Four days after Maria’s 21st birthday, on January 20, 1858, Hudson Taylor, wearing a Chinese dress and with a queue down his back, and Maria in her western gray silk dress and bridal veil were married at the British Consulate in Ningbo. The civil ceremony was witnessed by twenty-four friends including the officers of the British ship-of-war in what had been a Chinese temple nearby. Frederick F. Gough, Taylor’s close friend and a Greek scholar, conducted the marriage service, exhorting the new couple from the text they had already appropriated, ‘keep yourselves from idols’ to warn them from the danger of their idolizing each other.
(Sources: A. J. Broomhall, The Shaping of Modern China: Hudson Taylor’s Life and Legacy. Volume 1, p.440 | OMF HK, Christ Alone: A Pictorial Presentation of Hudson Taylor’s Life and Legacy, p. 29)
