"On December 16, 1920, at about 8 o'clock in the evening, some anomalies were observed in certain cities of China and in the countries adjacent to them. It cannot be said that Chengdu, Daimyo, Shanghai and Haiphong are very close to each other, you must know that it is about 1,200 kilometers from Chengdu to Daimyo, and about 1,900 kilometers from Haiphong to Shanghai. However, at the same time, at the French Consulate in Chengdu, at the Daimyo Jesuit Mission, at the British Consulate in Shanghai, and at the Observatory in Haiphong, all clocks and watches were immediately suspended. In these cities, and in all the other settlements, the people sitting at the dinner tables suddenly saw that the chandelier began to swing, and then something else became known. In Banxia, north of the Daimyo, three chattering missionaries suddenly felt sick and sick, and they felt that the floor began to sway like the deck of a ship, and at a place 1,250 kilometers away from the China Sea, housewives walking to the market suddenly felt seasick, and the residents of Beijing and Tianjin felt the same way...... "This is the opening part of "The Disaster Neglected by the West," written by an anonymous writer in Belarus after the earthquake in Haiwon.

As researcher Guo Zengjian said, the impact of the earthquake was felt almost entirely around the world. There was a British PO company's "Devanha" passenger ship that sailed from Shanghai to Hong Kong and felt a strong tremor like an earthquake when it sailed off the coast of Shantou. "The captain thought that the ship might have crashed into the submerged drift, but when the ship docked at the Hong Kong pier, he checked the hull of the ship and was surprised to find that the entire hull was intact, and then he thought that it might be the earthquake caused the tremor." Unlike the episode of a false alarm thousands of miles away, the people at the center of the earthquake are experiencing the cruel test of life and death.

At the beginning of December of this year, a British female missionary, Jin Leting, was about to pass through Gansu and go to Xinjiang. Who knows, she met the earthquake unexpectedly in Lanzhou. This female missionary faithfully recorded her experience, including her feelings during the earthquake, her witnesses after the earthquake, and the first comprehensive mobilization in China's history to rescue and relieve the disaster, which has become a rare and precious historical witness.

"The earthquake came in an instant, and the streets and alleys seemed to have escaped the death of a tsunami. With that, the shock was replaced by fear. This is Jin Leting's first impression after the earthquake. The first thing they felt was the sound of a heavy carriage passing overhead, and what seemed to be the rumbling of a train on a track erected in the air. These sounds are extremely uncomfortable.

After the sound, the ground moved. Feel the floor shaking first. At this time, parents instinctively rushed to the child. In an instant, the house shook, and people in the house could not reach the door at all. Only when the shaking had subsided a little did they run out into the yard. I saw another kind of scene: the streets and alleys of Lanzhou were like a tsunami, the trees were snapping apart, the walls were collapsing with a bang, and the beams of the houses were creaking.

In the face of the great disaster, they could only stand in the middle of the small courtyard and wait silently. I don't know how long it took for the earthquake to gradually subside, and the most terrible time was over. At this time, it was December 16th, and it was freezing cold, and the cold was unbearable, and they entered the house again. Thankfully, few aftershocks were felt this night. Later, they saw that on the slopes of Baita Mountain in the north of the Yellow River, the damage caused by the earthquake was even more severe. Some landslides sink into small streams at the foot of the mountain, and temples in the mountains are in ruins. She felt that although the earthquake had caused huge damage to the city of Lanzhou, it seemed to have escaped much compared to many places in the east and north of Lanzhou.

People were mobilized to respond spontaneously. Another friend of Kim Leting's, Dr. Barry, went to Jingning for disaster relief. What he saw along the way shocked him. The landslide buried a mile-long road, and more than two dozen streams were blocked. In the spring of the following year, she received another letter from Lanzhou saying that some of the dammed lakes in the earthquake-stricken area were up to 200 meters deep and rising every day, and that more than 1,000 villagers had been forced to leave their homes in a place near Jingning.

Friends who went to the earthquake-stricken area received news that aftershocks are happening at any time, and some families collapsed because their houses could not withstand many earthquakes, but as a result, there were no deaths from the earthquake, but hundreds of people died from aftershocks. People in the mountains have died so much that there is a sense of emptiness in the villages.

According to later investigations, most of the residents in the hardest-hit areas of the earthquake used caves as their homes, and the casualties caused by the collapse of caves were very large. As for the damage caused by the earthquake outside Lanzhou, Jin Loting learned more from friends. My friend also told her something. What's going on? The legendary experience of a family of three.

Most of the people in the extreme earthquake area lack scientific knowledge, and their most intuitive understanding of the earthquake is that "the mountain is gone". In fact, this refers to a large landslide caused by an earthquake. In one valley in the earthquake zone, there were as many as seven large landslides alone. Here, only three people and two dogs survived, and the others were buried by the landslide. A farmer and his two sons were first driven half a mile away by a landslide that ran into two rivers that went in different directions. The river hit the mudslide, and they were carried by the river for a long time. This strange experience frightened the three peasants, and it was a miracle that they survived.

In the face of huge natural disasters, Zhou Tingyuan, the governor of Jingning County, made great contributions. Shortly after the earthquake, he ordered local police and reservists to rush into homes and remove people from their homes. When the entire county was in ruins, he led people to rescue 1,100 wounded people and provide disaster relief to more than 3,000 victims.

Compared with what Zhou Tingyuan did, what surprised Jin Leting and them even more was what happened at noon on December 18. When they were praying before the meal, picking up knives and forks to enjoy the first meal of the day, the surroundings suddenly became noisy, and it seemed that there were many Chinese calling loudly, but Jin Leting, who did not know much Chinese, could not immediately understand what was happening, but the experience of the past two days made her understand that it was not an aftershock.

"Father and Sister Kim, come and see." Chen Qiancheng, a Chinese boy adopted by the church, knocked on the door and greeted loudly, "It's the head of state, the head of state, he really came to Lanzhou, just on the way to the city from the airport." ”

Jin Leting and Pastor Bobby stood up and went out into the street with Chen Qiancheng, and sure enough, many Chinese had gathered on both sides of the street, and everyone was talking, saying that His Excellency the Grand Führer had arrived at Lanzhou Airport this morning and was now entering the city, and he had come to personally lead the national defense forces and the people to rescue and rescue the disaster. Both Bobby and Kim find this a bit incredible, even in the United Kingdom and the United States, there is no precedent for a head of state to drop his state affairs and go to the disaster area in person, let alone an empire that is close to dictatorship under the banner of democracy.

But soon they learned that the rumors were true, as they soon saw a convoy entering town. On a military off-road vehicle behind the pilot car, Wu Chenxuan was wearing a steel helmet and a national defense training uniform, without any military rank or medal, standing in the carriage, holding on to the railing, waving to the people around him. The crowd followed the slowly moving convoy to an open field, which was in front of the Lanzhou Mansion, but the straw huts of the former official market have become ruins, but they can support so many people.

"Compatriots, fellow villagers, citizens of the Empire, in the face of disasters, the most important thing is calm, confidence, courage and strong command. I believe that under the strong leadership of the Imperial Government and the army, and with the unity of the military and the people, we will be able to overcome this particularly severe earthquake. I am not here to inspect the disaster as a head of state, but to do my duty as an ordinary public official of the Empire. We still have so many fathers, elders, brothers and sisters who are crushed under adobe houses and earthen caves, and they are meeting with Lord Yama every minute, and if we who are alive can't do our best to save them, we will be sorry for our conscience. As an official, a soldier, a father of children, the husband of a wife, and an ordinary citizen of the Empire, I ask you to join me in fighting natural disasters and saving lives! ”

Sister Jin Leting listened to Father Bobby's translation, and her mood was also extremely excited, she had never seen a head of state care so much about the people at the bottom, nor had she ever seen a ruler who would share sorrow and joy with his subjects, at this moment she thought that this Wu Chenxuan head must be an angel descending to the earth, and there must be a holy light on his head that he could not see.

When the Führer put down the microphone, rolled up his sleeves and parted the crowd with a young lad and walked towards an alley that had become a ruin, tears of excitement had just flowed down his face, and even the common people, who had already knelt on the ground and bowed, did not understand what the big man was going to do. But when the Führer, guided by several soldiers, came to a ruin where the owner of a cloth shop might have been buried, and when he and the young man were among the soldiers and carried a beam and pried the roof of the ruins, the crowd fell silent for a moment, and I could almost hear the heavy breathing of the soldiers and the Führer. I don't know who shouted "Hurray!" first! Then the crowd unfolded like a flood around the group of soldiers, everyone was trying their best to find the ruins that might have survivors, they used a qiē in their hands, digging, as if the despair and exhaustion just now had disappeared without a trace. An old man who seemed to be over seventy years old beside me, dragging his bloody legs, using his crutches to stick little by little into the ruins around him, and a child no more than seven years old, dressed in tattered cotton wool, followed the adults and carried heavy adobe. At that time, Father Bobby and I also joined in, at this moment, no one cared about our foreign devil identity, even some pagans with white hats would be friendly to rummage with us, every time a person with signs of life was carried out of the rubble, it would cause a burst of long-lived exclamation, I found for the first time that these Chinese could burst out with such strong energy, and I myself forgot about fatigue and panic, and I had no other thoughts than to save people, The only obsession in my heart was to find and save a living being, and at that moment I finally found God's revelation for my life, which also benefited me for the rest of my life. ”