Taichow

And at the end of the journey Taichow itself, a wretched fishing village inside a grandly bastioned, high-walled, moat-encircled town enclosure, with a beach of rough shingle covered with stinking fish in the process of sun-curing—Taichow without a single other European inhabitant, Taichow which prides itself on its pirates, its oysters and its groves of square-stemmed bamboos.

She felt, too, that he would ignore a call to evacuate his beloved hospital unless he received a message from someone he trusted: she knew his opinion of timid consuls who tried to rescue their nationals from imaginary perils. Looking at the map, she decided that the person to warn him was Kerr Taylor, who had been temporarily at Taichow to the south and was listed among those evacuated by American gunboat to Shanghai.

Somehow, the trunk was spared, and they were able to board the launch, moving up the Yangtze for several hours until they landed at a small village where my father had to round up enough rickshaws to take the four of them and all the ladies’ baggage the five-hour overland trip to the hospital at Taichow. […] In Taichow Daddy was able to finagle two passes—one pass would allow him passage through the territory controlled by a guerilla^([sic]) general and the second would allow him to go to Ko An, now held by the Japanese. […] It was a two-day boat trip to Taichow.