Born on July 24, 1843, in the Chinese year of the water rabbit, Sarah Jane Pike was reared in a place and in circumstances as far from imperial Asia as it was possible to be—the pre-Civil War American Midwest, amid the grass roots simplicity and devout Christian faith of Ohio and Illinois farming communities.

The particular brand of Christian faith in which Sarah was raised had much to do with her liberal perspective on the world. This perspective helped her appreciate the beliefs of a culture about which most Americans knew nothing, and which many Christians considered heathen. Sarah’s...

China had not had many friends among the presidents of the United States, and the current executive, William McKinley, was not one to deviate too radically from tradition. In the past the American government had operated on the premise of never giving something for nothing. Since the American trading ship Empress of China first dropped anchor in Canton in 1784, Americans had had much to offer the Chinese, from ginseng to otter furs—not to mention the opium from which they, like the British, made their largest fortunes—and had profited greatly. (Chinese merchants had been following the same business...

On June 23, 1898, the Congers’ steamer put in at Shanghai, where they were whisked off to the Foreign Settlement. This area west of the famous waterfront Bund was crowded with what were the tallest buildings in China and vessels from a dozen nations were moored along its bank. The settlement stretched along the Huangpu River and inland to the west, centering around the Shanghai Race Club and fashionable Bubbling Well Road. The French had a concession all their own to the south of the Foreign Settlement. The Chinese City lay in a small area south of these settlements’ bisecting...

Almost four years before the Congers’ arrival in Beijing, in November 1894, the Empress Dowager Cixi, then in her third year of retirement, was presented with a gift which, as one of her biographers puts it with pointed understatement, “is supposed to have led indirectly to very important developments.”¹

Following the lead of the missionaries who had converted them, Chinese Protestant women throughout the empire had raised a subscription to help pay for an elegantly printed edition of the New Testament, translated into Chinese and bound in silver repoussé with a scene of Christ rising to heaven, to be given...

When the Congers returned from the Great Wall, the Beijing air was already pungent with an incendiary collision of emotions, all roused by the decrees issued by the Guangxu emperor. Anxiety and excitement, hope and fear, increased with the number of reforms implemented, and spurred on both factions for and against those reforms. The secrecy and mystery which had always been a source of power for the imperial throne now worked against it; nobody had answers, just opinions, which gave rise to rumors, and these became more fantastical with the passing of time, destabilizing imperial authority.

As these groups began...

“The wives and the ladies of the diplomatic corps had never been recognized,” wrote Eliza Scidmore, “during the thirty-eight years that Legations had been established at Peking.” That was about to change. On the frigid morning of December 13, 1898, Sarah and the wives of six other foreign ministers were up and primping before the sun had risen. They had been invited by the Empress Dowager for an audience in Zhongnanhai, the Sea Palaces complex.¹

The idea had been broached over six months earlier. In May 1898, Prince Henry of Prussia, the light-hearted younger brother of Kaiser Wilhelm II, was...

If American Thanksgiving, with its enshrinement of family togetherness at the time of harvest, was one celebration in which the Chinese could theoretically enjoy a shared interest, Christmas was another matter altogether. It honored, after all, the birth of Jesus, the god of the foreigners most missionaries were so eager the Chinese should accept over Confucius, Laozi, or the Buddha.

Christians and their faith had existed in some part of China since the Tang dynasty, when a “mission” of Nestorian Christians made its way over the Silk Road to Shanxi and the Tang capital, Chang’an. It was the Western wing...

Sarah began to wander deeper into Beijing in the winter and spring of 1899, where she discovered a site which fascinated her more than any of the palaces or temples: the Imperial Observatory.¹

The movement of stars and planets and the bright patterns of the constellations had been of interest to Sarah since childhood—from the flat Midwest plains, she had only to look up at night to see the skies transfigured by the hour. She loved, too, the fact that many of the greatest minds of past centuries had watched the stars for answers. As Sarah wrote to a...

While Sarah was celebrating the brilliant China of the past, the Empress Dowager Cixi was looking to a murkier future, via human instruments of a vintage pre-dating the bronze altazimuths at the Beijing Observatory.

Just as Cixi had not been averse, at first, to the Guangxu emperor’s reforms, she had not always rejected foreign ways and things. Yuanmingyuan, the pleasure spot she had loved as the setting of her happy days as the Xianfeng emperor’s favorite, would surely have also fascinated her with its European-style buildings and technology. Cixi was later to enjoy the very foreign art of photography, standing...

Aside from being thoroughly American (born in Washington, D.C., no less), Dr. Robert Coltman was the antithesis of Sarah Conger. If she saw the poetry of China, Coltman only had eyes for prose.

A long-time resident in China, who had learned the language fluently, and far better acquainted than Sarah with Chinese customs common and arcane, Coltman nonetheless cast a gimlet eye on the Chinese people and their Manchu overlords. Combining a nineteenth-century doctor’s fussy fastidiousness with the competitive edginess of a journalist, in which capacity he had served since 1895 as correspondent for the Chicago Record, he subscribed to...

There were only two ramps to the top of the Tartar City wall, both open to the sky. But Sarah’s dislike of walls that restrained her view of the world outweighed, for the moment, the very real danger of exposing herself atop them. Late on the night of June 18, when it was dark enough for them to be safely concealed, she and Edwin, accompanied by guards, went up to the wall behind the US legation for a midnight view of the destruction.

Looking out across the city, the air filled with the acrid bite of charred wood, they could...

The risks Sarah ran to bring supplies back from the American compound were not slight. Sarah and Edwin went together one morning to gather what they could from the legation. An intrepid photographer, Sarah was walking around the ruined courtyard taking pictures, when “a shell from the big gun on the wall to the west end of [the gateway],” which she had just been snapping with her camera, hit the building “with a thud,” puncturing the roof. “We looked around a little more,” she wrote, “then ducked our heads & passed out & across the street.”¹

“Not an hour later,”...

The topography that made Beijing prone to miserable dust storms in the spring also left the city vulnerable to biting north winds in the winter. The afternoon of January 7, 1902 was no exception. But chilled air glittering with Gobi Desert grit did little to detract from an occasion that, despite the ravages of weather and war, was nothing less than splendid—the formal return to Beijing of the Guangxu emperor and the Empress Dowager Cixi, after a year and a half of self-imposed exile. While the state coffers had run dry long ago, what remained of imperial officialdom in...

Cixi began her new lease on the throne by keeping her word. Before returning to Beijing, she had issued an edict stating her intention to invite not just the foreign ministers but their wives to audiences at the palace, and so she did. A few days after the court’s return to Beijing, the Guangxu emperor received the credentials of six foreign ministers, among them Edwin; and as Sarah points out, they were shown especial favor by being permitted to enter the Forbidden City through the Meridian Gate, “for the first time in China’s history”—certainly a less violent means of...

It was obvious to Sarah, if not to many others in her circle, that the dowager was a hapless victim of gossip and sensationalist journalism created by people who knew nothing about her. She concluded that if people could just see Cixi as she did, they would feel about her as Sarah did. Sitting with Cixi and holding her hand, Sarah detected in “her strong character the golden threads of kindness and tenderness. I do not proclaim this on the housetops as the wise world would call me mad,” she assured Laura, “and it would do no good.” Along with...

Katherine Augusta Carl was born in New Orleans in 1865, the daughter of Captain Augustus Carl, who had died in the Civil War. Her mother, a relative by marriage of Sir Robert Hart, became president of the Tennessee State Female College in Memphis, and it was there that Kate received her education. Not content with becoming a teacher, Kate went to Paris to study at the famed Académie Julian, an art school which, unlike the École des Beaux Arts, allowed women to enroll and participate in life drawing classes using nude male models. It was in Paris that Kate had...

Perhaps it was in the great Lama Temple in Beijing where Sarah had her most significant epiphany regarding the lot of Chinese women. While attending a Buddhist service there, she had looked around and been surprised to find herself the only female in the temple. Her reaction was not just that of a woman used to seeing women and men sitting side by side in churches in America. It was the feminism that moved such women as Margaret Sanger, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Mary Baker Eddy to look at the inequalities of the sexes and wonder what gave men the...

Through 1905 and into 1906, Edwin had still planned to fulfill his ambassadorial obligations to Mexico—there was even talk of his running for governor of Iowa. Edwin’s brother, Universalist minister Dr. E. L. Conger, lived in Pasadena, California, which is where the Congers themselves moved shortly after returning from China. It was there their new troubles began, starting with a rug.

In 1906, Sarah sold to a private Chicago dealer a Chinese carpet she had bought in Beijing for $90. For this silk carpet, purchased after the Boxer Uprising (and apparently not at one of the military auctions), she...