The life of St Jonah of Manchuria
A deacon in his village took him in and gave him his name along with a home, and made certain the orphan received schooling; that early kindness carried Vladimir all the way to the Kazan Theological Academy, first as a student and later as a teacher there, by which point he had entered monastic life under the name Jonah.
Made bishop of a Chinese diocese centered at Hankou, Jonah in practice lived and worked far from that city, in the border settlement of Manzhouli, a place within Manchuria's wider territory yet its own distinct town. He arrived there in 1922 to find it overrun with Russians who had fled the Bolshevik revolution carrying almost nothing, and he gave himself entirely to their children's welfare: an orphanage built at the rail station, schools that charged no tuition, a hall where the hungry could eat freely, a clinic, and a library meant to keep some thread of spiritual life alive amid so much upheaval.
He died young, only thirty-seven, on October 7 by the old calendar in 1925, and it was not until 1996 that the Russian Church Outside Russia numbered him formally among the saints.
