Thousands of Chinese Christians lingered on the beach, the cove ahead doused in the night sky.
They came with donkeys, motorbikes, bamboo pools, trucks – anything to carry the cargo due ashore at 9 p.m. that evening.
From a barge off the shoreline, three flickers of a flashlight glinted toward the hushed crowd. One of the Christians replied to the prearranged signal, sending three beams in return.
Each of them had prayed for years to witness a moment like this, even as the Cultural Revolution squeezed the Chinese church underground, their places of gathering wrecked, their brethren arrested.
They prayed for Bibles, lots of them. Besides illegal presses operating after hours or individual smuggling efforts, Bibles were few and far between in the early 1980s.
The houses of those who did possess a Bible became a clearinghouse for sharing the scriptures. Over the course of twenty-four hours, each Christian would get two hours for personal study.
One pastor would bicycle to a fellow pastor’s house and would spend every moment he could copying passages.
In 1979, the Chinese underground church leader had been specific when he made contact with Open Doors and Brother Andrew International, two evangelical organizations dedicated to serving the persecuted church across the globe.
We need one million Bibles.
So that’s what Open Doors and Brother Andrew International gave them.
In Search of Pearls
One million Bibles one one night would be delivered to a cove near Shantou, a city on the coast of Eastern China and a naval hub in Guangdong Province.
While Shantou residents ate dinner at 9 p.m. on June 18, 1981, the twenty-man crew from the tugboat Michael eased their way a hundred meters from the beach’s outer crust.
Gabriella, the 137-foot semi-submersible barge towed by the Michael, shouldered 232 tons of Bibles. Forty-eight 1-ton packages of Bibles waited to splash into the cove. Every 1-ton package contained 48 waterproof boxes, each with 90 Bibles inside.
Some of the crew hopped into three inflatable rubber boats, hauling, pushing, and prodding the packages ashore.
The Chinese Christians waded into the surf, the high tide sloshing up to their necks in places, as they wrestled the packages onto the shore. Assembly lines formed as volunteers sheared open the waterproof bundles, passed the boxes up the beach, and stashed them into the vehicles, onto donkeys, or individual luggage.
The crew of the Michael dubbed their mission Project Pearl, a nod to Matthew 13:45-46: “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it” (ESV).
The cost? More than six million dollars. Television commercials, charity dinners, and direct mail fundraising letters from Open Doors International blanketed Christian churches and homes in the U.S. and around the globe.
All donors knew was that their giving would help Chinese Christians get Bibles. To preserve operational security, the mission details remained confidential.
Thomas Nelson Publishers in Nashville Tennessee printed the Chinese language Bibles, producing a bill at $1.4 million.
The tugboat Michael was purchased for $480,000, while the semi-submersible barge Gabriella was custom-built.
The crew drew its roster from Australia, Canada, Holland, New Zealand, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Training for several months, they simulated the drop-off in the Philippine island of Mindoro.
On June 15, 1981, they shoved off from the Philippines and sailed to Hong Kong, where the Bibles had been shipped. Then they made the 200 mile journey up the coast to Shantou.
Unloading took two hours for the crew, their portion of the mission concluded by 11 p.m. They traveled out of Chinese territorial waters, praising the Lord for their successful venture. Even a fierce storm on the return trip couldn’t dampen their giddiness.
Yet it’s when the Michael left the cove that the most dangerous portion of the mission took place.
The 5-Year Supply Line
The hundreds of Christians had to get the Bibles off the beach and avoid detection. Most went into vehicles and other forms of transportation so the distributors could travel to other provinces. The remaining portion was stashed in the tree line overlooking the beach.
By 3 a.m., they had almost finished. But all the activity, combined with reports from local fisherman out early in the morning, instigated a patrol from security forces.
They arrested many Christians, soon after unearthing the cache. Some security officers tried to burn the Bibles without much success, so they began tossing the boxes back into the surf, even chucking individual copies piecemeal.
Eager fisherman scooped up the Bibles, recognizing an entrepreneurial opportunity when they saw one. They could earn extra and sell the Bibles on the black market to desperate Christians.
Authorities later released later most of the detained Christians, while many who had slipped away took the precious cargo to their home regions, extending Project Pearl’s reach into every province in China, except for Tibet.
Project Pearl was a veritable stimulus package of one million Bibles, the largest single delivery of them anyone in China had ever seen.
In one night, generations of believers gained the eternal guide of their faith.
Strict surveillance and confiscation efforts by authorities forced house church leaders to coordinate covert distribution across the nation.
It would take five years until the last Project Pearl Bible found its home.
As for the Bibles Chinese security officers plopped back into the sea, many were recovered, too.
“Charlie,” a Chinese Christian, learned that a fisherman neighbor of his squirreled away some of these drenched Bibles in a cave, later using the pages to wrap the fish he sold at the market. Upon discovering this, Charlie sought out his neighbor and bought the whole batch.
Charlie didn’t stop there. He would hand deliver more than 200,000 Bibles on his own.
Another pastor was so excited to get his hands on the scriptures, he read cover to cover three times over in three weeks.
His house church network would later spike to more than 400,000 believers.
The soupy pages and soaked covers became known as the “Wet Bibles” but proved life-saving all the same.
Fishing for Bibles in a Cesspool
Peter Xu, an eminent figure in Chinese house church history, later told Open Doors a remarkable story.
Xu would send couriers to Shantou to pick up loads of Bibles and carry them back to other provinces. On one trip, security officers checked their luggage, discovered a lot of one thousand Bibles, and arrested the men.
They also plunked the Bibles into a cesspool leading to a sewer line. Upon the three Christians’ release, the security officers told them to never show their faces in the region again. The men asked where the Bibles had been taken, and officer replied they had tossed them into the cesspool at the local park.
The three couriers made haste for the park, hiding out. Two of them lowered their third comrade into the sewer of raw excrement and sludge, where he recovered all of the thousand Bibles.
They took the foul-smelling load to the public water tap, rinsed them off, and stowed them away for the journey home. Arriving back home, they applied perfume to the Bibles and handed them out, the batch earning the moniker, “Project Pearl Perfume Bibles.”
Toss the Bread of Life into salt-laced seas and sewage-lined pits security officials might try, but they couldn’t keep those Bibles out of the faithful’s hands.
30 Years A Prisoner
Equipped with scripture in their mother tongue, the underground church in China sprouted through the Bamboo Curtain of Communist China.
But many faithful believers soon learned that blood and tears makes the grass grow.
Mai Fu Ren’s parents were missionaries and they were adamant that their son would become one too.
Mai resisted the calling at first, but eventually became a believer and a Bible smuggler.
A resident of Shantou, he was present on the beach the night of Project Pearl and went on to a prolific career as a distributor.
Shandong. Beijing. Shanxi. Xian. Lanzhou. Urumqi. Again and again he carried the cargo for many years and many miles.
And it came at a high price. He was arrested in Inner Mongolia for Bible distribution and spent thirty years in prison.
Like any good bag man, he smuggled a Bible into the prison and preached the gospel behind bars.
Such devotion earned him two extra years onto his sentence. The crime?
An inmate asked, “Did Karl Marx sin?”
“Yes, Karl Marx sinned. We have all sinned and only Jesus can save us.”
Mai’s fellow inmate reported him to the prison warden, who tacked on the two-year extension for “slandering a revolutionary leader.”
In a short documentary about his testimony titled, “Sowing With Tears,” Mai admits three decades of imprisonment, beatings, and the suicides of close Christian friends left him feeling as if God had ignored him.
During one seven-year stretch, he languished in hopelessness, craving death. But Mai recounted a moment when God spoke a reviving word to him. He heard a voice say, “I have tested you in the furnace of affliction. I have chosen you.”
Humbled that God would speak to a lowly prisoner, he suffered on and eventually served his time.
When Mai earned his release, most of the new generation of underground leaders did not know of all his sacrifices.
Time had left him with much suffering and wisdom, but few recognized his contributions. That was true until Back to Jerusalem, an organization focused on evangelizing unreached people from the eastern provinces of China all the way to the Jerusalem, released his testimony in “Sowing With Tears.”
Watching it, you won’t find any trace of bitterness. Agony at what was lost, yes. But even then in his late eighties, Mai exuded the joy of someone who loved God and loved his church.
“I didn’t really do much, only what the Lord told me to do. It didn’t take much effort to stay in prison,” he once said in an interview.
Mai Fu Ren, “The Bible Man,” who spent more than a third of his life in prison for the Bible, died in 2009.
He stands in the great cloud of witnesses now, one of the gems who took the Bibles given to him that night during Project Pearl and spread the them far and wide.
The Bible Man who wouldn’t deny his faith and couldn’t keep out of prison was one of many whose blood, tears, and best years grew the Chinese underground church.
Many of the 20-man crew who participated in Project Pearl would return the Shantou beach in 2005 and again in 2015, even Chinese Christians who were there that night.
One faith, one night, and one million Bibles united them.
It was a moment in history that reflects the title of Project Pearl coordinator Paul Estabrooks’ book chronicling the events:
Night of a Million Miracles.
And the thousands of testimonies, ones hidden in brutal prisons and lost seasons of life, bound believers like Mai Fu Ren to a revival whose fingers stretch from a Shantou Beach to the farthest reaches of China today.
You can never tell when the Word of Life will weigh anchor on distant shores, easing in from fierce storms, fresh from calming the raging Sea of Galilee.
Or, you might spot Him at high tide near a Shantou beach, the books containing His testimony floating in from fair winds and following seas.
A note from the author: This story would not be possible without original reporting from open sources like Time Magazine, Open Doors International, Back to Jerusalem. See below for a breakdown of reference materials.
- Time– Risky Rendezvous at Swatow
- Christian Today– Open Doors: Project Pearl – 25th Anniversary of Delivering 1 Million Bibles to China
- Back to Jerusalem- The Greatest Bible Smuggling Operation Ever Took Place 39 Years Ago Today
- Back to Jerusalem- The Bible Man
- Back to Jerusalem- China and the Bible – The story of Mai Fu Ren
- Paul Estabrooks- One Million Miracles: The People of Project Pearl
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Kevin Cochrane is the creator of Replenish, the site to resupply your faith with overlooked insights from Scripture-based stories. Share your thoughts by commenting below or dropping a line to kevin@replenishstories.com.
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