thirty years in China was one of almost continuous upheaval. They lived through the collapse of imperial China, the rise of the Republic, the warlord era of the 1920s, the Nationalist consolidation under Chiang Kai-shek, the Japanese invasion of 1937, and the wartime transformation of Chengdu into a refuge for institutions displaced from the coast. Throughout this period, the Canadian Methodist Mission — and after 1925, the United Church of Canada — addressed not only evangelism but foot binding, opium addiction, child marriage, famine, and warlord oppression. These were not peripheral concerns. They were, for many missionaries of Homer and Muriel's generation, the very substance of the gospel as they understood it.
Homer served in the China Labour Corps as an interpreter during the First World War — a reminder that even remote Sichuan was not insulated from the convulsions of the wider world. And when the Second World War reached China through Japan's expanding occupation, Chengdu became one of the few secure cities remaining in free China, swelling with refugees and exiled institutions. The Browns witnessed all of it.
Their eldest daughter Isabel's life became, in its own right, a remarkable chapter in the story of Western engagement with China. Isabel Brown Crook became an anthropologist and professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, widely regarded as a pioneer of English language education in the People's Republic. She died in Beijing in 2023 at the age of 107, having outlived the world her parents helped to build and lived to see its successor.
The letters gathered in this archive span the full arc of Homer and Muriel's time in China — from the optimism of the early mission years, through the losses and dislocations of middle age, to the long shadows of war. They are the record of two thoughtful, serious people navigating an extraordinary historical moment with faith, resourcefulness, and love. They wrote, as missionaries of their generation habitually did, to sustain the connection with home. What they left behind is something more: a sustained, intimate testimony to a world that no longer exists.