Frederick O’Neill, an Irish Presbyterian missionary, lived for forty-five years in Faku, a small town in Manchuria, northeast China. From 1897 until his expulsion by the Japanese army in 1942, he witnessed and reported the extraordinary events that convulsed China – the Boxer Rebellion, the Great Manchurian Plague, the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. He also served with the China Labour Corps in France in World War One.