Manly Whitfield Rankin was born in 1897.
He received commercial training at Draughn’s Business College in Columbia, SC, worked as a bookkeeper in a paper factory in 1916, and was employed at the DuPont Powder Works in New Jersey in 1918.
He then completed a BA at Wake Forest College in 1922 followed by a year of public‑school teaching in Robertsonville, North Carolina (1922–23).
In 1923 he was appointed as a Southern Baptist missionary to China and began language study in the Hakka dialect (1923–25). Later on he added Cantonese and Mandarin. His brother, Milledge Theron RANKIN, was also a missionary in South China.
In 1924 he married Grace Elliott, who had been appointed in 1919 and was already serving in Yingtak and Shiuchow* as a teacher and school principal. Rankin’s early years in China included service as principal of Khoi Min High School in Shiuchow (1924–27), followed by multiple terms as director of the North River evangelistic work (1928–29, 1930–32, 1933–37, 1938–40), during which he oversaw itinerant preaching circuits along the river corridor.
The Rankins had two children, Manly Whitfield Jr (1925) and John Elliott (1930).
Cheung Chau
In 1938 Rankin completed the Th.M. at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and expanded his linguistic preparation with further study of Mandarin (1940, 1944) and Cantonese (1947).
From 1933 to 1937 he also served as principal and New Testament teacher at the Hakka Bible School in Shiuchow.
After World War II, he resumed service as an evangelistic worker in Kukong* (Qujiang) beginning in 1945, while Grace likewise took up postwar evangelistic work there from 1946.
He died in 1967, aged 70.
Archive.org Missionary Family Info
Rankin Photos - 1926 Missionary Album
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