The Story of Fei Ch’i-hao

Two Heroes of Cathay (1903) takes its subtitle literally: it is an autobiography and a sketch. The core is Fei Ch’i-hao’s own first-person account of his early life, his schooling, and his conversion to Christianity, told plainly and from the inside.

The book’s most gripping passages recount the Boxer Uprising of 1900. Fei describes the violence that swept Shanxi, in which most of his missionary colleagues and fellow believers were killed, and his own harrowing escape through danger and hiding. It is a survivor’s testimony as much as a conversion story, bearing witness to those who did not live through it.

Alongside Fei’s narrative, the volume includes a sketch of K’ung Hsiang-hsi (H.H. Kung), a Christian described as a seventy-fourth-generation descendant of Confucius. The book was edited and framed by the missionary Luella Miner, who gathered and presented the material, but the voice of the autobiography is Fei’s throughout.

The autobiography is Fei Ch’i-hao’s own first-person testimony as edited by Luella Miner, and our public-domain edition presents it in a clean, readable modern format with clear type, with a link to a free source.

This edition is Fei Ch’i-hao’s account of the Boxer Rising of 1900, as translated by Luella Miner and printed at New York by Fleming H. Revell in 1903. It follows Cornell University’s copy of that printing.

WHAT IS IN THE ORIGINAL VOLUME THAT IS NOT HERE, and why. The 1903 book is called Two Heroes of Cathay, and it is two stories. The first, which is this edition, is Fei’s own, written by him in the first person and running to some forty-three thousand words. The second is fourteen thousand words about a different man — K’ung Hsiang-hsi, later H. H. Kung, finance minister of the Republic — and it is not by him. It is Miner writing about him in the third person: “The boy was K’ung Hsiang Hsi, the hero of our sad story.” She explains why in her preface: “Were the story of Mr. K’ung’s boyhood days given as fully as is Mr. Fay’s, we should have a strongly contrasting picture.” He had not written it, so she did.

This library is first-person testimony — a man’s own account of his own life — and a missionary’s sketch of somebody else is a different kind of book. So Miner’s Part II and her closing chapter are not in this edition. They are in the free scan linked from this book’s page, entire, for anyone who wants them.

THE ONE THING WE CANNOT PUT RIGHT, and we would rather say it plainly than let a reader discover it. Miner’s preface states that Fei’s narrative “has been freely translated, with a few omissions.” Fei wrote in Chinese; what survives is her English. We have looked for the Chinese original and it does not appear to exist in print: it is in no library catalogue we can reach, it is not on the Internet Archive, there is no Chinese article about him, and the Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity cites nothing for his life but this same book. If his manuscript survives at all it is unpublished, most likely among Miner’s papers at Oberlin.

We do not knowingly publish abridged texts. This is the exception, and it is made with the reasons in the open: there is no fuller version to prefer, the omissions cannot be measured because nothing survives to measure them against, and this is the only form in which a first-hand account of the Shansi massacres by a Chinese Christian who lived through them has come down to us at all. The translation is Miner’s and the voice, so far as we can tell, is Fei’s.

FOUR PRINTINGS WERE READ AGAINST EACH OTHER, all of the same 1903 setting. The catalogue had pointed at the Google digitisation, which is the worst of the five that exist, at one suspect word in 114; Cornell’s reads one in 178 and is the base here. Twenty-eight readings in this text come from the other three copies, and each is recorded with its context in the collation logs kept with the edition. The result is the cleanest text we have produced: between one suspect word in 456 and one in 3,403, chapter by chapter.

What has otherwise been repaired is damage done by the scanner, not by the translator. Running heads, page numbers and the printer’s furniture have been removed; words broken at a line ending have been rejoined; letters the scanner confused have been restored where the book’s own vocabulary or another copy settles the question. The 1903 spelling of Chinese names stands as Miner set it — Fen Chou Fu, Shansi, T’ai Ku — because it is hers and because the book is of its date; where this note and the book’s page name him in modern form, Fei Ch’i-hao is 费起鹤, of Tongzhou, 1879 to 1953.

Prepared by T.S. Baker Books, 2026.