Soon after the party arrived in China, they had lunch with the Foreign Minister and the Vice-Speaker of the Parliament (a former interpreter of Eddy's), but political titles meant little in a situation where the central government was so impotent. At about this time, too, Buchman met Chang Ling-nan, a leading corporation lawyer and diplomat.* Chang had a house in the beautiful mountainous country near Kuling, where Buchman and his friends had gone to attend one of the missionary community's yearly summer conferences. One day, in breach of the normal social divide between Chinese and non-Chinese, Chang asked Buchman over for a game of tennis and a sumptuous Chinese dinner of thirty-six courses. 'We paused for an hour and a half between the eighteenth and nineteenth,' related Buchman. The lawyer drank a different wine with each course, and his nicotine-stained hands shook even when drinking cocktails before dinner. At a late hour Buchman departed in a chair ordered by the lawyer and carried by six coolies. 'I didn't need the chair to carry me home, though he certainly needed someone to carry him to bed,' commented Buchman later. 'But I gratefully agreed as I didn't want to upset him that night.'

(* Chang's daughter married T. V. Soong, Madame Chiang Kai-shek's brother.)

Next evening the lawyer came to dinner with Buchman in Kuling, where he was staying with Mrs Adams, the widow of a Baptist missionary. Buchman told a story of how God had once guided him.

'Do you think God can speak to people like me?' Chang asked.

'Of course I do,' answered Buchman.

A great storm arose and Chang had to stay the night. He admitted that he did not want to stay because he had to take pills to go to sleep and other pills to wake up properly in the morning. But, after a long talk with Buchman and reading the Bible together, he slept soundly. The next morning he decided to make a new start in life. Shortly afterwards, at his own lunch table with Buchman present, and in front of the children and their nurse, he said to his wife, 'You married me thinking I was a real Christian. But I have not been.' His change, which was permanent and growing, led to a series of house-parties in his home, at which some eighty of his friends and relatives took part, many travelling long distances to do so. One by-product was the creation of a Chinese missionary society manned by Chinese and backed by Chinese money.26

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