George Soo Hoo TEN

TEN, GEORGE SOO HOO (b. Hoiping, Kwangtung, China, 1848; d. Sydney, NSW, 24 Sept 1934). Tea merchant and Anglican missionary to the Chinese.

Soo Hoo Ten emigrated c. 1865 from China to San Francisco, where he learned English and was converted to Christianity by a Baptist minister. By 1876 he was a tea merchant in Sydney and in July 1879 he began a mission to the market gardeners of Botany and Waterloo, sponsored by the Sydney Diocesan Corresponding Committee of the Australasian Board of Missions. He succeeded in the face of ridicule and opposition from Europeans and Chinese gamblers and opium dealers; he began conducting Sunday afternoon services in St Andrew's cathedral schoolroom as well as in Botany, and in 1884 founded 'a Chinese YMCA', offering classes in English. In Dec 1885 he was ordained deacon and licensed as 'missionary to the Chinese and to officiate at Christ Church, Botany', whose foundation stone had been laid six months earlier.

Ten extended his mission beyond Sydney by conducting campaigns in Bathurst in Feb 1884 in Brisbane in Oct 1887 and in Melbourne in July 1888. By 1890 he was conducting weekday and Sunday afternoon services in the schoolrooms of St Andrew's and St Phillip's, Sydney, and for market gardeners at Botany, Waterloo, Cook's River, Canterbury and Willoughby, and was also training other Chinese as catechists. He began raising funds for a mission hall in Wexford Street, the centre of prostitution and gambling in Sydney, and in March 1898 opened St Luke's church. Ordained priest in June 1898, he thereafter confined his ministry to the inner city; his suburban work was taken over by the CMS. By 1912 he appears to have retired to Homebush.

In the 1880s, Ten's mission was a sustained but solitary attempt by Anglicans in Sydney to evangelise the unchurched and underprivileged. The clergy opposed the introduction in 1886 of the Church Army and beyond occasional mission in working-class inner city parishes, no concerted evangelistic outreach was attempted by the Church of England.

S Judd and K J Cable, Sydney Anglicans (Sydney, 1987); A'sian Missionary News, Jan 1889; C M Assn of NSW, Annual report 1903-4, 1912; Diocese of Sydney, Official Register; Diocesan Corresponding Cttee, A'asian Board of Missions (Syd Diocesan Registry)

RUTH TEALE