In 1906, the Canadian missionary couple Andrew and Margaret Thomson arrived in China to spread the word of God. During the ensuing thirty-six years, they built churches, hospitals, schools, and gardens in their mission field in north Henan. ‘To bring some beauty to the bare, brown soil’, they planted roses around a stinking town cesspool, into which drained all of the town’s sewage, waste, and even the bodies of unwanted babies. The bushes thrived, the roses were ‘gorgeous and abundant’, and all survived the great changes and wars that came thereafter, still blooming ‘in the New China’.