3

ArticlesMissionary Society Archives and Research on
Sino-Western Cultural Exchanges*
SU Ching†

Introduction
From the 1790s the Protestant missionary societies of Western nations
continuously sent missionaries to the countries of the world to propagate
Protestant Christianity. If we look at just China alone, we ﬁnd that from1807, when the ﬁrst Protestant missionary arrived in China, to 1905, a
century later, the number of missionaries in China increased to 3,445, and thenumber reached an all-time high of 8,158 missionaries in 1925.1
Protestant missionaries were not only numerous, but also engaged in a
number of activities besides proselytizing. They established schools andtaught. They printed and published. They founded hospitals and treated thesick. And they translated. Through these other activities they became an
important conduit for Sino-Western cultural exchange and had a tremendous
inﬂuence on China. All the while, they sent back to their sponsoring
missionary societies letters, journals, reports, and forms, in which theyexpressed their thoughts, their ways of managing, and their sundry observations and understandings of China. Because the missionary societies
preserved these materials, with the passage of time these collections became
vast archives. Today they serve as a valuable treasury of ﬁrst-hand historicalmaterials for studying Sino-Western cultural exchanges. We can use thesematerials not only to supplement and correct omissions and errors in thesecond-hand literature, but also to help reconstruct historical facts in detailand objectively explain the signiﬁcance and inﬂuence of various sorts of* This paper was originally presented as a keynote speech at the Eighth Annual Meetingof the Society for Cultural Interaction in East Asia, May 7, 2016.
† Retired professor, Institute for China Studies, National Yunlin University of Scienceand Technology.
1 Donald MacGillivrary, ed., A Century of Protestant Missions in China (1807 1907)(Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1907), p.674. Stephen Neill, A
History of Christian Missions (London: Penguin Books, 1986), p.429.

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Journal of Cultural Interaction in East Asia Vol. 8 2017

cultural exchanges.
Because there are so many missionary archives and their collections are
so diverse, I will here limit myself to the Chinese sections of the Europeanand American archives that I have used. I will discuss ﬁve areas—proselytizing, establishing schools and teaching, founding hospitals and treating thesick, translating, and printing and publishing—giving concrete examples,
along with illustrations of archives, in order to show the importance of thehistorical materials in missionary archives for the study of Sino-Westerncultural exchange.

Proselytizing
Robert Morrison’s ﬁrst day in China In as much as Protestant missionaries were the conduit of Sino-Western cultural exchange, the thoughts andactions of Robert Morrison, the ﬁrst Protestant missionary to set foot in
China, have a symbolic and historic signiﬁcance in the history of such
cultural exchange. For instance, on September 4, 1807, the ﬁrst day he set
foot in China, what were his thoughts, what did he do, and what sort ofreactions did he provoke? Memoirs of the Life and Labours of RobertMorrison, edited and published by his wife after he passed away, is theauthoritative work on Morrison, and most researchers rely on it as theirsource of information about Morrison.2 But this memoir begins its coverageof his stay in China with his arrival at Guangzhou on September 7, the fourth
day of his stay in China. It is as if he thought nothing and did nothing on his
ﬁrst three days in China.
This, however, was not the case. In the London Missionary Society
Archives is a journal entry for September 4, 1807, which he wrote at an inn
in Macau at 10 p.m. after he had landed.3 There are also entries for thefollowing few days recording in detail his thoughts and activities for the day.
These journal entries are valuable records for the history of Sino-Westerncultural exchange that can supplement serious omissions in Memoirs of theLife and Labours of Robert Morrison. They also show that the ﬁrst three daysof Protestant Christianity’s presence in China were not a complete blank.
A chronology of Cai Gao’s life While omissions in second-hand historicalsources are bad enough, even worse are falsiﬁed historical materials. In the
China Mission Yearbook 中華基督教會年鑑, no.7 (1924), there is a biography
2 Eliza A. Morrison, Memoirs of the Life and Labours of Robert Morrison (London:
Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1839).
3 London Missionary Society Archives, China, South China, Journal, Robert Morrison,
4 September 1907.

Missionary Society Archives and Research on Sino-Western Cultural Exchanges

5of China’s ﬁrst Protestant Christian, Cai Gao 蔡高. Appended to this biography is a chronology of his life, signed by two authors, stating that Cai Gao,when he was 59 (1846), was imprisoned for his belief in Protestant
Christianity, and that on the 3rd of the Sixth Month he died as a martyr forhis beliefs.4
However, much earlier, on October 12, 1818, John Slater, a missionary
for the London Missionary Society in Guanzhou, wrote a letter to the secretary of the society stating at the end of his letter that Cai Gao, whomMorrison had baptized several years earlier, had died a few days before.5
One year later, on November 14, 1819, Morrison stated in a letter that
the Chinese authorities sent oﬃcers to the dormitory of the East India
Company to arrest a man. That man was none other than the younger brotherof the man whom he had baptized but who had already died.6 When Morrison
wrote his letter, he had baptized only one individual, Cai Gao, who had
already died. The letters of Slater and Morrison thus show that the abovementioned chronology stating that Cai Gao lived to 1846 was fabricated.
Documents on Liang Fa Mingled in with English documents in the archivesof missionary societies are quite a few Chinese documents, often having
unexpected historical value. For instance, there is the diary that Liang Fa 梁
發, the ﬁrst Chinese evangelist, kept from March to November 1830. In it henotes that he and his assistant Qu Ang 屈昂 carried out a unique method of
spreading the gospel. They would follow the Guandong provincial educationcommissioner 學政 on his rounds to examinations for the Cultivated Talentdegree 秀才 and the Confucian Apprentice status 文童, and outside the examsites they would distribute christian books to the candidates. On a single day,they might give out tens to hundreds of books.7 The historical value of theserecords is that they conﬁrm that when Hong Xiuquan 洪秀全, leader of theTaiping Rebellion 太平天國, took the civil-service examination in Guangzhou
in the 1830s, he received Good Words to Admonish the Age 勸世良言, read it,
4 “Cai Gao fu nianpu” 蔡高附年譜 (A Chronology of Cai Gao’s Life), Zhonghua
Jidujiaohui nianjian 中華基督教會年鑑 (China Mission Yearbook), edited by
Zhonghua Quanguo Jidujiao Xiejinhui 中華全國基督教協進會, no.7 (1924): 164 167.
5 London Missionary Society Archives, Ultra-Ganges, Malacca, box 1, folder 3, jacket
A, John Slater to W. A. Hankey, Canton, 12 October 1818.
6 London Missionary Society Archives, China, South China, box 2, folder 1, jacket B,
R. Morrison to George Burder, Canton, 14 November 1819.
7 London Missionary Society Archives, China, South China, box 3, folder 1, jacket A,
R. Morrison to W. A. Hankey, Canton, 14 November 1830, and R. Morrison to
Joseph Arundel, Canton, 15 November 1830, enclosure. In his letters from 1830 to
1832, Morrison frequently gave daily reports of Liang Fa’s distribution of
missionary books.

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Journal of Cultural Interaction in East Asia Vol. 8 2017

experienced a revolution in thinking, and went on to lead the ﬁrst large-scale
rebellion of against the Qing dynasty.8
In 1834 Liang Fa, because he was sought for arrest by the local authorities for again distributing books during the Guangdong provincial examinations, ﬂed to Southeast Asia for ﬁve years. There too he continued distributing books to Chinese. In the London Missionary Society Archives is adetailed list, written by Liang Fa in 1839, of books distributed to trading
ships from throughout China docking in Singapore. This list records dates, thenumber of ships, the name of each ship, the origin of each ship in China, thename of each ship’s captain, etc.9 And yet there is no evidence showing thatany of these ship captains or sailors were nearly as inﬂuenced by thechristian books as Hong Xiuquan.

Establishing Schools and Teaching
Protestant missionaries were an important element in promoting themodernization of Chinese education. In China they established many schools
at all levels. Researchers for the most part have focused only on universities,
but missionary society archives in fact contain more documents on elementary and middle schools.
The Anglo-Chinese College at Malacca On the Anglo-Chinese College at
Malacca, a well-known school in the history of modern Sino-Western cultural
exchange, an excellent monograph titled Waiting for China appeared in
1979.10 Yet this book makes some statements that still bear discussing. For
instance, Brian Harrison, after devoting over a page to discussing the student
Yuan Dehui 袁德輝 (Shaou Tih 小德), says that there is evidence that Yuan
Dehui translated notices into English for Lin Zexu 林則徐, the imperial
commissioner 欽差大臣 who led the campaign to suppress the opium trade,and that the missionary James Legge, before criticizing the Anglo-ChineseCollege as having never produced any translators, should look at the ﬁne
example of Yuan Dehui.11
There are problems with this statement of Harrison’s. First, while Yuan
8 Liang Afa 梁阿發, Quan shi liang yan 勸世良言 (Good Words to Admonish the Age),
9 vols. (Guangzhou: Religious Tract Society, 1832).
9 London Missionary Society Archives, Ultra Ganges, Singapore, box 2, folder 1, jacket
C, Alexander & John Stronach to William Ellis, Singapore, 14 May 1839, enclosure, “List of Ships Distributing Bibles” 分發大小聖書各船開列.
10 Brian Harrison, Waiting for China: The Anglo-Chinese College at Malacca, 1818
1843, and Early Nineteenth-Century Missions (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press, 1979).
11 Harrison, Waiting for China, p.127.

Missionary Society Archives and Research on Sino-Western Cultural Exchanges

7

Dehui did indeed translate notices for Lin Zexu, the quality was rather
lacking, and he used hardly any punctuation, simply adding periods at theends of paragraphs. And when The Canton Register published his translationof the notice, the editor added a note saying that this was not English, that it
was but a use of the Roman alphabet taking on the appearance of a notice.12
Moreover, the missionary Samuel W. Williams, who was also in China at thetime, criticized Yuan Dehui as having insuﬃcient grasp of both Latin andEnglish and being able to understand only broad outlines of meanings.13
Second, the statement that the Anglo-Chinese College has never produced
any translators, uttered in 1843, came not from Legge but from Henry
Pottinger, the British commander in chief during the Opium War (1839 1842)
and the governor of Hong Kong after the war. After Legge had already
moved the Anglo-Chinese College from Malacca to Hong Kong, he unexpectedly discovered that Pottinger had canceled the monthly subsidy that theEast India Company had given the college. Legge asked that it be reinstated.
But Pottinger, in a letter of reply, said that during the war, the British army
could not ﬁnd any qualiﬁed translators in Malacca or anywhere else, and thatcanceling the subsidy was quite appropriate.14
English instruction Most people think that church schools invariably teachEnglish, and that students of these schools are quite proﬁcient in English.
Documents in missionary society archives show that this was not always true.
After the Opium War, some schools founded by missionaries intentionally got
rid of English instruction. For example, when the Ningbo mission of the
Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. founded a boarding school, the missionaries vigorously discussed whether to oﬀer English instruction, they established an ad hoc committee to study the matter, and the committee produceda more-than-twenty-page report presenting pros and cons. Finally, themissionaries suggested not teaching students to read English, and the mission
decided not to teach English.15 A year later the mission reviewed this decisionand reaﬃrmed that this was the correct decision.16
12 Canton Register, July 30, 1839, p.136.
13 Chinese Repository, March 1842, p.160.
14 London Missionary Society Archives, China, South China, box 4, folder 3, jacket B,
LMS Missionaries to Sir Henry Pottinger, Hong Kong, 18 August 1843, enclosure,“Copy of Sir Henry’s answer to the above letter, 21 Aug 1843.”
15 Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., Board of Foreign Missions, Correspondence andReports, 1833 1911, China, Incoming, vol.2, no.106, Minutes of the Annual
Meeting of the Ningpo Mission, September 10, 1845; no.127, Report of theCommittee on English Instruction, 1845; and no.132, Walter M. Lowrie to Walter
Lowrie, Ningpo, 31 December 1845.
16 Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., Board of Foreign Missions, Correspondence and8Journal of Cultural Interaction in East Asia Vol. 8 2017

Some missionary societies even adopted policies of not teaching English.
For instance, Rufus Anderson, secretary for the American Board ofCommissioners for Foreign Missions, wrote a letter in 1849 to all of its
missionaries in China instructing them on four matters concerning school
instruction. The third matter was that they should not teach Chinese students
English.17
The Shanghai boarding school of the London Missionary Society,established in 1849, also did not teach English. Article 5 of the school’s
regulations stipulated that student instruction should be carried out entirely in
Chinese.18 But with increasing contacts between Chinese and Westerners inall sorts of ﬁelds, there was a great increase in the need for Chinese proﬁcient in English. The missionary William Muirhead, headmaster of the
London Missionary Society boarding school at Shanghai, took out an advertisement in the Shanghai News 上海新報 in which he stated that the newly
founded British School 大英學堂 sought students desiring to study only British
English.19 The times had changed. In the past, missionary authorities fearedthat Chinese students, once they became proﬁcient in English, would be lured
away from the church to enter commerce (particularly, the violent opium
trade). Now they thought that only by oﬀering English could they attract
more students.
Even so, we should not overgeneralize and state that from then on all
church schools taught English. For example, as late as 1899, J. E.
Shoemaker, a Presbyterian missionary in Ningbo, stated that his school went
along with the trend of the times and began oﬀering English instruction, only
to ﬁnd after three years that students had not become competent in either
Chinese or English. Hence, the school decided to follow its former practiceand thus to eliminate English and teach only in Chinese.20
Female education The motives and goals of nineteenth-century mission-

17
18
19
20

Reports, 1833 1911, China, Incoming, vol.2, no.144, W. M. Lowrie to W. Lowrie,Ningpo, May 30, 1846; and no.167, Ningpo Mission, “Third Annual Report of the
Ningpo Mission,” October 1, 1846.
Papers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Unit 1, ABC
2.1, vol.11, Rufus Anderson to the Brethren of the Canton Mission, Boston,
December 31, 1849.
London Missionary Society Archives, China, Central China, box 1, folder 2, jacket
B, William C. Milne to A. Tidman, Shanghai, 13 February 1849.
“Chuantou huojia zhi” 船頭貨價紙 (News on Prices for Ship Captains), Shanghai
Xinbao 上海新報, no.356 (2nd of the Seventh Month, 1864).
Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., Board of Foreign Missions, Correspondence andReports, 1833 1911, China, Incoming, vol.39, no.76, J. E. Shoemaker to Robert E.
Speer, Ningpo, December 29, 1899.

Missionary Society Archives and Research on Sino-Western Cultural Exchanges

9aries in China in giving education to girls will perhaps surprise us. In 1839
Ira Tracy, a missionary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign
Missions, stated that a strong motive for giving education to girls was toprovide future wives for the boys of the mission school.21
The 1863 annual report for the Ningbo Presbyterian mission stated thatone should not underestimate the value of the mission’s boarding school forgirls, because the girls of the school are the future wives of China mission
assistants and a source of teachers for day schools for girls.22 Even as late as
1876, the secretary of the Presbyterian Church wrote a letter to a missionary
in Ningbo, solemnly declaring that the main work of the school for girls wasto cultivate wives for Chinese ministers and evangelist.23
In the Missionary Society Archives are many more examples of this typeof thinking and doing. As one can see, this type of thinking was rather
widespread among nineteenth-century missionaries in China. They provided
education to girls to cultivate wives for their Chinese male converts, not tocultivate women capable of independence and self-development.

Founding Hospitals and Treating the Sick
Also contained in missionary society archives are documents on missionaries’ eﬀorts at treating the sick. Here too these documents can be used tosupplement and correct the omissions and errors of other historical sources.
Below I give three examples.
The reason that Peter Parker was sent to China The ﬁrst missionary
physician to come to China was Peter Parker. He was sent by the American
Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and he arrived in China in late
October 1834. Why did the board send him? Neither studies nor biographiesof Parker give a clear reason. Even the classic study Peter Parker and theOpening of China, by Edward V. Gulick, simply states that Rufus Anderson,
secretary for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions,said to Parker that the board needs men like him to go to China to serve as
missionaries.24
21 Papers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Unit 3, ABC
16.2.4, vol.1, Ira Tracy to R. Anderson, Singapore, January 4, 1839.
22 Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., Board of Foreign Missions, Correspondence andReports, 1833 1911, China, Incoming, vol.4, no.397, “Twentieth Annual Report of
the Ningpo Mission for the Year Ending October 1, 1863.”
23 Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., Board of Foreign Missions, Correspondence andReports, 1833 1911, China, Outgoing, vol.65, no.49, W. W. Eddy to Miss
Harshberger (Ningpo), New York, June 26, 1876.
24 Edward V. Gulick, Peter Parker and the Opening of China (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1973), p.11.

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Journal of Cultural Interaction in East Asia Vol. 8 2017

In fact, the Papers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign
Missions show that Parker was sent to China at the urgent request of Elijah
C. Bridgman, another American Board of Commissioners missionary, alreadyin China. On the basis of his observations and experience in China,
Bridgman, in a letter dated July 1, 1833, urged the board to send a physician.
Later, in letters dated March 4 and July 14, 1834, he repeated this request.25
But before the board received Bridgman’s second letter, it had already
decided to send Parker to China.
The nature of Renji Hospital We can also make use of mission societyarchives to clarify another historical fact about modern Western medicine inChina, namely, the connection between Renji Hospital 仁濟醫院 in Shanghai
and the London Missionary Society. Renji Hospital was founded in 1844 by
William Lockhart, a missionary physician for the London Missionary Society.
From then until 1950, over a hundred years, the hospital was managed for themost part by society physicians. Hence, nearly all books on the hospital
regard it as a missionary hospital, a church hospital, or a London Missionary
Society hospital.
But such a description of the hospital is inaccurate. In a letter dated
October 14, 1846, Lockhart clearly stated that the recently completed Renji
Hospital does not belong to the London Missionary Society, that it was built
from funds donated by foreigners living in Shanghai, that donors made up theboard of directors, but that the hospital would be managed by society physicians.26 However, problems arose during 1865 and 1866. Relations between
Renji Hospital and the London Missionary Society took a turn for the worse,and the trustees of the hospital canceled the agreement of cooperation withthe society and had the hospital managed by foreign physicians living inShanghai.27 This arrangement lasted until the close of the nineteenth century.
Then in 1904 the trustees again signed an agreement of cooperation with theLondon Missionary Society, and the society sent the missionary physician
Cecil J. Davenport to manage the hospital.28 Hence, from 1868 to 1904, a
25 Papers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Unit 3, ABC
16.3.8, vol.1, Elijah C. Bridgman to R. Anderson, Canton, July 1, 1833, March 4,
1834, and July 14, 1834.
26 London Missionary Society Archives, China, Central China, box 1, folder 1, jacket
C, Walter H. Medhurst & William Lockhart to the Directors, Shanghai, 14 October
1846.
27 London Missionary Society Archives, China, Central China, box 3, folder 2, jacket
B, James Johnston & R. Maclean to A. Tidman, Shanghai, 2 September 1865; box
3, folder 2, jacket C, William Muirhead to A. Tidman, Shanghai, 22 May 1866; andbox 3, folder 2, jacket C, W. Muirhead to Joseph Mullens, Shanghai, 20 July 1866.
28 London Missionary Society Archives, China, Central China, box 15.1, folder H, jacket

Missionary Society Archives and Research on Sino-Western Cultural Exchanges 11

total of thirty-six years, Renji Hospital had no connection with the London
Missionary Society. So for this reason as well, we cannot say Renji Hospital
was a London Missionary Society hospital.
Materials on Huang Kuan Huang Kuan 黃寬 (Wong Fun) is an importantﬁgure in the history of Sino-Western cultural exchange. Together with Yung
Wing 容閎, he studied abroad in the United States. After ﬁnishing middle
school, he went to the University of Edinburgh in Britain to study medicine.
After graduating, he received an appointment from the London Missionary
Society as a missionary physician and returned to China. The London
Missionary Society Archives has quite a few historical documents by him.
For instance, on November 26, 1857, he reported in a letter from Hong Kong
circumstances regarding the practice of medicine, including the number ofpatients per month and the average number of patients per day.29 Toward theend of 1858 he moved to Guangzhou, and up until he left missionary service
late in 1860, he wrote some ten letters reporting on his practice of medicine.
Unfortunately, only few researchers make use of these ﬁrst-hand reports
written by Huang Kuan.
Worth noting is that the authoritative History of Chinese Medicine, by
Wang Jimin and Wu Liande, states that Huang Kuan died on October 12,
1878.30 But Benjamin C. Henry, a Presbyterian missionary familiar with
Huang Kuan and in Guangzhou at the time, wrote a letter to the missionary
physician J. G. Kerr, who was on leave in the United States, stating that
Huang Kuan died on October 10, only two days before Henry wrote his
letter.31 For the date of Huang Kuan’s death, Henry’s letter is more reliable
than the History of Chinese Medicine. Between the two dates given for Huang
Kuan’s death, there is only a diﬀerence of two days, but this slight diﬀerence
reveals the diﬀerent uses of ﬁrst-hand and second-hand historical materials.

Translating
Translation is an important part of Sino-Western cultural exchange, andnineteenth-century missionaries in China ardently engaged in it. Hence, there
are many historical materials related to translation in missionary society
L1, Willett Bevan to R. Wardlaw Thompson, Shanghai, April 28, 1904.
29 London Missionary Society Archives, China, South China, box 6, folder 1, jacket A,
Wong Fun to A. Tidman, Hong Kong, 26 November 1857.
30 Wang Jimin (K. Chimin Wong) and Wu Liande (Wu Lien-Teh), History of Chinese
Medicine, 2nd ed. (Shanghai: National Quarantine Service, 1936), p.395.
31 Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., Board of Foreign Missions, Correspondence andReports, 1833 1911, China, Incoming, vol.14, no.124a, Benjamin C. Henry to J. G.
Kerr, Canton, October 12, 1878.

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Journal of Cultural Interaction in East Asia Vol. 8 2017archives.
Robert Morrison’s translation manuscripts Protestant missionaries could
proselytize in China because they had translations. At the meeting of theboard of directors of the London Missionary Society on July 30, 1804, a
letter from the Rev. William W. Moseley was read aloud. In this letter hesuggested that the society translate the bible into Chinese and begin proselytizing in China. The board resolved that it was important to translate the bible
into Chinese, decided to send a missionary to China to carry out the translation, and hoped that Robert Morrison could undertake the translation.32 Thus
began the Protestant eﬀort to proselytize in China.
Morrison’s translation of the bible has attracted much attention fromresearchers of later ages, but these researchers overlook one important aspectof the translation, namely, that in preparing to translate the bible, he practiced
translating many styles of Chinese into English. Some of these practicetranslations have been published, but there are also many translations inmanuscript form waiting in the archive for researchers to discover them, such
as Laozi’s Texts on Treatise on Action and Retribution 太上感應篇, Divine
Lord Wenchang’s Ten Precepts of the Window Overlooking the Banana Tree
文昌帝君蕉窗十訓, and portions of the Analects 論語 and Dream of the Red
Chamber 紅樓夢. In the past, scholars have thought that the earliest translation of even a portion of the Dream of the Red Chamber was John Francis
Davis’s translation of portions of chapter 3, published in 1830. In fact, in
1813 Morrison translated chapter 4 and wrote an introduction.33 Thus, one cansee that Morrison had a deep appreciation of this novel. He also translated theﬁrst poem of the collection “Poems on My Fortieth Birthday” 四十生日詩, by
Ruan Yuan 阮元 (1764 1849).34 Ruan Yuan, governor-general of Guangdong
and Guangxi residing in Guangzhou, no doubt never imagined that thirteen
hongs outside the city wall there resided a foreigner who would translate his
poem into a foreign language.
The Macau News translators When missionaries began translating, they
took note of Chinese translation activity. From 1839 to 1840, when Lin Zexu
confronted the British and prohibited the opium trade, in order to gather
information and learn about his adversaries he hired four translators totranslate English newspapers into Chinese. These translations were collec32 London Missionary Society Archives, Board Minutes, 30 July 1804.
33 London Missionary Society Archives, China, South China, box 1, folder 2, jacket A,
R. Morrison to G. Burder [?], Macao, 18 January 1811, enclosure.
34 London Missionary Society Archives, China, General, Personal, box 1.

Missionary Society Archives and Research on Sino-Western Cultural Exchanges 13

tively called “Macau News” 澳門新聞紙, but were never published. At thattime the missionary physician Peter Parker wrote about this eﬀort in his
report on the work of the Guangzhou mission to the American Board ofCommissioners for Foreign Missions, and he mentioned the names of the fourtranslators: Aman 阿曼, Shaou Tih 袁德輝 (the above-mentioned student of theAnglo-Chinese College), Alum 阿倫, and Atih 梁進德.35 For each translator,
Parker gave a brief introduction of one sentence, but because the Chinese
literature does not mention them at all, were it not for Parker’s introduction,
they would have vanished from the stage of history. In The World as Seen by
Lin Zexu: “Macau News” in the Original and Translation 林則徐看見的世界：
澳門新聞紙》的原文與譯文
的原文與譯文, I discuss these four translators and their work in《澳門新聞紙detail, and I preserve in full the hitherto unknown original text of Macau
News.36
Historical materials of the Translators College One famous institution in
the history of Sino-Western cultural exchange is the Translators College 同文館, a school for training government translators. The school ﬁrst beganteaching English, and the ﬁrst instructor was John S. Burdon, of the Church
Missionary Society. In the society’s archives are documents written by him
relevant to the history of Sino-Western cultural exchange. For instance, in a
letter of May 28, 1862, he stated that the Oﬃce of Foreign Aﬀairs 總理衙門,
with help from the British envoy, approved his appointment as an instructor.37 But more important is his letter of July 2, 1862, in which he stated thedate of the opening of the college, the number of students, the students’ ages
and family backgrounds, the location of the college, conditions in the classroom, study and break times, his own salary and treatment, etc.38 Previous
studies of the Translators College have never made any use of these two
important letters.
After Burdon, John Fryer and W. A. P. Martin served as English instructors at the Translators College, and they too left documents related to thecollege. For instance, Fryer, in a letter dated March 8, 1864, expressed
dissatisfaction with the fact that when he taught class, a Chinese instructor
35 Papers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Unit 3, ABC
16.3.8., vol.1A, P. Parker to R. Anderson, Macao, July 4, 1839.
36 Su Ching 蘇精, Lin Zexu kanjian de shijie: “Aomen xinwenzhi” de yuanwen yu yiwen
林則徐看見的世界：《澳門新聞紙
林則徐看見的世界
澳門新聞紙》的原文與譯文
的原文與譯文 (The World as Seen by Lin Zexu:
Macau News in the Original and Translation) (Taipei: Sifuzhai, 2016), pp.3 50.
37 Church Missionary Society Archives, C CH O 22, John Shaw Burdon to John
Chapman, Peking, May 28, 1862.
38 Church Missionary Society Archives, C CH O 22, J. S. Burdon to J. Chapman, Peking,
July 2, 1862.

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Journal of Cultural Interaction in East Asia Vol. 8 2017

was always sitting in the classroom observing and preventing him fromproselytizing the students.39 Martin, in his 1865 annual report on the Beijing
mission of the Presbyterian Church, stated that college regulations expressly
prohibited proselytizing.40

Printing and Publishing
Missionaries frequently engaged in printing and publishing. Hence,
mission society archives have vast amounts of documents on such activities.
We can make use of these documents to explore the process whereby
missionaries helped to modernize Chinese printing and to fathom the eﬀect
and inﬂuence of the various sorts of new knowledge that they disseminatedwith their publications.
The modernization of Chinese printing The ﬁrst Protestant publication in
China was Acts of the Apostles 使徒行傳, printed in 1810 with woodblocks.
The characters were rounded, the character grid spacious, and the carving andprinting technology high quality. Robert Morrison was quite satisﬁed with theprinting. He even listed the cost of carving the blocks, buying the paper, andprinting, which came to 521 yuan in total. He also said that the cost was
higher than that for printing ordinary Chinese books. The reason was that he
was a foreigner and the printer had to take on additional risk to do this illegal
job. Of course the printer would ask for more money.41
Because the cost for missionaries to print Chinese materials was high andprinting technology was controlled by the Chinese, Morrison stopped
favoring woodblock printing and began advocating replacing woodblock
printing with Western movable-type printing. Later missionaries accepted thispoint of view and made eﬀorts to apply Western movable-type technology toChinese. In the 1860s William Gamble, of the American Presbyterian Mission
Press, created six sets of Chinese movable type in diﬀerent sizes, establishing
the technical foundation for the modernization of Chinese printing. Before theclose of the nineteenth century, printing with Western-style Chinese movabletype had nearly completely replaced Chinese traditional woodblock printing.
A medium for disseminating the new knowledge The eﬀect of the publi39 Church Missionary Society Archives, C CH O 38, John Fryer to H. Venn, Peking,
March 8, 1864.
40 Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., Board of Foreign Missions, Correspondence andReports, 1833 1911, China, Incoming, vol.7, no.242, W. A. P. Martin, “Second
Annual Report of the Peking Mission for the Year Ending October 1, 1865.”
41 London Missionary Society Archives, China, South China, box 1, folder 2, jacket A,
R. Morrison to the Directors, Macao, 7 January 1811.

Missionary Society Archives and Research on Sino-Western Cultural Exchanges 15

cations of the missionaries far and away exceeded their original intent of
spreading the gospel. Such Western-style publications became a tool for
disseminating the various types of new knowledge. Though most Chinese did
not accept belief in Christianity, they readily accepted the new knowledge thatthe missionaries brought to China. Quite a few books by missionaries
enjoyed a ready market. For example, Richard Q. Way’s An Outline ofGeography 地球說略 was originally intended as a textbook for students. From1847 to 1856 the book was reprinted four times. The ﬁrst printing was only
200 copies, but the fourth printing was greatly increased to 9,000 copies.42 In
1857, after the fourth print run, copies sold briskly. In 1859 annual sales
reached 3,523 copies, leaving only 3,636 copies in the warehouse.43 Thus, injust two years the Ningbo Huahua Bible Bookstore 寧波華花聖經書房 sold
most of its inventory of this book, the only Chinese book that it sold rather
than give away. Because it met Chinese demand, this school textbook becamea bestseller among the populace at large.
Another example is A New Treatise on Anatomy 全體新論, by Benjamin
Hobson, a missionary physician for the London Missionary Society. This was
the ﬁrst Chinese book to systematically introduce modern medical knowledge. For Chinese readers, this work “revealed the hitherto unseen anddiscussed the hitherto undiscussed,” to borrow from Wang Tao 王韜, a late
Qing translator reformer.44 In his 1855/56 annual report for Huiai Hospital 惠愛醫館, which he managed, Hobson asserted that within ﬁve years of the
publication of A New Treatise on Anatomy in 1851, he had the work printed
twice and Chinese publishers had printed the work from newly carved
woodblocks at least three times, that there were more than 10,000 copies incirculation in China, and that this did not include the work’s serialization in
the Hong Kong monthly Chinese Serial 遐邇貫珍 in 1855.45 Chinese buyersof this book not only used the book themselves, but also gave it to others as
a gift. Even some foreigners did this. For example, when Griﬃth John in
October 1858 arrived in Danyang, Jiangsu Province, to spread the gospel, he
42 Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., Board of Foreign Missions, Correspondence andReports, 1833 1911, China, Incoming, vol.3, no.46, Report of the Publishing
Committee, October 1, 1847, and vol.4, no.96, Report of the Press for the YearEnding September 30th 1856.
43 Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., Board of Foreign Missions, Correspondence andReports, 1833 1911, China, Incoming, vol.4, no.242, Report of the Press for theYear Ending October 1st 1859.
44 Wang Tao 王韜, Wang Tao riji 王韜日記 (Wang Tao’s Diary), edited by Fang Xing 方
行 and Tang Zhijun 汤志钧 (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1987), p.34.
45 B. Hobson, Report of the Missionary Hospital in the Western Suburbs of Canton,
under the Care of Dr. Hobson of the London Missionary Society, for 1855 56(Canton: S. Wells Williams, 1856), p.13.

16

Journal of Cultural Interaction in East Asia Vol. 8 2017

gave Hobson’s New Treatise on Anatomy to the local oﬃcial. This oﬃcial,
being delighted with the gift, sent him tea and cakes in return.46
How did missionaries promote Western printing technology to replace
traditional Chinese woodblock printing? How did these Westerners view theirown works? How did they disseminate their works? What was the Chinese
reaction to such works? Missionary society archives have many documents
useful for answering these and similar questions.

Conclusion
Research in the history of Sino-Western cultural exchange, like other ﬁeldsof history, faces two tasks: reconstructing the facts and interpreting thesigniﬁcance and inﬂuence of the facts. Reconstructing the facts needs to be
based on reliable and authentic historical sources. Only then do we have afoundation for interpreting the facts without getting lost in generalities anderrors. Missionary society archives are a treasure-house of ﬁrst-hand historical materials consisting of the thousands upon thousands of documents left
behind by missionaries.
The examples of missionary society archives provided in this paper all
have their value for the historical materials that they contain. Some of these
documents can supplement the omissions of other materials, some can correct
the errors of still other materials, and some are waiting for researchers to
discover and use them. I have reaped many rewards from my use of thesearchives over the years. I am glad to share my experience. Should this experience prove useful to others in the ﬁeld, this will be my greatest reward.

46 London Missionary Society Archives, China, Central China, box 2, folder 2, jacket
B, Griﬃth John to A. Tidman, Shanghai, 6 November 1858.