Dr. and Mrs. Niels Nielsen Mementos "Wash Ashore" at Monterey Bay (2010)

Due to an unusual development, we are publishing this week's post a couple of days early and it is not the post we had planned. That one will have to wait until next week.

Over the past 15 years, we have put together the story of Anna Bøg and her coworkers at the Danish Lutheran mission in Siuyen little by little. Sometimes it seemed as if the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle had been scattered all over, then found and sent to us one by one. But surely the most remarkable of such occurrences has just taken place. It makes one think of those stories about bottles that supposedly wash ashore many years after someone puts in a message and tosses the bottle into the sea.

Last week, a man calling himself "Mike from Monterey" (California, USA) contacted us saying he had many items involving Dr. and Mrs. Nielsen, along with a few related to Anna Bøg. Over many communications, the following story emerged:

Around 1990, a Swedish-American resident of Carmel, California went to a flea market in Santa Cruz, California before dawn. Since it was still dark, he had to use a flashlight to look at the items on display. Under these conditions, he purchased a box or boxes of memorabilia about which he could learn very little in the dim light except that they involved a missionary to China, a doctor who had been kidnapped and held hostage by bandits.

Twenty years passed. Then just a few weeks after we published our post, Among the Bandits for 196 days (Dr. Niels Nielsen, 1933), the Swedish-American man asked "Mike from Monterey", who sells on the internet outlet e-Bay, to see if he could find buyers for the approximately 500 items that were in the collection bought that long ago morning. The memorabilia consist of photographs, letters, postcards, telegrams and newspaper articles, many of them with the names and faces of Dr. and Mrs. Niels Nielsen. In doing background research, Mike found our website and contacted us.

By that time, Mike had already posted some of the items on e-Bay at his store, Treasure Bay of Monterey and that allowed us to look at them. He also gave us some details about what else was in the entire collection. Based on what we have seen and heard, as best we can tell, what Mike has are all the souvenirs kept by Dr. Niels and Kirstine Nielsen over many years. They include not only photographs and written items depicting Dr. and Mrs. Nielsen but many other individuals including families in Denmark, other missionaries in Manchuria, and many Chinese Christians. There are portrait-type pictures of missionary children as babies. Mike says that there is even a pair of eyeglasses that look just like the ones Kirstine Nielsen was wearing in several of the photographs. He thinks they are probably are the very same ones.

It is unlikely we will ever know for sure how these items traveled to Santa Cruz from Los Angeles -- where the Nielsens apparently lived after being ejected from China at the start of World War II, and also during their 1933-1936 furlough -- but travel they did.

We are not in a position to purchase the entire lot of items nor would we have a means of preserving them for future generations if we did. We hope they will be bought (individually or as a collection) by a person, persons, or organization that will treat them with reverence and see to it that they are preserved. Therefore, we offered to write this post in order to help Mike publicize their availability. We hope our readers will pass the information on to others who might be interested.

If you would like to take a look at the items, you can visit Mike's e-Bay store Treasure Bay of Monterey. We suggest starting with Item #120526807744, which includes a photographic portrait of Dr. and Mrs. Nielsen as well as a clipping from a newspaper in Council Bluffs, Iowa, about speeches Dr. Nielsen made in churches in that area in 1935. This was prior to the Nielsen's return to Siuyen after their long furlough following Dr. Nielsen's release by the bandits. Then there is Item #120526855221, which is a charming picture of the Nielsens. Or you might want to look at one of the missionary baby pictures -- Item #110490219452.

If we can be of any help, feel free to contact us at thedanishknight (AT) gmail (DOT)com. Don't forget to substitute the @ sign for (AT) and a . for (DOT)!

Image:
South Monterey Bay, from Wikimedia Commons. Some rights reserved.