Wilhelmina "Minnie" Vautrin

Wilhelmina "Minnie" Vautrin is considered a Kuan Yin Pusa "Goddess of Mercy". A Living Buddha.

Wilhelmina "Minnie" Vautrin was an American missionary, diarist, educator, and president of Ginling College. She was a Christian missionary in China for 28 years. She is known for the care and protection of as many as ten thousand Chinese refugees during the Rape of Nanking (1937-38). The Japanese soldiers immediately went on a rampage of committing despicable crimes. They gang-raped women and tortured victims to death.

Thousands of women poured into Ginling and the campus was soon overcrowded with refugees. Vautrin had to stand at the college's front gate to urge the older women to return home and leave room for Ginling to protect the younger ones. But, most of them refused to leave. They kneeled on the ground, tearfully begging to be admitted into the campus. Seeing the sad scene, Vautrin let all of them in. At the zenith of the Japanese atrocity, the small women's college was crowded with over 10,000 women and children. She spent her day and night rushing to wherever the soldiers intruded on the campus to keep them out. Some of them became so angry that they slapped her face. They threatened her with their bloodstained bayonets. One night, they demanded that she leave the campus. She replied, "This is my home. I cannot leave".

In addition, Vautrin cared for the refugees' well-being. For instance, she made arrangements to serve them rice-porridge, teach them to sing hymns to lift their spirit and she even tried to locate their missing husbands and sons, who were their families' sole breadwinners. After persisting in the Nanking Safety Zone from 1937, she returned to the United States under extreme stress in 1940.

A year later, on May 14, 1941, while alone in a friend's apartment in Indianapolis, she ended her own life. She was only 55 years old. She left a note saying that her life was a "failure" and wishing that she could return to her work in China.

Vautrin was posthumously awarded the Emblem of the Blue Jade by the Chinese government for her sacrifices during the Nanjing Massacre.