(Yale Divinity Library)
The South China Mission was sixty years old when Sanderson arrived. Founded in 1860 by William Ashmore Sr., who transplanted American Baptist work from Hong Kong to the newly opened treaty port of Swatow, the mission had grown by 1918 into a regional network reaching well beyond the Kakchieh compound. A 1920 survey of American Baptist work in China counted 139 churches across the Chaoshan field, 164 primary and 18 secondary schools.
Kakchieh, a rocky island across the bay from Swatow city was the institutional center. A board surveyor visiting in 1920 called the compound “a beehive of Christian activity embowered in [a] most delightful semi-tropical setting.” The Abigail Hart Scott Memorial Girls’ School, the institution Sanderson would soon take charge of, was one cluster of buildings inside that compound, alongside the seminary, the boys’ academy, the hospital, the missionary residences, and a kindergarten.