The China Inland Mission

Hudson Taylor goes Chinese. He was in fact a
Yorkshireman, born in Barnsley in 1832.
He died in China in 1905

The 1881 Shanghai wedding certificate of Herbert Sowerby and Ann Fanny Wombwell reveals that Herbert was at this time a missionary with the China Inland Mission. Their first child was born the following year in Wuhan. 

The China Inland Mission was founded by Hudson Taylor in 1865 in Britain, with the modest aims of prioritising remote inland provinces whilst 'seeking to evangelize the whole of China.' With this in mind, Taylor proposed a novel methodology in which the missionaries would identify with the Chinese 'by wearing Chinese dress and queue (pigtail), worshipping in Chinese houses'. This was to cause quite a stir in certain quarters. Taylor also insisted on strict fiscal policies. There was to be:

'No solicitation of finance, or indebtedness; looking to God alone; pooling support in life of corporate faith'

For Ann Fanny Wombwell, the daughter of the bankrupted and reckless ex-menagerist George Wombwell junior, such admonitions may just have held a certain romantic appeal.

The first group of China Inland Missionaries set off from England in 1866, numbering sixteen in all, not including Taylor and his family. In 1872, the China Inland Mission London Council was founded. In 1875 Taylor asked the Council for a further eighteen missionaries, and then in 1881, for another seventy. His operation seemed to be gathering strength.

For whatever reasons though, Herbert Sowerby did not find the approach of Hudson Taylor to the whole-scale conversion of the Chinese entirely satisfactory. In 1882, it is recorded in Gray and Sherman's 'The Story of The Church in China' that:

Mr. Herbert Sowerby and his wife joined the Mission Staff. They had been previously 
connected with another mission and had a valuable knowledge of the Chinese language and people and were able to be of immediate service in the needy field at Wuchang (Wuhan). Mr. Sowerby was placed in charge of Boone School and under his able management the school improved greatly.

The mission in question was the Protestant Episcopal Mission or Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, and in switching missionary camps, Herbert and Ann Fanny had effectively transferred their allegiances from a British to an American missionary organisation. It would also seem from this report that the couple must have already been in China for quite a while, and may even have been part of Hudson Taylor's group of eighteen that arrived in China in 1875.