Project Pearl: 40 years on

Tomorrow is a special day for everyone associated with Project Pearl – a secret mission undertaken by 20 blokes some four decades ago.

Christian men aren’t renowned for adopting commando tactics and military techniques when spreading the Good News. But one of the exceptions occurred on 18 June 1981, when a crew from Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, The Netherlands, The Philippines and the US shipped over a million bibles to a secluded beach in China.

The audacious plan was the work of Open Doors, an organisation founded in 1955 by Andrew van der Bijl, a Dutchman better known as ‘Brother Andrew’ or ‘God's Smuggler’, whose reputation was built on smuggling bibles in his VW Beetle into eastern Europe during the Cold War.

Incredibly, the mission took just two hours to complete, utilising a specially built semi-submersible barge.

Remaining undetected

At the time, Communist China was still reeling from the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), which tried its best to crush Christianity (and other faiths).

Yet the country’s Communist leaders had spectacularly failed in their attempt to stamp out the growing Christian faith, leaving millions of Chinese people needing Bibles which, if found, would be confiscated, burned and prohibited from being printed.

The 1981 mission was dependent on a custom-built submersible barge that was modified in Hong Kong and loaded with 232 one-ton waterproof packages, each of which contained 50 cardboard boxes crammed with Chinese bibles.

On the night of the operation, a tugboat slowly pulled the barge 200 miles up the Chinese coast, remaining undetected even when it passed a Chinese naval base, to a shore in southern China, where thousands of underground Christians eagerly awaited.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Tony Yorke is Deputy Editor of Sorted magazine and Sorted Digital.