Delwyn Vaughan Rees was a missionary doctor, born in 1895, one of six children. He served in the mission field for 30 years in China and then practised for 10 years as a doctor in Hong Kong.
He was to marry twice; in 1923 he married Eileen in China. When she died, he married Irene in Shanghai in 1931.
Dr Vaughan Rees arrived in China in 1921. In the 1920s and 30s during the Chinese civil war, he worked for the China Inland Mission in their hospital at Kaifeng in Honan (Hunan) Province. In 1948 it was closed down due to the pressure of the Communist advance.
These were the years of the Great Shantung (Shandong) Revival which began in 1927. It was one of the great Christian revivals recorded in church history and it spread throughout North-east China.
In 1948 Dr Rees was summoned for his medical skills by the elders of the town of MaChuang in Shantung Province, which was an important centre of the revival and in particular the 'Family of Jesus' (Ye-Su Chia-ting) movement. He spent the next two years there in increasingly dangerous circumstances.
It was at the hands of the Communist forces that persecution of Chinese Christians started and continued, and in 1949, when the Communists came to power, they expelled most of the foreign missionaries from the country* in the belief that without foreign support and with continued persecution, the Chinese church would die.
The Reeses left China at the end of 1949 and Dr Rees took a job as ship's surgeon for three years. They then moved to Hong Kong, where Dr Rees took charge of the Fanling Hospital, New Territories, where he will have encountered the Fanling Babies' Home under Mildred Dibden. Later on we find his name on a newsletter of the Shatin Babies’ Home (1960) serving as their doctor along with Dr Peter Jenkins of the Emmanuel Church.
In 1959 Dr Vaughan Rees published a short account of his experiences of revival and persecution while in China, called The Jesus Family in Communist China. In it he shows how this community already practised many communist ideals and indeed outdid them in doing so, in particular in communal farming, medical work and trade. The Communists were baffled. 'This is what we Communists want to do;' said a commissar, 'we won't do it in a hundred years!' (This book is still available).
The Reeses retired to Eastbourne in England c1963.
Dr D Vaughan Rees predeceased his wife in 1974, aged 79. He is buried in the Tunbridge Wells Cemetery, Kent.
* After this the China Inland Mission was compelled to direct its efforts to other nations and renamed itself the Overseas Missionary Fellowship.
Sources:
The Jesus Family in Communist China - D Vaughan Rees
The American Scientific Affiliation VOL 5 NUMBER 3 May 8, 1963
The Jesus Family – Asia Harvest website