WITH CHRIST IN INDOCHINA - IndoChina1911

CHAPTER IV
EARLY MISSION HISTORY
DR. W. M. TURNBULL, a late Vice-President
of The Christian and Missionary Alliance,
once said that wherever one could find a closed mission
field, that is, a heathen nation where it was not
permitted to preach the gospel of Christ, there you
would find a missionary of The Christian and Mis¬
sionary Alliance encamped on the threshold, await¬
ing an opportunity to enter. This was true of Annam.
It was one of the objectives of Dr. A. B.
Simpson when the Alliance was founded, and the
South China missionaries of the Society had their
eyes turned in that direction for many years before
any Protestant missionary was permitted to enter.
In 1887 Dr. Simpson wrote in his magazine, Word,
Work, and World: "The southeastern peninsula of
Asia has been much neglected. The great kingdom
of Annam should be occupied for Christ. Why
should it not, along with Tibet, be looked forward
to as one of the earliest fields of new aggression by
the people of God?"
In the summer of 1893 Rev. David Lelacheur, who
was closely associated with Dr. Simpson in the be¬
ginning of the Alliance work, visited Saigon. Later
he met Dr. Simpson at Singapore and told him of the
open door in Annam, as all of French Indo-China
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