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Forbidden Orphanage Outside the Forbidden City
9781963511260
Laura Richards was a shy American nurse who moved to a remote North China village in 1929 to take in castaway babies. Through 22 years of famines, bandit invasions and wars, she lived in the same poor conditions as the Chinese peasants, while managing to save the lives of nearly 200 destitute children. So why did she refuse the Chinese Communist Party’s offer to make her a national heroine? Laura Richards’ story was too dangerous to tell when she returned to the U.S. in 1951. But when she died thirty years later, the old letters, photographs, and scattered bits of memoir that she left behind were so intriguing to her second cousin Becky Cerling Powers, that Becky began a 25-year quest to discover her quiet relative’s amazing story. Eventually that quest led Becky to China and the orphans themselves. Today, over half a century after Laura left China, her story and her children’s story can finally be told.
Paperback
21.95
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Pub Date:
Oct. 2025
Praise For:
Forbidden Orphanage Outside the Forbidden City
“Rich with research and firsthand biographical details, Forbidden Orphanage Outside the Forbidden City takes the reader on a journey to the China of 1921-1951. Laura Richards, a Presbyterian missionary nurse, founded Canaan House for cast-off babies from destitute families, and stayed in China when other foreigners were evacuated. With the support of friends, dressed and eating like a Chinese peasant, Laura kept her 200 beloved children alive through the violence, famine and persecution of the Japanese invasion and the Maoist era. This is the inspiring story of an ordinary woman—but a woman of action, empowered by extraordinary faith, dedication and love.” — Caroline Kurtz, author of A Road Called Down on Both Sides: Growing Up in Ethiopia and America
"[Powers] describes a faith and dedication that inspires awe. And [she] places it all in context so well. How will it be received in the wider world? As an inspiring piece of history? As a challenge to faithfulness and commitment? As a threat? Maybe all of the above. How will it be received in China, or by overseas Chinese believers? I can only imagine. I wonder how the book can be positioned so as to provoke wide readership…" — Bill McConnell, retired assistant to the president of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship
Creators
Author: Becky Cerling Powers is a parenting columnist and editor of My Roots Go Back to Loving and other stories from “1998: Year of the Family,” a collection of faith-based family stories originally published in The El Paso Times.