In his long missionary life, though, one episode in particular stands out. A few years after his arrival in China, famine struck in the province of Shanxi: the rains had failed for two years, the crops had died, the people were starving.
Help was needed urgently. Richard was called upon by the Famine Relief Committee in Shanghai and travelled to Shanxi through freezing November weather to see how he could help.
The sights that met him there were so horrifying that the two men travelling with him were forced to leave and Richard carried on alone. Worse still, once he finally reached the main town, the governor of the province actually blocked his proposals for famine relief.
Undeterred, he risked his own life and set out with a servant to visit the villages and see for himself the extent of the suffering.
His memoirs contain extracts from his diary of the time. Touring the province, he reported daily deaths, corpses abandoned, weak and starving men and women fainting to the ground. People were dying so quickly that it was impossible for the living to bury all the dead. On 4 February 1878, he wrote:
"We had a daily repetition of the same ghastly sights, until I sometimes wondered whether the scenes were not the imagination of a disordered mind.
Fearing for his own sanity, Richard also had to face his inability to help people. Describing his frustration, he wrote:
"Terrible as the suffering was, we did not dare to give any relief except surreptitiously; for once it was known that we gave relief, we would have been surrounded by such crowds that progress would have been impossible, and our lives would have been endangered, perhaps lost, without any good to the people.
Instead, Richard had to wait until he returned to town, then make the facts known so that the relief could be organised on as large a scale as possible. Sending off his diary to Shanghai, and writing letter after letter back to BMS, he appealed for urgent aid.
Despite the scale of the disaster and the huge difficulties in reaching people through the cold winter and mountains, Richard stayed strong and was able to distribute £60,000 of aid to the starving province, saving at least some lives – and drawing people to Christ.
Today, such famine relief might seem a matter of course. In those days, though, feeding the hungry was not necessarily considered the job of a missionary. But Timothy Richard’s compassion and concern for the people of China always made him think big: relieving physical as well as spiritual hunger. And by 1879 he had become a pioneer in one of the first major programmes of humanitarian relief in modern history.