"…there was no section [of the FAU] which attained so much character and coherence, so much sympathy and integration with the life of the country in which it served. No wonder that when they returned home to England its members spent many a nostalgic evening talking of Paoshan and Pichieh, of charcoal burners and mule-borne medical expeditions …"

-A. Tegla Davies The Friends Ambulance Unit: the story of the FAU in the second world war 1939-1946   

In 1940 the FAU approached the general secretary of the British Fund for the Relief of Distress in China with a proposal to send FAU members to supplement the work of the International Relief Commission then based in Guiyang (Kweiyang). Much of the early work was in transporting medical supplies from Ragoon and, after the fall of Burma, from Kunming. It was estimated that up to 90% of the medical supplies reaching China for the use of civilians were brought in by the FAU. Later medical and mobile surgical teams were formed to work alongside the Chinese Red Cross in tending both military and civilian casualties. In 1945, with the ending of the war, FAU members transferred to relief and reconstruction work centred in Honan, where large areas had been devastated by the fighting and the infrastructure destroyed.

In March 1941 one of the first four FAU members to be sent to Ragoon, Burma, - then the only free gateway into China - was Henry Rodwell, who had had the advantage of having been born in China, the son of Quaker mission workers. His father John Porter Rodwell had been working in Sichuan province with the Friends Foreign Mission Association since 1908, and his mother Mary since 1915; Henry was born in Sichuan in 1918. His sister Joanna Kirkby records her parents' work and their family life in China in her book The Two oceans: the dark and the light (Sessions, 2001).

Shoulder flash of Henry Rodwell's uniform

Scenes at Baoshan (Paoshan), 1941-1942