During china’s Cultural Revolution this diminutive woman was able to endure six and a half years of brutal imprisonment, humiliation and torture.

In September 1966, after the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in China and the destruction of my home by the Red Guards, I was taken to a ‘struggle meeting’ where I was physically abused for four hours. Then I was thrown into a dank, dirty cell of the No. 1 Detention House, the dreaded prison for political suspects in Shanghai.

Over my head hung a single naked light bulb, under my feet the floor was black with dampness. Cobwebs hung in thick ropes from the ceiling, the walls were crushed with grime. My bed was bare rough planks; my toilet was a crude concrete cube on in one corner of the cell. The air was heavy. I stretched up and pulled with all my strength at the cell’s only small window, high up in the wall. It swung open in a shower of dirt and paint chips to reveal rusty iron bars.

For many weeks before they broke into my home, Mao Zedong’s fanatical Red Guards had roamed the streets of Shanghai, ransacking homes and brutalising citizens suspected of ‘Western’ sympathies. Since both my late husband and I had worked for Shell International Petroleum Company, I fell under that category.

On the night of 3rd August, the Red guards, nearly forty of them, burst into my home to ‘take revolutionary action’ and destroy the Four Olds: old culture, old customs, old habits and old ways of thinking. They shredded clothes and upholstery, smashed dishes and mirrors, threw the books into a bonfire on the lawn and confiscated my valuables.

At least my twenty-three-year-old daughter, Meiping, was at work when they burst in. she was the dearest person in the world to me. Intelligent, beautiful ad warm-hearted, she was an actress at the Shanghai Film Studio. But what would become of her now that I had been denounced and imprisoned as a ‘running dog of the Western imperialists’?

Never in my life have I been so alone. I sank down on my ‘bed’ in despair, closed my eyes and asked God for His guidance. My husband had come from one of China’s earliest Christian families and I had spent many hours with his mother, reading the bible to her when her eyesight was failing. I had become a Christian myself, and so far my faith had carried me through many trying circumstances. God would not fail me now.

That moment of prayer strengthened my resolve. I went to the cell door and pounded as hard as I could.

The small shutter on the door slid open and a guard’s face appeared.

‘What do you want?’

‘Please give me a broom to sweep this room,’ I said. ‘It’s very dirty.’

The guard was really startled at my request. ‘Nonsense!’ she said angrily. The shutter closed again with a smack.

In the past I had found that taking positive action to cope with problems was therapeutic and good for the renewal of courage. To make my dreary quarters more liveable was now my challenge. I pulled the bed out and, using my meagre ration of rough toilet paper, did my best to wipe the grime from it. Little good it did, but the effort made me feel better. With the light bulb still glaring above me, I fell into a fitful sleep.

Towards morning, the light was finally switched off. The shutter in the door opened again, and an aluminium container holding some watery rice porridge and a few pickled vegetables was thrust in my hands.

As I quickly said my morning prayers, I heard the door shutter slide open. ’What are you doing?’ a voice beyond the door cried out harshly. ’You must read Chairman Mao’s books!’

But once more my moment of prayer had revived my fighting spirit and I asked her again for a broom to clean the cell.

To my surprise, she squeezed an old ragged broom through the opening above the door; I pulled my bed around the cell and stood on it, using the broom as a brush to pull down the cobwebs. I sighed in relief - that was a victory.

I went to my cell door again and called out. When the guard came, I recited a quotation from Mao: ’To be hygienic is glorious; to be unhygienic is a shame.’ then I quickly asked, ’May I have some water to clean my cell?’

I used the water to wipe my bed and the panes of the widow.

Then I bathed myself and rinsed out my blouse. With some rice I’d saved from my midday meal, I made a paste and glued toilet paper along the wall by the bed to make a clean wall surface beside it.

Sitting on my bed, I looked at the narrow strip of sky just visible through the window bars. That day and the next I watched a rectangular patch of sunlight moved across my cell floor.

Then the days moved into weeks and the weeks into months.

I was constantly hungry and exhausted, and my health deteriorated, the isolation was broken only by periods of intense, brutal and irrational interrogation about ’crimes’ I had never committed.

Since I could not pray openly, I had to do so while my head was bent over Mao’s little red book that I was told to read for my ’re-education’.

And my daughter, Meiping? I worried about her constantly. Was she safe? I did not know. I was isolated from the world outside, and the world of my cell grew lonelier and lonelier until…

One day when I was staring up at the widow, I saw a spider about the size of a pea, making its slow but steady way up one of the rust-encrusted bars.

The spider moved purposefully to the top of the window and then, after a moment’s pause swung out and down on a slender thread that emerged as if by magic from its own tiny body. Working with precision, it attached the end of the silken thread to where it had started, and swung out again to anchor another thread on another bar.

I sat motionless, almost holding my breath, as the tiny spider moved methodically from corner to corner, until what looked like a frame had been created. Then it made its way within that frame, from corner to corner, edge to edge, creating a pattern that was evenly spaced and intricately beautiful.

At last the web was completed. The spider waited in its lacy centre.

By the time the spider had finished its work, it was early evening. Golden light stream through the cell’s small window. The rays of the setting sun struck the web and turned out into a glittering mass of rainbow colours.

I sat in stunned silence. In this ugly cell, before my eyes, beauty had come into being. The spider, one of the tinniest of God’s creatures, had made me feel a part of God’s world again. It was a moment of transcendence.

In the first light of day I looked to see if the spider was still there. It was. ‘Good morning,’ I murmured, and that was the beginning of our friendship. Every morning when I first opened my eyes, I looked for the spider and greeted it. And at night I looked over as I went to sleep, reassured by its steady presence.

Dad by day, my affection for the spider grew. If a corner of its web was ruffled by a breeze or ripped by the wind, the spider was there in an instant to repair the damage. Again and again it patched and weaved and restored, never retreating from the wind or giving in to defeat.

With each passing day, the temperature dropped. Winter was on its way, and the winds were increasingly chill and rainy. I needed to close the window. But to do so would disrupt my friend’s web, perhaps sending it scurrying away forever. No, that was unthinkable. I shivered in the cold, but it was worth it to have the courageous spider with me.

Then came the unforgettable morning:

The overhead light that stayed on all night went off, and I awoke for the few precious minutes of darkness before the sun rose. With the first rays of light entering the cell, I looked up at the spider’s web. It was gone! And so was the spider.

During the night the wind had torn the web apart. Only a few filmy shreds trembled in the air. I panicked. Where was my friend?

My eyes scanned from corner to corner, from wall to wall.

Minutes passed. A gust of chilling wind blew through the window. I sat motionless, overcome by sadness. I had come to look upon the spider as a messenger of hope, a God-sent creature. Now every hope had been torn from me. This was the darkest moment I’d known.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw something move. Was it the wind blowing something?

I looked up. In a corner of the ceiling was the spider.

For the first time in months I smiled. Not only was my friend there, but it was back at work, determinedly spinning its fragile cables, creating a new web.

Now I knew it was true. God had sent this spider to me. Don’t give up, He was saying to me. He had not left me alone in my prison cell. God was there.

In the days that followed, the spider moved from place to place and rebuilt its web throughout the cell. Once I crouched and followed as it moved across the floor, finally settling in a crevice of the wall, where it wove a thick web that enclosed its body like a cocoon. And then one day I watched as the spider went beneath my bed and never emerged. But by now I knew that whatever fate befell it - and me - we were both creatures of God and part of something more vast than we could imagine.

I remind in No.1 Detention House for six-and-a-half years - years filled with deprivation, sickness and, at times, torture.

When I was finally released in 1973, I learned that my daughter had been beaten to death during an interrogation by the Red Guards. If I had not been a Christian, I would have not wanted to live. But I knew that my Lord expected me to carry on.

Today I am alive and well. My old life was torn from me, but like the spider, I have learned to build a new one. And it’s beautiful.

By Nien Cheng