Lan-Hua Liu

Liu was born in Che Wang, Taigu, Shanxi Province.^[2] Her grandfather was Liu Fengzhi, a Christian convert and community leader. Her grandfather and mother were killed in the Boxer Rebellion, when Liu was a little girl. She attended Christian missionary schools in Shanxi and Peking (Beijing),^[3] and graduated from Yenching College in 1917.^[4] She graduated from Oberlin College in 1925. She earned a master's degree at Teachers College, Columbia University in 1926.^[5] In 1936 she took a summer course at Cornell University.^[6]

Liu was a girls' school principal in Shanxi,^[7] before and after her time at Oberlin.^[8][9] She spoke about her school's work at a missionary meeting in Ohio in 1922.^[10] She was responsible for handling the school's merger with a boys' school to create a co-educational school. In a 1929 letter, Luella Miner refers to Liu as "one of my college daughters", while they were working together in Shanxi.^[11] In 1936 and 1937, she toured in the United States and Canada,^[12] lecturing and raising funds for her work.^[6][13] She visited her friend Janette O. Ferris while in the United States.^[14]

In the 1930s Liu was dean of women at Cheeloo University, leading the school's women during significant wartime upheaval, when much of the school fled Tsinan (Jinan) for Chengtu (Chengdu).^[15] "We still retain our identity and our ideals, and are seeking to cultivate here a group who will be ready at the first opportunity to return to our real home and build up again the work which has been so sadly interrupted," she wrote in a March 1939 letter to American supporters.^[16] In the 1930s and 1940s, she was a treasurer and member of the National Committee of the YWCA of China.^[17][18]

Liu was in California in the mid-1940s, recovering her health,^[19] living at the Ming Quong Home in Los Gatos,^[1] and again giving lectures about her work.^[20]