Stanley Crawford (center) attended the Hart & Stone Scholarship Award Ceremony in Jiujiang College December 7, 2009.

January 4, Jacksonville Journal-Courier - A Jacksonville native has been recognized for improving the lives of Chinese citizens and improving Eastern and Western relations after returning to a province where his family founded a hospital and nursing school generations ago.

Stanley Crawford received the Lushan Award which recognizes 30 foreigners annually for contributions to the Jiangxi Provence in China.

He has been in the city of Jiujiang for about 10 years where he helped to found the Hart & Stone Scholarship fund which pays tuition fees for two student nurses from low-income families a year. Many of those funds come from donations made to First Presbyterian Church in Jacksonville.

What compelled him to go to China were strong ties his ancestors had to that area before they moved back to the U.S.

Crawford was born in Jacksonville where he lived until he was 18. He moved to Colorado where he was for about 25 years when, after the accidental death of a girlfriend, he decided to take a bike trip around the perimeter of Mexico.

“The poverty there really shook me,” Crawford said. “I’ve seen poverty before. In the west we can insulate ourselves, but when you see it 24-7 if really gets you.”

It was very shortly after that when Crawford was asked to move to China.

“In 2000, my grandmother and great aunt sent me on a mission,” Crawford said.  “They sent me to China to reconnect with a city where their grandfathers practiced medicine. I thought it was a great adventure.”

Crawford found himself in China’s Jiangxi Provence where he began to teach English to nursing students. It was there, in the city of Jiujiang, where Crawford’s great-great-grandfather founded a hospital which grew into the city’s largest medical center.

Caroline Hart, for whom the scholarship is named, is Crawford’s great-grandmother who went to Jiujiang in 1904 to establish a school of nursing for women.

Crawford has also been recognized for his help in donating some digitized photographs from the family’s collection of 19th and 20th century China to several museums there. But he’s trying to do more.

“My father’s church gave me $1,500 to buy electronic dictionaries for one of the companies I’ve been working with,” Crawford said.

Among letters of thanks and congratulations he has received from Asian and Western universities, he has been asked by the Royal Asiatic Society to give presentations and tours on the  Jiangxi Provence and his experience there.

He is also working on a book called “The Middle Kingdom’s Western Medical Disciples” which concerns his family’s influence in that region of China as well as the region itself. Crawford said he plans to donate copies to the Jacksonville Public Library, Illinois College and MacMurray College after it’s completed.