Tubabao Refugee Camp

The 1949 evacuation of the Shanghai Russian colony — close to five thousand souls — from communist China to the small island of Tubabao in the Philippines, where the International Refugee Organization ran a tent city under St. John’s pastoral care; the camp’s “little Russian city” with its churches, schools, hospital, and elected districts; the refugees’ testimony that the typhoons which sweep the Samar coast spared the camp while he blessed it nightly from the four directions, and the storm that destroyed the abandoned site after the last of them left; and his presence among them from May to July 1949 before he carried their cause to Washington.

Tradition: ROCOR (glorified 1994; Moscow Patriarchate veneration affirmed 2008)

The Exodus from Shanghai (1949)

When the People’s Liberation Army closed on Shanghai in the winter of 1948–1949, the Russian émigré colony St. John had shepherded for fifteen years faced forcible repatriation to the Soviet Union or flight. The exodus began in earnest on January 14, 1949 (rocorstudies.org, “From Shanghai to Tubabao”). No country would take the stateless refugees outright; it was the International Refugee Organization (IRO), the United Nations body then winding up the displaced-persons work of postwar Europe, that found them a way station. President Elpidio Quirino of the Philippines agreed to admit the refugees temporarily — initially some 6,000 people for a stay of about four months — on the uninhabited island of Tubabao, off Guiuan on the southern tip of Samar (rocorstudies.org; orthochristian.com/80526.html, “When the Philippines Welcomed Russian Refugees”; UNHCR Philippines, “Nine Waves of Refugees”).

The standard English lives of St. John give the number he personally led out as roughly five thousand (orthodoxcanada.ca; relicsofthesaints.org). The discrepancy between this figure and the “close to 6,000” of the camp histories is partly one of phases — the evacuation moved in successive shiploads over the first five months of 1949 — and partly one of counting the whole IRO caseload (which included non-Russians) against the Russian Orthodox flock specifically [Disputed: the camp histories give “close to 6,000” total refugees processed through Tubabao (orthochristian.com/80526.html; rbth.com); the hagiographic lives speak of “about 5,000” Russians whom St. John led from Shanghai (orthodoxcanada.ca; relicsofthesaints.org)]. The population was overwhelmingly Russian but not only Russian: a camp census of April 28, 1949 counted, alongside the Russians, “five Austrians, 75 Armenians, one Bulgarian, 24 Czechs, 41 Estonians, 20 Hungarians, 45 Latvians, 30 Lithuanians” and others (rocorstudies.org, citing camp records).

Before each ship sailed, St. John “served a safe voyage moleben for the ship’s passengers, after which he blessed each one of them” (rocorstudies.org). He did not leave first. As in Shanghai under the Japanese, he stayed with the rear of his flock and crossed last among the shepherds, arriving at Tubabao on May 14, 1949, bringing with him the forty-eight children of his St. Tikhon orphanage of mixed Russian-Chinese descent (rocorstudies.org; see Orphanage and Pastoral Care).

The “Little Russian City”

Tubabao under the IRO became, in the phrase the camp histories repeat, a “thriving little Russian city.” The refugees raised a tent town on the cleared jungle and organized it themselves: it was “divided into 14 main districts with democratically-elected leaders,” and equipped with communal kitchens, a power station, schools, a hospital, a dental clinic, an arbitration court, a police force, even a jail; there was an open-air cinema and a theater company (orthochristian.com/80526.html, drawing on the research of Kinna Kwan of the President Elpidio Quirino Foundation; rbth.com, “When the Philippines Welcomed Russian Refugees”). The central gathering ground the refugees called, with diaspora humor, “Red Square.”

At the heart of it stood the churches. The refugees “built the iconostasis and everything else required,” raising three Orthodox churches including a cathedral set on higher ground; the largest, a wooden Russian Orthodox church, was assembled partly from an abandoned church the American forces had left on the island from the war (rocorstudies.org; orthochristian.com/80526.html). St. John resumed at Tubabao the rule of his whole life — the daily Divine Liturgy — now under canvas and palm, in a camp that could be reached only by a single causeway and that lay open to the weather of the Philippine Sea.

The conditions were harsh. Tubabao had been a wartime American base, abandoned to the jungle; the refugees cleared it by hand and lived under U.S. Army surplus tents pitched on coral and sand, in a tropical climate with little fresh water and the constant threat of disease. The IRO supplied rations and basic medical care, but the camp’s institutions — the kitchens, the school where the émigré teachers kept Russian children at their lessons, the hospital and dental clinic, the makeshift court and police — were largely the refugees’ own work of self-organization (orthochristian.com/80526.html; rbth.com). Into this improvised town St. John brought the orphanage children he had carried out of Shanghai and continued the institutional care of the helpless that had marked his episcopate from the first. The camp histories preserve the memory of an old man in worn vestments moving daily among the tents — serving, blessing, visiting the sick — so that the spiritual life of the community never lapsed into mere waiting.

The Typhoon Tradition

Tubabao sits in one of the most typhoon-prone corridors on earth; the Samar coast is regularly raked by storms that form in the western Pacific. The refugees’ enduring testimony is that during the more than two years the camp stood, no typhoon struck it. They attributed this to St. John. In the words preserved by the camp’s historians, Bishop John Maximovitch “is remembered to this day… as the holy man who blessed the camp from four directions every night to ward off typhoons and other potential dangers” — a memory recorded among both the Russian refugees and the local Filipinos (Kinna Kwan, quoted in UNHCR Philippines, “Nine Waves of Refugees,” and in orthochristian.com/80526.html).

This is presented here as attested testimony, not as a claim about meteorology. What the sources establish is what the refugees believed and reported: that St. John made the rounds of the perimeter nightly, blessing the camp toward each of the four points of the compass, and that the community connected its preservation to his prayer. The hagiographic lives state the tradition in its strong form — “where many strong typhoons sweep over the islands, the camp was unaffected while they were there” (orthodoxcanada.ca; relicsofthesaints.org gives the same). When skeptical refugees pointed out to camp authorities that a typhoon would scatter the tents, the answer that passed into the community’s memory was that their bishop walked the camp each night and they need not fear — a saying transmitted within the refugee community rather than from an external record, and reported here as such.

The named modern witnesses through whom the tradition reaches us are not refugees inventing legend for piety’s sake but researchers and survivors recording a community memory. Kinna Kwan, senior researcher at the President Elpidio Quirino Foundation, gathered the testimony that Bishop John “blessed the camp from four directions every night”; the historian Larissa Goncharova, writing on the White Russians, and surviving camp residents such as Leo O. Zakharof — seven years old at Tubabao — are among those whose accounts the camp histories preserve (orthochristian.com/80526.html; UNHCR Philippines). The methodological point matters: the protection is reported as the refugees’ shared conviction, sourced to those who recorded it, and not asserted by this compendium as a meteorological fact. That the Samar coast is in truth one of the most storm-battered stretches of the Pacific is precisely what made the refugees’ experience so striking to them — and what made the destruction of the camp, once empty, so forceful a confirmation in their eyes.

The most striking element of the tradition concerns what happened after the camp closed. The lives are unanimous and specific: “after their departure, the next typhoon destroyed the camp completely” (orthodoxcanada.ca; relicsofthesaints.org). The camp histories corroborate the bare fact and supply the timing: the last group to leave — twenty-seven tubercular patients accepted by France in 1953 — had no sooner departed than “the entire camp was hit by a typhoon and completely destroyed” (rbth.com; pravoslavie.ru). That a typhoon devastated the abandoned site in 1953 is thus documented in the secular as well as the hagiographic record; the coincidence of its arrival with the camp’s final emptying is what the refugees remembered as the seal on St. John’s protection. The chronology of the typhoon’s striking only after the people were gone is reported as the tradition transmits it; the meteorological event itself is documented.

His Pastoral Presence

St. John remained on Tubabao from May 14 to July 8, 1949 — under two months — but the imprint he left far outlasted the stay (rocorstudies.org). During those weeks he served daily, walked the districts, and tended the sick; the refugees reported that “typhoons were averted, and those who were sick were healed” while he was among them (rocorstudies.org). His departure was felt as a loss precisely because his presence had become the camp’s spiritual center.

He did not leave to rest. He left because the camp’s four-month welcome was running out, no permanent home had been found, and the great powers’ refugee laws as they then stood excluded the stateless Far Eastern Russians almost entirely. Where his flock saw a protector against the storm, St. John saw a community stranded on a tropical sandbar with the clock running. He went, in July 1949, to do the one thing the camp could not do for itself: to argue its case in Washington and in the chancelleries of the resettlement countries (see Washington Lobbying). The resettlement, when it came, scattered the Tubabao Russians across the world — roughly half to the United States once the law was changed, with large numbers to Australia and others to South America (orthochristian.com/80526.html; orthodoxcanada.ca).

That St. John “did not abandon his flock” is the refrain the lives apply to Tubabao as to Shanghai. He had crossed last; he stayed until the welcome thinned; and when he left, it was not to safety but to the harder labor of the petition. The Filipino municipality of Guiuan has in recent years marked his memory, and a “St. John (Maximovitch) Day” has been established locally — a sign that the memory of the camp survives among the islanders as well as among the descendants of the refugees (orthochristian.com/123421.html, “Filipino municipality establishes St. John (Maximovitch) Day”).

See Also

References

  • “From Shanghai to Tubabao: The Enduring Legacy of St. John Maximovitch in the Philippines.” rocorstudies.org, June 28, 2025. (Evacuation from January 14, 1949; IRO administration; the April 28 census; the three churches; St. John on the island May 14 – July 8, 1949, with the 48 orphanage children; the safe-voyage molebens; healings and averted typhoons.)
  • “When the Philippines Welcomed Russian Refugees.” orthochristian.com/80526.html (and pravoslavie.ru/80526.html). (The “little Russian city,” fourteen districts and elected leaders; the wooden church from the abandoned American chapel; Kinna Kwan’s testimony of the nightly four-directional blessing against typhoons.)
  • “When the Philippines Welcomed Russian Refugees.” Russia Beyond (rbth.com), July 7, 2015. (Close to 6,000 refugees fleeing China in 1948; camp closed 1953; the typhoon that destroyed the camp after the final departure of the tubercular patients accepted by France.)
  • UNHCR Philippines. “Nine Waves of Refugees in the Philippines.” unhcr.org. (Quirino’s admission of the refugees; Kinna Kwan’s account of St. John as the holy man who blessed the camp.)
  • Canadian Orthodox History Project. “Saint John (Maximovitch).” orthodoxcanada.ca. (About 5,000 refugees including the orphans; the camp unaffected by typhoons while they were there and destroyed by the next typhoon after their departure; the resettlement to the US and Australia.)
  • “St John of Shanghai, San Francisco and W. Europe.” relicsofthesaints.org, August 1, 2025. (The 5,000 refugees; the typhoon tradition.)
  • “Filipino Municipality Establishes St. John (Maximovitch) Day.” orthochristian.com/123421.html. (Local Guiuan commemoration.)
  • Rose, Fr. Seraphim, and Abbot Herman (Podmoshensky). Blessed John the Wonderworker. 3rd rev. ed. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1987. (The Tubabao typhoon tradition as transmitted in the brotherhood’s account.)
  • Perekrestov, Archpriest Peter (ed.). Man of God: Saint John of Shanghai & San Francisco. San Francisco: Holy Virgin Cathedral, 1994/2015.