REPRESENTING THE CHINESE THROUGH A …english.humanities.mcmaster.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2016/10/... · early seventh century when Theophylact Simocatta. 3. gave perhaps the

REPRESENTING THE CHINESE THROUGH A MISSIONARY GAZE:

READING THE 1892-1937 PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE

OF REV. WILLIAM HARVEY GRANT

By JIANGLING XU

A Major Research Project Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial

Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts

McMaster University © Jiangling Xu, August 2013

Major Research Project – Jiangling Xu – McMaster University –Cultural Studies and Critical Theory

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MASTER OF ARTS (2013) McMaster University

(Cultural Studies & Critical Theory) Hamilton, ON

TITLE: Representing the Chinese through A Missionary Gaze: Reading the 1892-1937

Photographic Archive of Rev. William Harvey Grant

AUTHOR: Jiangling Xu

SUPERVISOR: Dr. Mary O’Connor

NUMBER OF PAGES: 62


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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First of all, I would like to thank Dr. Mary O’Connor for her endless encouragement and

instruction throughout the preparation and the completion of this project, whose insight and

suggestions have guided me to overcome the difficulties during the research and writing. I would

also like to thank Dr. Deepali Dewan, curator at Royal Ontario Museum. The full support from

her and the staff of the museum has made this project possible. Special thanks to Dr. Donald

Goellnicht for being the second reader of this paper and Dr. Amber Dean for her suggestion of

reference books about the research of visual culture. Finally, I would thank all the professors and

colleagues at McMaster who offered great guidance and support during the last year, and my

supportive friends and parents back in China.


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CONTENTS

I. Introduction: Representation of Chinese People and Mission Photography

II. Historical Context: William Harvey Grant’s Honan Mission and His Gaze

A. William Harvey Grant and the Honan Mission

B. Grant’s Canadian Gaze

III. A Missionary Paradigm: Constructing the Representations of Chinese People

IV. Representations of Chinese People: Themes and Manifestations

A. Laborers and Helpers

B. Worship and Idolatry

C. Patients and Medical Assistants

D. Students and Schools

E. Construction of Christian Community

F. Portraiture

V. Conclusion

VI. Appendix


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I. Introduction: Representation of Chinese People and Mission Photography

More than two hundred years ago, George Macartney1 admitted, “Nothing could be more

fallacious than to judge of China by any European standard” (44). This claim still stays true even

in our current world of change, when there are multiple and contradictory representations of

Chinese people. If we take representation as “an essential part of the process by which meaning

is produced and exchanged between members of a culture” (Hall, “The Work of Representation”

15), we would recognize that the various images of Chinese people constructed by the West2

necessarily reflect disparate cultural and historical backgrounds. Acknowledging the nature of

representation, then, leads us to investigate this process of meaning construction that involves

language, signs and images: a dynamic process that may extend over a thousand years.

The origin of Western images of China and Chinese people could be traced back to the

early seventh century when Theophylact Simocatta3 gave perhaps the first detailed and coherent

written account of China and Chinese people in History (Mackerras 11). China was portrayed as

a rich and powerful nation: “[Chinese people] have become owners of a great abundance of

silver and gold as a result of their large and advantageous trading” (Simocatta 192). At that time,

China was considered to be at one of the high points of its civilization – the Tang Dynasty (618 -

907), a golden age with a thriving commerce. Since then, following the age of active Sino-

European contact in the thirteenth century, Western images of Chinese people were created in

books, travelogues, drawings, engravings and other literal and visual forms. From the laudatory

account of China and its civilization in the famous book The Travels of Marco Polo, to the

1 George Macartney (1737-1806) was a British diplomat, the first Envoy of Britain to China in 1792. 2 The “West” in this paper is a broad generalization for the countries of Western Europe, North America and Australasia. 3 Theophylact Simocatta is a Byzantine historian in the sixth and seventh century. In History, China is mentioned as “Taugast”. See “Book Seven”, The History of Theophylact Simocatta: An English Translation with Introduction (1986), 179-208.


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prosperous and “peace-loving” China described by Matteo Ricci, rosy images of China have

been painted by Western travelers, merchants and missionaries. However, Colin Mackerras

remarked, starting from the middle of the eighteenth century, “the balance between positive and

negative images shifted decisively away from the former and towards the latter” (39). This

change occurred when the Europeans gained imperial power and confidence from the Industrial

Revolution and observed the declining China (the Qing Dynasty, 1644 -1912) from a totally

different perspective. In John Barrow’s 4 Travels in China, Chinese people then were portrayed

as cunning and dirty, whose general character “…is a strange compound of pride and meanness,

of affected gravity and real frivolousness, of refined civility and gross indelicacy” (187). The

changing literary account of Chinese people was further enriched by visual depictions with the

advent of the camera.

With the signing of treaties between China and Western imperial powers in the 1840s

after the First Opium War, China was opened to European and American photographers, who

came along with the imperial army and companies to produce their own visual images of China

(Bennett ix-xii). Commercial studios operated by Western photographers emerged and later

proliferated in Hong Kong and other major treaty ports like Tianjin, Hankou, Guangzhou and

Shanghai. Those Western photographers took photos of the landscapes, buildings, street scenes,

and Chinese people in special costumes or engaging in various activities. But their portrayal of

the people and the places at that time was highly influenced by the prevailing Positivism,5 a

4 John Barrow (1764-1848) was a British statesman on the first British Embassy to China from 1792-1794. 5 Positivism was firstly described in The Course of Positive Philosophy by Auguste Comte (1798–1857). According to the definition of Positivism in The Oxford English Dictionary, it is “A system of philosophy elaborated by Auguste Comte from 1830 onwards, which recognizes only positive facts and observable phenomena, with the objective relations of these and the laws that determine them, abandoning all inquiry into causes or ultimate origins, as belonging to the theological and metaphysical stages of thought, held to be now superseded…” (Auguste Comte xiv). See also Auguste Comte‘s Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings, edited by Gertrud Lenzer, 1998.


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philosophy that emphasizes the authenticity of scientific knowledge and truth about the world.

As John Berger comments, photography developed along with positivism since its invention in

1839: “What sustained them [photography and positivism] all as practices was the belief that

observable quantifiable facts, recorded by scientists and experts, would one day offer man such a

total knowledge about nature and society that he would be able to order them both” (99). Since

the invention of the camera and the technology of photography both emphasized the objectivity

of the machine and the process of photo-producing, photography was regarded as a method of

producing objective representations through a mechanical recording device rather than through

the subjective eyes of historians and other researchers. In this context of positivist ideology, a

photographic genre of “native types” was firmly established especially in colonial Africa and

India from the middle of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. “This photography

of native types drew on nineteenth-century anthropological notions of race and human evolution”

(Prochaska 263) and reduced people to certain kinds of types by separating them from their

environment, tending to regard the photographed subjects as “a generic type” instead of

“individuals” (263).

[New paragraph]The trend of portraying “native types” also influenced Western

photographers in China. Just as the stereotypical portrait of indigenous African people

constructed them as “savage” and “wild,” certain distinctive features of Chinese people and their

lives were emphasized and promoted as their typical representations in “native types”

photographs. Photographic themes such as “foot-binding,” “coolies” and “execution scenes”

thrived. This genre of “native types,” to some extent, is derived from a sense of superiority that

was closely associated with the Western colonial and imperial powers, and Western science and

technology, and reflected the views of the Western audience of that era. Visual representations of


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Chinese people, including those “native types”, could be found in many influential photographic

volumes such as John Thomson’s Illustrations of China and its people (1873-74) 6, Spence &

Worswick’s Imperial China: Photographs 1850-1912 (1978), Burton Beers’s China in Old

Photographs,1860-1910 (1978), Sidney D. Gamble’s China, 1917-19327: Photographs of land

and its people (1988) and L. Carrington Goodrich’s The Face of China as Seen by

Photographers & Travelers, 1860-1912 (1998). However, most of those catalogues hardly

include articles or detailed study on the construction and meaning of those representations,

though John Thomson did give an account of people and the places along with the images.

Rather, they mainly provide a rich collection of visual manifestations. Other books or articles on

Chinese photography focus on the analysis of the particular styles of some well-established

photographers such as Felice Beato8 and Milton Miller9, or on the history of a particular period

in early photography in China. For example, in the recent catalogue Brush & Shutter: Early

Photography in China (2011) [published?] by the Getty Research Institute, Wu Hung’s

“Inventing a ‘Chinese’ Portrait style in Early Photography: The Case of Milton Miller”

especially explored the characteristics of Miller’s studio portraits of Chinese officials, merchants

and women, and Edwin K. Lai’s “The History of the Camera Obscura and Early Photography in

China” illustrates in brief the photographic surveys of Chinese society and people along with the

6 John Thomson (1837-1921) was a pioneering Scottish photographer who operated a commercial studio in Hong Kong in the 1860s. He was one of the first Western photographers to China to document its people and landscape. He published books including Foochow and the River Min (1873), Illustrations of China and its people (1873-74), and Through China with a Camera (1898). 7 Sidney D. Gamble (1890-1968) was a social economist and photographer who traveled to China four times between 1908 and 1932 to make social-economic surveys. See also the photographic collection of Sidney D. Gamble collection at Duke University (http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/gamble/). 8 Felice Beato (1832-1909) was an Italian–British photographer who came to China as the war correspondent with Anglo-French Allied Forces in 1860. He is known for his portraits, panoramas of landscapes and battle scenes. See also Of battle and beauty: Felice Beato's photographs of China (1999). 9 Milton M. Miller (1830-1899), an American photographer active in Canton and Hong Kong in the 1860s, was famous for his portraits of Chinese people and landscape. See also the introduction of Miller in Terry Bennett’s History of Photography in Chin: Western Photographers 1861-1879 (2010).

http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/gamble/


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invasion of China by foreign powers. The theme of the visual representation of Chinese people

has been partially but not fully explored.

In addition, the visual images covered by those books were taken mainly by Western

commercial photographers, correspondents, travelers or sociologists. It is worth noticing that

early photo-takers in China also included missionaries from Europe and North America, who took

photographs of China and its people during their mission activities. As T. Jack Thompson, a

historian and researcher in missionary photography in Africa points out, mission photography

developed along with the proliferation of Christian missionary societies and the movement of

overseas evangelism in the nineteenth century when missionaries began to create images of the

places and the local people with the advent of the camera (2). Regarded as a way to record the

missionary endeavors, the interaction with people, and the experience of the surrounding

communities, mission photography gradually obtained an important position in the research field

of historical photographs. The volumes of images increased accordingly and the public

repositories grew in large numbers with the activities of foreign missions. Gradually, rich

resources became available for academic research on visual representations in a variety of

missionary regions. Those photographs were taken with different agendas and purposes, by a

range of levels of technical skill, and of distinctive styles. The archived visual images reflect not

only the physical presence of the missionary power and influence – the churches, compounds,

settlements, hospitals and schools, but also the cultural impact brought along with the

introduction of Christian practices, Western science, technology and ideology as shown in the

transformation of indigenous people’s life styles and their education.

Those images offer researchers great materials to examine the extraordinary views on

people, places and the development of society, and present a precious resource to study the past


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and interpret its influences. Scholarly interest has been drawn to large mission photography

archives such as the International Mission Photography Archive10 for its easy accessibility, large

collection of images, and the efficient support of a digital database. Despite the fact that it is

comprised of various Protestant and Catholic missionary collections in Britain, Norway,

Germany, France, Switzerland, and the United States, it does not include the archives from

Canada, whose missionary endeavor was an important component of the foreign mission of

North America in the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Furthermore, research on mission

photography has mainly focused on geographic terrains in Africa, America and the Pacific Ocean,

and particular interest has been put on the Basel Mission Archive11. T. Jack Thompson offers a

careful reassessment of missionary photographers, their photographs, and their African and

European audiences12; Christraud M. Geary compares missionary photographs of Africa in

private and public domains to broaden the understanding of those images; Joleen Pietrzak’s

study on Africa asserts dominant and subjugating social relationships between the missionary

and the Swazi people; Kim Greenwell analyzes photographs in British Columbia, while Helen

Gardner and Jude Philp study photographs taken by George Brown during his mission in New

Britain. Other researches explore stereotyping. For example, Anne Maxwell investigates the

historical practice of producing stereotyped spectacles of colonized peoples at the great

exhibitions and in colonial photography, and relates it to the shaping of European and settler

identities.

10 International Mission Photography Archive includes historical missionary photographs from the 1860s to 1960s provided by different archives centered in Europe and North America. See website: http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15799coll123 11 The Basel Mission was a Christian missionary society founded in 1815. It has been active in Africa mainly in Ghana and Cameroon, in Asia (India and China), and Latin America since the 1820s. Its archive contains over 30000 images, 6700 maps, sketches and plans. See www.bmarchives.org. 12 T. Jack Thompson’s book Light on Darkness?: Missionary Photography of Africa in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (2012) gives an analysis and assessment of the missionary photographs taken by British missionaries to sub-Saharan Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15799coll123

http://www.bmarchives.org/


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In view of this research, attention paid to the photographic archives about foreign

missions to China is comparatively little, despite the fact that China was one of the most

important destinations of foreign missions: by the end of 1898, there were over fifty protestant

missionary societies from Europe and North America in China (“Statistics of Protestant

Missionary Societies in China for 1898” 144-145). Although there are photographic catalogues

like Lost China: The Photographs of Leone Nani (2004)13 that give a visual illustration of China

and Chinese people from the perspective of a missionary, articles on the detailed reading of those

missionary photographs are rare. This may be partially attributed to the availability of archives in

different regions. Even though there are some public archives about the Canadian foreign

missions to China, the fragility of historical photographs, their unorganized state and

inaccessibility limit the possibility of the research. For instance, the United Church of Canada

Archives includes more than four thousand photo prints of the foreign mission to China, but only

a small portion of them have been digitized and made available online for research.14

There is one exception. In the Far Eastern collection of the Royal Ontario Museum

(ROM), Toronto, there is a photographic archive of Rev. William Harvey Grant15. This archive

is newly donated by the descendants of Rev. W. H. Grant in 2012 and includes 1,382

photographs and photographic material of China and India.16 Comprised of albums, loose

photographs, glass plate negatives, cellulose negatives, postcards, typed and handwritten notes

and memos, and even the boxes and envelopes that were used to contain the negatives and prints, 13 Father Leone Nani (1880-1935) was an Italian missionary of the Pontifical Foreign Mission Institute (PIME) who lived in China in 1903-1914. The book Lost in China provides portraits of Chinese people, architecture and landscape. 14 An online search of digital images via the key word “China” in the Graphic Database (http://archives.united-church.ca/graphics.htm) provided by the United Church of Canada Archives showed that there are 4572 records, but most of them do not have thumbnail images or digital images. 15 William Harvey Grant (W. H. Grant, 1865-1952) was the son of Rev. Alexander Grant, a Presbyterian minister at St. Mary’s. Grant was a Canadian missionary sent to Honan in China during 1890s-1930s by the Presbyterian Church in Canada. 16 Grant stayed in India for two years after the Boxer Rebellion (1899) in China broke out.


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the archive covers a period of over three decades, ranging from 1892 to 1937. If we compare it

with other missionary archives in missionary societies, libraries and museums, this may not be a

large collection since it contains only the works of one amateur photographer.17 But the staff at

ROM have taken great effort in maintaining and scanning all those prints, negatives and

materials, and successfully have turned them into a precious digital collection for further

research. Besides, this archive manifests some historical and cultural features that make it a

valuable addition to the research of missionary photographs by including the stories of the

Canadian foreign mission and providing visual details for specific analysis of the photographic

representations of Chinese people.

II. Historical Context: William Harvey Grant’s Honan Mission and His Gaze

A. William Harvey Grant and the Honan Mission

The start of the nineteenth century saw a resurgence of a world-wide zeal of

evangelization: “In the years 1885 and 1886 there was developed in the colleges of Great Britain

and America a remarkable interest in Foreign Mission work” (Gregg 224). In particular, the

Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, since its foundation in 1886, influenced a

great number of student volunteers in the United States and Canada, recruiting them for

missionary service abroad. At that time, “upwards of 1,800 students signed a declaration that

they are ‘willing and desirous, God permitting, to be foreign missionaries’” (224). William

Harvey Grant was among them, sincere and passionate, eager to devote himself to the cause of

foreign mission.

17 Other large missionary archives are Missionary Archive in SOAS (The School of Oriental and African Studies of University of London, which claims to be the largest collection of Christian missionary archives in the UK, is comprised of collections from various sources and includes materials like correspondence, journals, minutes, photographs), archives at the Council for World Mission, missionary archive at the State Library of New South Wales, etc.


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Brought up in a Christian home in Ontario, Grant was highly influenced by his parents to

view the heathen world as the place worthy of a whole life’s investment. He was furthermore

fascinated with the foreign mission described in missionary literature and the first-hand tales by

other missionaries. Out of the great interest in foreign mission, he became a member of the

Student Missionary Volunteer Band at its inception in 1887 (“Our College” 111-112). After

being on the volunteer list for many years, in 1892 when Grant graduated from Knox College, he

was finally chosen by the Foreign Mission Committee of the Presbyterian Church in Canada as a

missionary to Honan: “He was ordained and designated for the field by the Presbytery of

Stratford, on the 26th of July, and [was] expected to reach Honan before the end of the year”

(Gregg 229).

Grant, then at the age of 27, embarked on his first missionary journey to China in

September. He was expected to enlarge the “missionary Colony” in Honan (“Our College” 108),

the first destination of the foreign mission to China, where the Canadian missionaries had started

their services four years before. In 1887, Honan mission was launched when the Alumni

Association of Knox College and the Missionary Association of Queen’s University proposed an

offer of college missionaries to the Foreign Mission Committee of the Presbyterian Church in

Canada (“Thirteenth Sederunt” 171). In “a vision of the vast stretches of China peopled by

millions who had not heard the Gospel” (Grant, North of the Yellow River 3), two missionaries,

Mr. Jonathan Goforth of Knox College and Mr. James Frazer Smith of Queen’s University, were

appointed as the vanguard in service of the church. Honan, a northern inland province of China,

was adopted as the mission field.

Later, in view of the development of the mission stations, additional missionaries were

sent to join the Honan group since the first dispatch in 1888. By the time Grant first landed in


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China, the Presbytery of Honan had been established and mission centers secured in different

small towns. Originally as the companion to Mr. Donald MacGillivray, Grant then worked as a

permanent clerk and secretary in Honan, managing the finances and organizing the mission

stations. During his service there, Grant recorded the work and life in words, sending back letters

and articles to journals such as The Knox College Monthly and Presbyterian Magazine, Monthly

Letter Leaflet of Woman's Foreign Missionary Society, and The Presbyterian Record to report

and share the development of the Honan mission. At the same time, as an amateur photographer,

he captured his experience and encounters with Chinese people with photographs, and mailed

them to his friends back at home, trying to “give one a very vivid idea of some of the phases of

Chinese life” (“Our College” 617). All of these resulted in the collection now stored at ROM.

B. Grant’s Canadian Gaze

W. H. Grant’s particular gaze distinguishes his photographic collection from other

archives because of the historical and cultural contexts in which the photographs were taken.

First of all, in the nineteenth century, as a federal dominion recently developed out of British

colonization, Canada was seeking its own power to be independent. Its contact with China did

not involve any military actions. At the same time, the Presbyterian foreign mission in Honan

was carried out first in forms of humanitarian aid to relieve the great famine in Honan caused by

the Yellow River flood in 1887: the churches raised funds for famine relief and Goforth took the

sum of money directly to China. This humanitarian feature made the Honan mission, to a certain

degree, distinct from those that were closely associated with imperial actions and great powers

such as the British and Europeans. It further suggests that, despite its language of a “missionary

Colony,” the Honan project and Grant’s photographic collection might not entirely be


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understood through the commonly assumed colonial paradigm of past analyses (such as those of

the missionary photographs in Africa).

In addition, Grant’s photographic collection depicts China and Chinese people in an

inland region of China. Inland China was not open to foreigners until China’s signing of multiple

treaties with the French and British after the Second Opium War in the 1860s. After that, the

entire country was opened up to missionary activity but was mostly limited to Catholic missions.

Despite that, unlike the practice in African colonial countries, the Chinese government still

maintained partial political autonomy and governance of a majority sector of the local population.

Under such control, interior China still remained much less affected by the missions sent by

different imperial powers, while indigenous people held a hostile attitude towards “foreign

devils” (Western people). It was only in the 1880s that Protestant Christian missions expanded

rapidly with James Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission18. Nearly at the same time, the

Presbyterian Church in Canada sent out its first foreign mission to China, taking Honan as the

first destination in 1888.19

Located in central China, Honan province used to be the capital of several dynasties as a

cultural, economical, and political center: “For its climate, productions, literary reputation,

historical associations, and variety of scenery, this province takes a prominent rank. The earliest

records of the Black-haired race [the Chinese] refer to this region, and the struggles for dominion

among feudal and imperial armies occurred in its plains” (William 98). With this historic

heritage, this province was proclaimed “[to] be third in hostility to the foreigner, Hunan and

18 James Hudson Taylor (1832-1905) was a British Protestant Christian missionary to China. He established the missionary society: the China Inland Mission, in 1865 for the purpose of evangelization in China. 19 In Donald MacGillivrary’s “Missionary: Honan, The Garden of China”, an overview of Honan province and the reason why Honan was chosen by the Church as the destination of the first college mission are provided. See it in The Knox College Monthly and Presbyterian Magazine, Vol. 7, no. 4, Feb. 1888, 223-228.


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Kiang-si20 coming first” (MacGillivrary 227). But there appeared to be different attitudes held by

the people. The missionaries claimed that ordinary people exhibited “universal sentiment of

kindliness” to Christian missionaries regarding the humanitarian aid the missionaries brought as

a relief to the victims of the famine and flood (226) while the officials and gentry acted

otherwise. With those elements in consideration, the missionaries took it as a challenge and

opportunity to carry out preaching activities among the indigenous people there, whom they

believed were “typical Chinese” because “as each province has its own outstanding distinctions

and peculiarities, the same holds good of the provincials” (Mackenzie 10). This reflects Western

missionaries’ general perception of Chinese people at that time. Just as Arthur H. Smith21,

another famous missionary, wrote in his book Chinese Characteristics in 1894, “As the

topography of a district can be much better understood in the country than in the city, so it is

with the characteristics of the people” (14). Missionaries regarded the inland mission as a chance

to find out the common features of Chinese people. Although such perspective on “typical

Chinese” is arguable, it reveals that Grant’s portrayal of local people may succeed in going

beyond the photographic representations of Chinese people by European and American

photographers in coastal cities.

In view of the above, this paper provides the first reading of this particular photographic

archive. It establishes a “missionary paradigm” under which the photographs were constructed.

By situating the reading of the photographs in particular historical, cultural and social context, it

looks for potential meanings in these scenes of perhaps everyday life of the Chinese in Honan in

that period.

20 Jiangxi (江西) is one of China’s inland provinces located in the southeast. 21 Arthur Henderson Smith (1845-1932), a missionary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. He spent about fifty-four years in China and wrote some influential books about China, including Chinese Characteristics (1894), Village Life in China (1899) and China in Convulsion (1901).


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III. A Missionary Paradigm: Constructing the Representations of Chinese People

Allan Sekula once commented, “The photograph, as it stands alone, presents merely the

possibility of meaning. Only by its embeddedness in a concrete discourse situation can the

photograph yield a clear semantic outcome” (91). Rather than regarding photographs merely as a

“reflection of truth” or as “historical documents,” now we tend to interpret the meaning of

photography with different approaches: the representations offered by photographs. Regarding

this, we once again should be aware that representation is a meaning construction process

involving the use of language, signs and images. Foucault’s arguments about the production of

knowledge and meaning through discourse provide us the perspective to analyze the elements

involved in the construction and understanding of representation. For him, discourse is “about

the production of knowledge through language. But … since all social practices entail meaning,

and meanings shape and influence what we do – our conduct – all practices have a discursive

aspect” (Hall, “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power” 291). Therefore, within discourse,

meaning is constructed: “nothing has any meaning outside of discourse” (Foucault 1972 qtd. in

Hall, “The Work of Representation”45). Starting from this constructionist approach, I propose

that Grant’s images are taken under what I call “a missionary paradigm” which is constructed

under particular historical, social and cultural contexts. The concept of paradigm “contains a

‘world-view,’ a set of statements which define its subject-matter...” (Hamilton 78), and thus offer

a way to understand the commonly shared perspective by missionaries on their mission and their

encounter with “heathen” people.

Missionaries of Honan mission shared the same vision with other Christian missions. As

Barnett argues, Christian missionaries imagined a common humanity – a fundamental unity of

humankind, based on which they carried out their foreign missions to cross geographical, ethical,


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and cultural barriers (64). That is to say, “The missionary project was only sustainable if there was

a belief in the possibility of assimilation and the fundamental unity of humanity” (Stanley 172).

With this belief, the missionaries aimed at not only bringing the Gospel, but also introducing

modern institutions such as schools and medical centers, all of which were based on the

development of Western ideology of education and technology. In doing so, they attempted to

provide indigenous populations the opportunity to get access to civilization (modernity) and

Christianity. Missionaries combined the responsibility of saving the souls with more concrete

goals to save the people living in dire circumstances, assuming on themselves the duty “to

exercise their influence for the removal of gross oppression and injustice…” and “protect certain

fundamental rights of the population …in an apolitical manner” (Barnett 73). Such efforts

involved the ethics of emancipation and care, the centerpiece of humanitarianism. In that sense,

the missionary paradigm could also be regarded as a humanitarian paradigm.

This missionary/humanitarian paradigm is composed of three key elements: the main

endeavors of the missionaries in Honan – the evangelical, the medical and the educational.

Evangelical work was the “spinal column of the whole mission system” (MacKay 17), which

includes various activities like preaching, worshiping and praising, gospel selling, organizing

station classes, training local pastors, baptism, etc. The other two parts of missionary works were

the medical and educational. Dispensaries, hospitals, and Christian schools were gradually

founded in Honan. Those endeavors carry the characteristics of humanitarian actions that aim to

ensure long-term development of local people and society. With the medical technology and

educational teaching methods brought by the medical and educational workers, the missionary

concepts of development and modernization were conveyed to indigenous people. Moreover,

through their missionary programs, evidence of the efficacy of their approach to development


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assistance was provided to the government. From this perspective, the Presbytery of Honan acted

as a non-government agency and performed social functions such as elementary education and

basic health services, which are usually regarded as the responsibility of the government. The

role of caring for people’s daily needs of basic health and education, in this case, was assumed

by the missionaries of the Presbytery of Honan. Those three key components: evangelistic,

medical and educational, constructed the vision that Grant took in his interaction with the local

people, and in consequence formed three main angles from which he took the images.

Under such a missionary paradigm, my reading of the images is based on the analysis of

elements in the production of meaning: producer, viewer, the historical and social context, and

the cultural and social codes and conventions (Hall, “The Work of Representation” 49). As

mentioned above, the producer W. H. Grant took certain missionary perspectives towards his

“subjects” – the Chinese people. The viewer, in this project, is more complex. It can refer to the

Western audience that Grant originally targeted when he took photos and sent home

documentation of his mission. It can also refer to me, the one who looks at the images and

produces my own interpretation. Furthermore, it can be extended to the possible readers of this

paper. By situating the reading of Grant’s photographs in specific cultural, historical and

economic context and exploring those elements mentioned above, this paper hopes to explore

and find Sekula’s “possible meanings” of the images. It is true that Grant’s previous knowledge

and understanding of China and Chinese people would have been inevitably affected by the

Western social, cultural and political environment at that time. In addition, his background and

perspective as a Western missionary – the missionary paradigm – unquestionably influenced his

framing of images in the photo-taking process. Without denying those limits, this project still


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regards Grant’s photo archive as a precious chance to see the Chinese people from this

missionary gaze, one that has not been fully explored in the research of visual representation.

IV. Missionary Representation of Chinese People: Themes and Manifestations

The scope of Grant’s photographic portrayal of people and places, though influenced by

the three components under the missionary paradigm, was not fully constrained by them. Those

photographs exhibit a variety of themes and present multiple manifestations: landscape, fairs and

celebrations, the family, the street, peddlers and craftsmen, habitations, mission school class

portraits, recreations, and so on. But this paper, with its main focus on the representation of

Chinese people, covers only part of those themes due to the limit of space. Under such

circumstance, it centers on the themes that are closely associated with the missionary paradigm

and tries to provide a reading that could entail a good understanding of the missionary images.

A. Laborers and helpers

For the missionaries in Honan, preaching to people, selling Gospels on the street, and

travelling from one place to another were almost their daily activities (Grant, “Jottings From

Honan” 11). It was during the tour and the daily preaching that W. H. Grant first got to know

indigenous people.

Figure 1 is a group photo of Grant and some Chinese boatmen on their way from

Tientsin22 to Honan. Judging from the date when this photo was taken, it should be Grant’s first

arrival in China as he departed from Toronto in September of that year, 1892. Honan, as its name

literally suggests, was located to the “South of the River” – the Yellow River. As there was no 22 Tianjin (天津) is a city in northern China. It was opened as a treaty port to foreign trade after the signing of “The Treaty of Tientsin” in 1858. In the 1890s, foreign powers including Britain, France, Japan, Germany, Russia, etc, established concessions in Tientsin.


21

railway in China at that time, Honan was easily connected with other provinces by way of water.

Boats became the most convenient transportation tool for missionaries to get access to Honan

from Tientsin.

Figure 1. “Boatmen who took me (W.H.Grant) to Honan from Tientsin, Nov.8, 1892”.

Accession # 2011.79.79, Royal Ontario Museum Collection.

As one of the most significant treaty ports in China, Tientsin was the center for trade and

commerce. European and American businessman and companies employed Chinese people to

meet their need of cheap labor. Therefore, a large number of people gathered in Tientsin to find

opportunities of employment. Most of them fled there as refugees because of flood or famine at

home. They depended on their own labor to find means of support and endured severe living

conditions. For the dire working conditions, the boatmen were labeled as “coolies.” This word,

as Sarah Fraser explains,


22

…signals a stereotypical, racialized construction of laborers that circulated from

India to China, to the United States, and back to East Asia. Its etymology as a

racial slur can be traced to colonial India, adapted from Tamil (kuh) or ….to

signal low-wage, itinerant laborers. (93)

Those boatmen struggled to make a living by physical toil even in bitter-cold winter as Arthur H.

Smith describes: “the boatmen of Tientsin, whose business is spoiled by the closing of the rivers,

take to the swift ice-sled, by which means it is possible to be transported rapidly at a minimum

cost” (30). Thousands of them lived on the boats that carried products from Tientsin to Honan.

Their perceived passivity, carrying so to speak the large burden of society, contributed to a

denigrated image of the Chinese laboring class as “coolies.” Even more, the negative illustration

of the “coolie” was gradually associated with a perceived ineptness of Chinese people. For

Westerners, “the blank look on their faces …[indicates] that they are not a thinking lot. The

lower class of Chinese are not very intelligent. They work with their hands instead of their

brains” (qtd. in Fraser 94).23

In the above photograph taken by Grant, the torn and patched clothing of the boatmen

seems to echo the repeated theme of the poor and the suffering that was generally accepted by

the Western audience, including the missionary societies. Such visual components easily lead the

audience to link this subject in a semi-colonial country to the need of a savior. But surprisingly,

those boatmen, who were regarded as living as the lowest class of society, exhibit an uplifting

figure. All of them are attentive, staring straight at the lens without any fear. Most of them smile

and pose in a very relaxed gesture, sitting or standing on the boat. Although in the 1850s

Western dress and hairstyles had been introduced into China, working people still dressed in

23 See also James Ricalton, A Study of Chinese Faces, Stereograph, ca. 1860 – ca.1939, published by Keystone View Company, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2003.R.22)


23

gowns and kept their pigtails. But still, these laborers seem to be attracted to new scenes and

technologies. Perhaps the photo-taking action and the encounter with a foreign missionary made

this tour an exciting and different one for them. Mr. Goforth, standing seriously to the far left of

the picture, is obviously not the focus of this photograph. Those boatmen occupy the vital

position and take the whole attention by their suntanned faces and vivid expressions. Their

physical and emotional situation captured in the photo seems to indicate that, despite the difficult

living conditions, they were very energetic and held an optimistic attitude towards their life. This

image, rather than showing the dire working conditions of “coolies,” presents another aspect of

the boatmen’s normal life, that is to say, the life of the laboring class in China. In addition, it

seems to represent an image of “happy laborers” who were glad to serve even for low wages.

This “happy” scene invites us to realize the subjectivity of the boatmen, regarding them not only

as miserable objects reduced by the harsh living environment.

Figure 2. “Donald MacGillivray (2nd from the left) and Mr. Wang Feng Cho (Grant’s Chinese teacher, 3rd

from the left) with their outfit on large barrow, 1896”. Accession #: 2011.79.422, Royal Ontario Museum

Collection.


24

The boatmen, as well as the carters (see Figure 2) who carried the outfit and the

missionaries on barrows, were necessary and important companions to missionaries like Grant.

In contrast to the fully communicating and joyous faces of the boatmen, the seemingly blank

faces of the carters convey a sense of their hard work: the carter at the back seems to be

straining to push and the one at the front, while pulling the cart hard, pauses for the photo to be

taken. He frowns slightly and stares at the camera, a little annoyed for the interruption of the

effort. Obviously, a carter’s work was laborious due to the structure of the vehicle, weight of the

missionaries and the outfit, the rough and rutty country lanes, and the long tour, which may take

several days. Although the postures of the carters suggest that once the missionaries commence

their journey by carts, they are at the mercy of their carters (J. F. Smith 83): the carters control

the time and pace of the tour, the image does not show a dominating relationship between the

carters and the missionaries. Unlike Arthur H. Smith’s description: “Cooks, coolies, gardeners,

carters – all agree in distrusting our judgment, and in placing supreme reliance upon their own”

(76), and James Frazer Smith’s remark: “he [the carter] in a class by himself, and has no little

conceit in his own importance” (83), no conceit and distrust are evident in the image. The

relationship between them may be revealed by the poses of the missionaries and the carters.

Travelling by barrow is never a comfortable journey considering the conditions of the

trails and the structure of the vehicle. But Rev. MacGillivray sits sedately on it, folding his two

hands, leaning against the outfits and stretching his two legs forward. This relaxed body

language indicates that he is ready for the coming journey and is confident about it. The carters

are making their move forward. Their readiness may come from the agreement on the destination

they are going to, or a kind of trust and mutually dependent relationship built between them

through travels. As this one-wheel cart requires the cooperation of the sitters and the carters to


25

keep a good balance in order to move forward, it is important that both of them should be fully

aware of their responsibilities and their limits. Therefore, the image implies a more subtle and

complicated relationship between the missionaries and the carters, other than the one usually

observed between the employer and the employee.

Another important companion to those foreign missionaries like Grant, as shown in

Figure 2 and Figure 3, is the Chinese language teacher. From the beginning of the Honan mission,

the study of Chinese language was regarded as a vital part in their preaching. They believed, “If

the Gospel is to be given to the Honanese it must be through the medium of their own language”

(Mackenzie 70). Therefore, new missionaries to Honan would first study Chinese for a period of

time under the instruction of a local Chinese teacher. As the acquiring of a working knowledge

of Chinese involves assiduous study and constant use with local people, the Chinese teacher

often accompanied the foreign missionary all the way in their teaching and preaching.

Figure 3. “Mr. Wang Feng Cho, W. H. Grant's Chinese teacher in Grant’s room, Chu Wang, 1894”.

Accession #: 2011.79.20, Royal Ontario Museum Collection.


26

Figure 3 is a depiction of Grant’s Chinese teacher Mr. Wang Feng Cho in Grant’s room.

It is hard to tell Mr. Wang’s previous occupation and his social background (no detailed account

is provided by Grant). But at that time, being a teacher of foreigners and teaching them Chinese

required a good educational background. Traditionally, under the influence of Confucianism,

Chinese intellectuals struggled to become administrative officials by taking civil service

examinations. Those who failed in the examinations later became private tutors or teachers as

they did not have the skills to work as farmers in this agricultural society. In the 1890s, with the

military defeats and the introduction of Western science and knowledge, this imperial

examination system was strongly challenged and the reformers in Chinese government called for

its abolition. Chinese intellectuals were facing a hard time finding occupations to support

themselves. In view of the rising demand of Chinese learning by foreigners, some Chinese

intellectuals became teachers of foreigners.

In traditional Chinese society, a teacher enjoyed a high social status and demanded high

respect from the student. As one of the Chinese Five Classics of the Confucian canon Li Ki (The

Classic of Rites) explains, “In pursuing the course of learning, the difficulty is in securing the

proper reverence for the master. When that is done, the course (which he inculcates) is regarded

with honor” (88). The status of the teacher could not be challenged by his students. In this image,

the central position of this teacher seemed to indicate the importance of this figure. He is sitting

on the chair, turning his body to the direction of the windows. With this position, it seems to

imply that his attention had been diverted by something outside of the window from his opened

book. However, details of his gesture exposed that this image is far from a display of a natural

scenario in the room. The whole portrait is more like one taken in a commercial studio if we

consider his gesture and the light. He was sitting facing the source of light in a very relaxed pose


27

– sitting astride. The light allows a good and clear depiction of his face, traditional Chinese

costume and gesture, and further creates a particular aura of orientalism. But sitting with legs

crossed was more regarded as an impolite and disgraceful gesture for a teacher at that time,

either in the public or private spheres, because his every conduct set the example and influences

the students who looked upon him and emulated him. The proper way for a Chinese was to sit

squarely. The composition of this image reflects a Chinese teacher in a typical environment for

study and seems to simulate more the Western tradition of portrait style (see Figure 4), “in which

figures were positioned in an idealized setting that suggested something of their usual work or

social position” (Maxwell 100), other than a Chinese one24.

Figure 4. “Portrait of Grant, 1890s”. Accession #: 2011.79.54, Royal Ontario Museum Collection.

24 More detailed analysis of portraiture in part 4: Representations of Chinese People: Themes and Manifestations, section F: Portraiture.


28

The combination of a typical oriental figure with Western style invites us to think about

the possible intricate relationship between Western students (missionaries) and their Chinese

teachers, which may involve conflicts of values: maintaining Chinese traditions and accepting

Western modernity. It seems that, on one hand, this Chinese language instructor tried to defend

his superior status as a teacher – a dominant role in the field of study, and on the other, he had to

accept the ideas of his Western student, who brought the new technology indicated by the camera

and the photo-taking. This conflict between Chinese traditions and Western modern ideology and

technology also existed in religion.

B. Worship and Idolatry

The acquisition of a sound working knowledge of Chinese enabled the missionaries to

preach the Gospel in their daily contact with people. They preached to indigenous people as

often as possible. The missionaries in Honan soon discovered the elements of Chinese people’s

everyday lives. Chinese people tended to live in villages and towns where they liked to

congregate “in great numbers at theatrical entertainments, markets and idol festivals”

(Mackenzie 72). In view of this, the missionaries considered those places as perfect occasions to

meet people and sell Gospels.

Figure 5 is a scene of preaching at Hsun Hsien25 Fair, one of the most important events

that the missionaries in Honan attended. Hsun Hisen was the centre of a great annual fair for

Chinese people to worship and do business (MacGillivray 244). Firstly, the mission workers

attended the festival only to sell books and do some quiet work among the assembled crowds

(Mackenzie 137). As the Christian converts increased and the community enlarged, a preaching

booth was set up at the fair to attract the crowd: “The Mission has attended this fair every year, 25 Hsun Hsien (Xun Xian 浚县) was located in northern Honan.


29

latterly with a strong band of voluntary native helpers, and many converts now on the rolls tell

how they first heard the Gospel there. Our experience here and at numerous other great fairs is

that such work is very fruitful” (MacGillivray 244). In an account of the endeavors at the fair,

Secretary of Foreign Mission Committee R. P. Mackay says, “Last year [1918] several

missionaries, accompanied by sixty Chinese Christians, spent twelve days preaching the Gospel

to these weary crowds of weary seekers. Seven made profession of faith, but the seed was widely

sown, and is silently but surely doing its work” (17).

Figure 5. “Preaching Booth at Hsun Hsien Fair, 1900”. Accession #: 2011.79.46, Royal Ontario Museum

Collection.

In the photograph, local people are standing at two sides of the booth. Goforth is in the

middle of the scene with another Chinese man, perhaps a native helper. The whole set-up of the

booth was obviously temporary for the preaching at this fair only. It seems that a large part of the


30

bystanders were not Christians yet, as most of them who looked into the lens are barehanded

without any Bible or pamphlet. Moreover, a few of them carry baskets or jars, indicating that

they might be peddlers. They would have been just attracted by the foreign missionaries who

preached the Gospel in Chinese. This picture caught one feature of Chinese people that

impressed foreign missionaries most – what they called the “teeming millions” (Mackenzie 11).

For Western missionaries, Chinese people liked to get together if something interesting or

curious happened around them. So here, before the booth, the people in crowds were in similar

gowns with identical style. Some faces are blurred perhaps because they moved before the

photo-taking process finished. Only a few are depicted clearly. Their facial expressions combine

a bit of curiosity with little enthusiasm. This photograph gives a collective impression of those

Chinese people without leaving any unique and individual features. Maybe, that is what the

image seems to testify: the large numbers of the heathen people and the common feature of them,

who were waiting for the preaching and the help from the missionaries. MacKay claims, “This is

our largest field, having 8,000,000 souls in the northern half of this Province, where our

missionaries are the only labourers” (13). The missionaries reduced Chinese people to objects

who needed to be saved. The agenda of the missionary society is clearly illustrated by this image:

the urgent need of the Chinese people can only be satiated by the endeavors of the missionaries.

But the missionaries would have not expected to encounter great difficulties when they

approached such groups of people who appeared to be an undifferentiated mass and passive

audience of Gospel preaching. The missionaries later acknowledged that “obstacles to the

missionary quest… [are] the heathen, barbarous nature of Chinese society, its anti-foreignism,

and the power of idolatry, most specifically the worship of the Great Goddess at the annual fair


31

at Xun Xian [Hsun Hsien], what the missionaries called the Mecca26 of China” (Gewurtz 138).

This Hsun Hsien fair, famous for its strong religious tradition among indigenous people, mixed

the elements of Daoism, Buddhism and other local religions together to attract the worshipers.

Figure 6. “The Ten Thousand Fairy Temple, Hsun Hsien, 1893”. Accession #: 2011.79.2.43, Royal Ontario

Museum Collection.

Figure 7. “Lao Nai Nai, who gives children, Hsun Hsien, 1893”. Accession #: 2011.79.2.44, Royal Ontario

Museum Collection.

26 Mecca is a city in the Hejaz and the capital of Makkah Province in Saudi Arabia. For Muslims, it is a destination of pilgrims. The Muslims pray toward the Black stone, the eastern cornerstone of the Kaaba – the ancient stone building.


32

Figure 6 and Figure 7 show scenes of the Buddhist temple Ten Thousand Fairy27 and the

Temple of a Taoist goddess “Bixiayuanjun” 28 (commonly called “Lao Nai Nai”). Both of the

temples in the photographs were popular worshiping destinations during the Hsun Hsien festival,

when people burned incense and made other offerings to the goddess. Yet the images only

provide a glimpse of the large and small shrines and temples that were prevalent in villages and

towns in Honan. Even in the absence of the local people worshipping right before the Buddhas

and goddess, the images reveal the worshiping tradition of Chinese people and the coexistence of

a great variety of religious beliefs in China.

In China, due to the large population and multiple nationalities, Buddhism, Taoism,

Confucianism, Islam, Roman Catholicism, other forms of Christianity and various local religions

were commonly accepted among the people. This complexity of religions led to the worshiping

of idols and physical objects including images and gods carved out of stone or wood, which was

practiced in Taoism and Buddhism, but strictly prohibited and condemned in Christianity.

Despite the fact that the Qing government was more supportive of Confucianism in its public

policy, no particular religion suffered discrimination from Chinese society or repression from the

government. Different from the religious context in Western countries where there was a strong

relation between Christianity and the regimes, the religious institutions in China did not have

much influence on Chinese imperial government. Exclusive adherence to a particular religion

was not demanded either. However, in this seemingly peaceful and inclusive religious

environment for Chinese people underlay inter-religious conflicts. For example, later in 1900,

the Boxer Uprising broke out in North China, signifying the existing conflicts of various 27 Temple of Ten Thousand Fairy (千佛洞) was built on the hill of Fu Qiu (浮丘山) in Hsun Hsien since Tang Dynasty. It comprises of over a thousand Buddhist stone carves. 28 Temple of Bixiayuanjun(碧霞元君) was built in 1542 on the hill of Fu Qiu in Hsun Hsien. It is a temple to worship the Taoist goddess, whom the Taoism believes has the ability to bless the living beings and give the birth of male children.


33

religions. This rebellion was based on the ideology of popular religion. It aimed to revive

Chinese local religion by emphasizing traditional martial arts practices. The anti-foreign and

anti-Christian sentiment resulted in attacks on Christian societies and the missionaries in the

name of Chinese gods. Those religious conflicts never ended and continuously presented great

challenges to the missionaries in converting local people.

For the missionaries, the practice of Chinese people to worship at the same time the

Buddha, Taoist goddess and other idols would cause contradiction and incongruity. They further

argued that the idols Chinese people worshipped did not have power as God – the spirit. The

false power of those idols led only to the futility of the worship: no matter what the worshipers

sought, either a cure for a disease, or the conception of sons, the wish of Chinese people could

not be answered. But for the Chinese people, they worshipped the idols only in hope to get help

and protection from the deity, regardless of what religion it came from. Spiritual consolation and

concrete blessing were therefore expected from the idols. Therefore, converting the heathen

people with a rich culture of idolatry requires the missionaries’ effort to convince the local

people that God is the only one that has the power to perform the miracles that they are seeking.

In order to attest to the divine authority of God and his blessings, medical treatment was carried

out widely along with the evangelistic work.

C. Patients and Medical Assistants

From the inception of the Honan mission, medical endeavor was an adjunct to the

evangelical one. Besides the preaching at the large festivals, markets and the gatherings, medical

work was regarded as a critical method to attract local people to hear the Gospel. The medical

missionaries took this responsibility from the start of their mission. Of the two initial


34

missionaries, Mr. James Frazer Smith was a medical graduate who had received intensive and

comprehensive medical training and could be regarded as a medical missionary: “a dedicated

professional whose task was to bridge the chasm between the religious and the secular, by

applying the scientific spirit to solve the needs of the body and the soul of man” (Minden 3). On

this integral part of mission work, the missionaries in Honan acknowledged, “The healing

ministry of the missionary is parallel to the healing miracles in our Lord’s public ministry. His

Gospel is for the whole man, and Christian workers in Mission fields earnestly desire to relieve

bodily suffering, which is ever in evidence, as well as minister to the soul” (Mackenzie 139).

With this mission in mind, the work in Honan consisted of both evangelical and medical

components, as the record of the initial tour and investigation in Honan shows:

The physicians went fully provided with medicines and instruments that they

might begin the healing ministry among the multitudes of sufferers in Honan.

The clerical members went carrying with them an abundant supply of Christian

literature and having as their expressed purpose, to preach Christ to thousands of

men who had not heard His name. (62)

Medical work was carried closely along with evangelical work to ensure the effect of the

preaching. Perhaps in view of such importance, Grant used his camera to record this endeavor. In

his archive, there are a number of images with the theme of medical treatment. The following

image (see Figure 8) illustrates the dire situation of the local people who suffered from the

prevalence of diseases and the lack of immediate and effective medical treatment.


35

Figure 8. “Tumor Patient, Chu Wang, 1897”. Accession #: 2011.79.218, Royal Ontario Museum Collection.

This is a portrait of a patient with a huge tumor before the treatment. The scene, unlike the

images analyzed above, was set on purpose to resemble the environment in a studio. Wearing an

old gown, the patient, perhaps an ordinary peasant, faced the camera directly. Although he sits

squarely with his hands held together under his long sleeves, he frowns with mouth open wide.

His eyes crinkled perhaps due to the strong sunlight (as his shadow projected onto the backdrop

indicated), or the pain caused by the tumor, or the uncertainty and anxiety about the treatment.

His facial expression conveys an uneasiness and stress. His huge tumor under his chin is

captured in the centre of the picture, creating a striking impact and a sense of emergency. This

grotesque part of the body disturbs and compels us to envision the suffering of an ordinary

Chinese patient and further casts doubt on the effectiveness of native treatment: traditional

Chinese medicine. At that time, Chinese people preferred to resort to native doctors when they


36

were ill. When the conventional treatment with Chinese medicine did not cure the disease, they

would bear with it for a long time. Such attitudes would then lead to the situation presented in

the photo. However, in the eyes of Westerners, this kind of image would again be associated

with Chinese characteristics. As Arthur H. Smith comments, “Those who have any acquaintance

with the operations in hospitals in China, know how common, or rather how almost universal, it

is for the patients to bear without flinching a degree of pain from which the stoutest of us would

shrink in terror” (94). He ascribed this endurance of physical pain to Chinese characteristics such

as “the absence of nerves.” This was a distorted view of the Chinese people who tended not to

express and exhibit very strong emotions due to their conservative and shy personality.

Later, a corresponding image of this patient after treatment (see Figure 9) was created to

form a strong contrast with Figure 8.

Figure 9. “Tumor removed, Chu Wang, 1897”. Accession #: 2011.79.217, Royal Ontario Museum

Collection.


37

The patient in the photograph, now with his tumor removed, turns his face to one side in order to

show clearly the healed wound where surgical removal had been performed. He stands casually,

with two arms falling naturally on both sides of the body. The before-and-after contrast created

by the two images illustrates from another perspective local people’s change of attitudes towards

Western ways of medical treatment. The physicians, with their surgical instruments and drugs,

had offered the ill people immediate relief of bodily sufferings. The missionaries believed that

such concrete and tangible benefits gained in their daily lives would make the local people seek

aid from the medical missionary, not only bodily, but also spiritually. To testify to this, Grant

told the story of the first convert Mr. Chou (see Figure 10) by citing his words:

I had been blind for many years. I had been treated by our doctors. I had prayed to

the idols, burning much incense. I had tried every other plan I could think of, but

all in vain. Then one day, I heard that the ‘foreign devils’ had arrived in town and

were curing diseases. So I ordered my son…to lead me to the ‘foreign devils’…

[Dr. Fraser Smith] said, ‘I can cure your eyes…’ He dropped some medicine in

my eye and then cut it…I saw at once…I lay in bed at the inn for ten days with

bandaged eyes, and each day one of the ‘foreign devils’ sat a long time beside me

telling me about Jesus dying for my sins, and I believed. When the bandages were

removed from my eyes, I brought a large-type New Testament and have read it

daily ever since, ‘Once I was blind, but now I see.’ (Grant, Five Decades in

Honan 5-6)


38

Figure 10. “The first convert – Mr. Chou Lao Chung, 1899”. Accession #: 2011.79.421, Royal Ontario

Museum Collection.

This encouraging story illustrates how Mr. Chou suffered from cataracts and finally received the

bodily and spiritual saving. The image of him here above also speaks perfectly the agenda: with

a Bible holding tightly in his hand, Mr. Chou sits calmly and faces the camera. It seems to

signify that only the Bible could bring the peaceful mind and the hope of life for an old man like

him. The story and the image combined describe the preaching strategies that missionaries

adopted during their medical treatment. After the treatment, patients would stay in the hospital

wards, the dispensary, the waiting room or the inns (medical treatment was conducted in small

inns in other areas surrounding the missionary stations) for a couple of days, where the local

people were given an opportunity to hear the Gospel and the stories of Jesus (Mackenzie 144-

147). The missionaries thought that the patients partly or fully cured learned to appreciate the


39

sympathetic and careful works of the doctors: gradually they gained confidence and trust in

foreign missionaries and their previous suspicion and prejudice towards “Foreign Devils” was

resolved (Mackenzie 142). From their perspective, medical treatment was an effective method to

introduce the Gospel. For the indigenous people, the concept of Western medical treatment

highly challenged their belief in traditional Chinese medicine and ways of treatment. The shock

of Western science and medicine helped to idealize the image and power of those missionaries

and their God.

Figure 11. “Interior of Women's Dispensary, Chu Wang, 1897”. Accession #: 2011.79.201, Royal Ontario

Museum Collection..

Because of the great demand for treatment, the dispensary and waiting room became

important places where preaching was provided. Despite the fact that the centers were segregated

into evangelical and medical areas respectively, the two endeavors were intricately connected. In

reality, the dispensary functioned as part of the chapel. Figure 11 shows the interior of a

women’s dispensary. A woman is standing by the table in the room. She seems to be very


40

familiar with this environment. There is no sign of discomfort on her face, but rather calmness.

Without any perceivable injuries or bandages to indicate a suffering of disease or operation, she

was probably the native assistant hired by the dispensary.

This is an exceptional scene regarding the Chinese traditions and the role of Chinese

women. Although as mentioned above medical treatment had been used as an effective entry

point to get access to the local people for converts, it was different when it came to the

evangelizing of women. In traditional Chinese society, especially in agricultural areas like Honan,

women mainly stayed at home and were not allowed to see other male strangers, needless to say

any foreigners. Male physicians could not approach the female patients without the presence and

the assistance of a female nurse. In view of this, separate dispensaries for women and men were

built. With the coming of Dr. Jean Isabelle Dow29 in 1897, who “… was sent out as the pioneer

physician to labor for the physical and spiritual welfare of her Chinese sisters in Honan”

(Mackenzie 158), medical treatment for women commenced. As the treatment required the

recruitment of women assistants and nurses, many Chinese women were hired. To a large extent,

they may have come from traditional Chinese families, like the case of the lady in the

photograph, who still had bound feet. This background also indicates that most of those women

assistants may not have received any education in their childhood and did not know how to read

or write – a common phenomenon in old Chinese society. Although no special medical training

school had been established for them, they learned medical skills by aiding the physicians to

operate and taking care of the patients to recover (Mackenzie 146). For those assistants, the work

offered them a chance to acquire Western medical knowledge, techniques, and information

regarding the human body through practice, and to discover their potential ability. The set up of

dispensaries and the hiring of medical assistants created nursing as a profession for Chinese 29 Jean Isabelle Dow (1870-1927) was the first women doctor sent to the Honan mission.


41

people, especially women. It encouraged them to go into public life and find their own role in the

male-dominant society. Mackenzie remarks that some of the medical assistants “set up on their

own account as practitioners” after withdrawing from the mission (146). The simple

representation of this image challenges Chinese conventions regarding women’s value and their

professions. The presence of this lady in the photograph speaks the recognition of her as a

capable individual. The visual elements: the neat floor, the orderly placed medicine bottles on the

stack, the opened door and the lights coming into the room, underscore effectively different

relationships implied in the composition – the relationship of evangelism and science, the

association of “cleanness” in Christianity and “hygiene” in Western medicine, and the

relationship of women with professional training that was opened up to them by including them

in this room.

D. Students and Schools

Although village schools abounded in Honan, illiteracy and low educational level were

common among the local populations and no schools were open to girls. This situation was

exacerbated by local people’s attitude towards education. As most of them were engaged in

farming, they considered it useless to spend time in school. In view of this, education was

considered by the missionaries as another important branch of mission work in Honan.

Nevertheless, it was not initiated at the early stage of the mission but deferred until there was

demand for it among the Christian parents as the number of Chinese converts increased.

Mission schools in China firstly appeared at the treaty ports in the 1840s. Most of them

were elementary schools. Their primary purpose was to produce “… a class of native teachers,

preachers, etc., who, having been brought up from childhood trained in the Holy Scriptures,


42

under Christian influence, and separated from heathen influence, may become helpers in the

Gospel, whose equals can scarcely be expected from other sources. This, then, should be the aim

-- to raise up native laborers” (Dodd 191). At the early stage of development, those schools

provided free education along with fares and thus attracted many children from poor families.

With the rapid growth of international trade and commerce, and the promotion of science and

technology by the Qing government, mission schools thrived in the late nineteenth century in

China. By the end of 1898, the foreign mission societies in China had 1,766 daily schools and

105 higher educational institutions in China, with a registration of 30,046 pupils and 4,285

students respectively (“Statistics of Protestant Missionary Societies in China for 1898” 144-145).

In this social context, the first Canadian mission school for boys in Honan was opened in

Changte30 in 1896. Later in 1905, primary schools for girls were opened at places where stations

were situated.

Figure 12. “A group of Children Doing Exercises”. Accession #: 2011.79.703, Royal Ontario Museum

Collection.

30 Zhangde (彰德) was the previous name of Anyang used before 1913.


43

This picture illustrates an ordinary scenario that happened daily in an elementary school:

when the classes were over, the teachers and students went out to the open area or the

playground to do some physical exercise. The subjects captured in the image convey educational

and social changes in China. In the photograph, the students are all girls. Before the nineteenth

century, girls in China hardly enjoyed the right to receive education. Even those from noble and

rich families who had access to education, received courses that focused on proper behavior or

certain skills, such as inner-chamber behaviors, embroidery, music, and proper conduct during

pregnancy (Du 16-18). In the nineteenth century, women’s literacy was common. Mrs. Arthur H.

Smith remarked at the Shanghai Missionary Conference of 1890: “among the thousands of

women we have met, not more than ten had learned to read” (qtd. in Burton 24). The change of

education for women in China was brought largely by the mission schools. In 1844, Miss Mary

Aldersey founded China’s first missionary school for girls in Ningbo (The China Educational

Commission 232). The opening of the mission schools provided girls the chance to receive

education and also working opportunities for women. Judged from the costume and hair style of

the person leading the class, it is easy to figure out that this was a native Chinese female teacher.

Just as the dispensary hired female assistants, the boarding schools in Honan hired local Chinese

women to teach the students. Those teachers did not have total freedom in teaching and

management. They were under the direction of missionaries, who trained them and supervised

their work (Mackenzie 149). This phenomenon was common in Chinese mission schools, where

Western missionaries considered themselves more capable of conveying the notion of Western

education. Nevertheless, the mission schools opened up possible professions to Chinese women.

The body movement of the students and teacher captured in the image reflects one

important component in their curriculums: physical exercise. The missionaries believed, “After


44

centuries of foot-binding, close confinement indoors, and sitting constantly over their

embroidery frames and other sewing, they become round shouldered and many of them go into

consumption for lack of good healthy outdoor exercise” and “regular daily work in gymnasium

imparts ease and grace of carriage and movement to the heavy and awkward Chinese girls” (qtd.

in Burton 74). Their curriculum, as Mackenzie admitted, was different from what was practiced

back in Canada because it was difficult for the mission school to keep up to the standard set for

national schools in Canada (148). The study of the Bible and classic Chinese traditional

literatures such as The Four Books and The Five Classics were included, while other courses like

mathematics, history, chemistry and geography were added later[?]. The courses were designed

to fit to the requirements of modern conditions and provide adequate training to the pupils for

their future work (Mackenzie 147-151). From the perspectives of the missionaries, Western ways,

especially that of Christian education, emphasized the physical, mental, moral and spiritual

development of a person, while the Chinese traditional ways of education were closely

associated with the imperial examination, which required the student to memorize texts from the

Classics. The Chinese teaching only focused on those literatures but neglected scientific and

technological knowledge. Therefore, the combination of Western ways with Chinese traditional

ones was an adaption of the Western curriculum in the Chinese context, which allows Chinese

students the chance to broaden their horizons of knowledge, especially in the fields of science

and technology.

E. Construction of Christian Community

With the pioneering work of missionaries, several mission stations had been set up by the

end of the nineteenth century in Honan, China. Premises were secured for setting up centers,

building the chapels, dispensaries and even schools as shown in the above photographs.


45

Permitted by the “Treaty of Tientsin”31 and “Treaty of Peking,”32 which allowed missionaries to

go into the interior China to preach and “rent or buy land and to set up churches” (Luo 43) in the

interior of China, houses were acquired, mortgaged or rented by signing contracts or long-term

leases with a local landlord. But the construction of buildings could not be completed by the

missionaries themselves and required the help from local laborwith different skills. Mackenzie

writes, “Certain villages seem to be given up to men of particular handicrafts, such as workers of

leather, carpenters, makers of pottery, brick and tile makers, cartwrights, and house builders”(12).

Those local craftsmen and workers were then employed for their crafts and energy. They

contributed to the emerging of the Christian community in Honan.

Figure 13. “Carpenters at work, ca. 1890”. Accession #: 2011.79.49, Royal Ontario Museum Collection.

31 The Treaty of Tientsin refers to a series of treaties signed in 1858 between China and several Western countries after the Second Opium War (1856–1860), including Russia, UK, US and France. The treaties opened more ports, allowed the Christian activities in China, the import of opium, the foreign legations in Beijing and etc. 32 The Treaty of Peking refers to a series of treaties signed between China and UK, France and Russia respectively after the Western invasion of Beijing in 1860, which finally ended the Second Opium War.


46

Figure 13 shows two carpenters trying to cut small pieces of wood from a large trunk (in

the middle), which is fixed only by ropes. They are standing on scaffolding-like devices made of

wood and trying hard to pull the saws. Another man is standing to the right. He is looking into

the lens without doing anything. Perhaps he was there to help the two carpenters and make sure

of their security. The potential danger is obvious. It appears that the two carpenters at work

might fall off to the ground at any time. The capture of the movement of their arms and their

outstretched legs makes this still image full of dynamic rhythm. A tension is maintained in it.

These visual elements are not just a depiction of the people at work. They lead us to consider the

worker’s role in the construction of Christian buildings, the limited availability of modern

techniques and resources, as well as the relationships between the local workers and the

missionaries.

Figure 14. “Pounding Earth for Foundations of Houses, ca.1890s”. Accession #: 2011.79.2.126, Royal

Ontario Museum Collection.


47

As Figure 14 also shows, the workers pound earth only with a simple tool – a large trunk.

To finish the pounding of the foundation of a large house by human power is obviously a time-

consuming and heavy-manual task. With such simple tools, it is hard to imagine the construction

of large buildings like the chapel in Figure 15. The shape and structure of the chapel indicate that

the buildings were constructed according to Western style and requirement. Apparently, there

was a division of tasks between the missionaries and the local laborers: the missionaries provided

the designs of buildings and gave instructions while the indigenous people obeyed and tried to

meet requirements. The design of the building including the inner roof structure, the large

windows, the practicality of spaces, was based on Western architectural knowledge that was

regarded more advanced at that time.

Figure 15. “The Bellsmith Memorial Chapel, from north, 1898”. Accession #: 2011.79.205, Royal Ontario

Museum Collection.

However, the application of this advanced knowledge would meet difficulties in China

for lack of any large machinery like cranes or labor-saving building techniques that were


48

available in Europe and North America. This insufficiency is obvious in the images. The tasks

such as the making of the beams and the hoisting of the roof timbers could only be performed

without the aid of modern Western machines. Under this situation, the agency of the craftsmen

was emphasized. They had to use their intelligence, power and skills to find solutions to the

problem, relying on their handy experience gained from their construction of local buildings. The

relationship between missionaries and those laborers was partially changed by such agency: the

missionaries could only rely on the craftsmen to construct the buildings in their own way and

with their own tools available. The confidence and vigor emanating from the figures in the two

photographs are convincing and seem to indicate the capability of the workers to accomplish the

tasks and meet the high standard of the Western design.

Moreover, these photographs, along with the evidence of writings by Grant and others,

represent the missionaries’ attempt to internalize Christianity in indigenous people. With the

labor of indigenous people, these different types of buildings – the church, the school, the

dispensaries and so on – gradually formed a Christian community to which the indigenous

people belonged. Along with the deep involvement in the construction of such a community, the

Christian symbols represented by the buildings were imprinted in the minds of indigenous people.

This was one purpose that the missionaries hoped to achieve through the process of construction.

Just as Grant admitted, one of the most perplexing questions the missionaries faced was the lack

of suitable buildings for meeting in. But the missionaries insisted inculcating independence and

ownership of the Church by the new converts. They “encourage[d] them [native Christians] to

depend on themselves for providing buildings and all else necessary for carrying on a church

among themselves” (11). For the missionaries, the labor and the construction of a “self-support”

church connected the indigenous people with Christianity because those direct experiences


49

associated with the physical presence would be internalized as a way of living, influencing their

mind and behavior. As well, as the indigenous people studied, lived or received treatment within

the buildings, an effective preaching was going on to maintain a sustainable and permanent

attraction to the Gospel.

F. Portraiture

The Portrait is usually understood as a kind of image that aims not only to register the

physical appearance of an individual, but also to capture, in an artistic way, the subtle emotions

and expressions at the time of the shooting. The portrait of Chinese people as a type was

famously established by Western commercial photographers and further promoted by local

Chinese photographers like Lai Afong33 and See Tay34.

Figure 16. “Parody of Chinese Photographic Portrait”. The Photographer's Friend: A Practical,

Independent Magazine, Devoted to the Photographic Art, Vol.3, 1873: 40-42.

33 Lai Afong (1840-1900) was a photographer based in a commercial studio in Hong Kong. 34 See Tay, also known as Liang Shitai (?-?), was a Chinese photographer who operated a commercial studio in Tientsin in the 1870s. He was famous for his portraits of Qing officials and imperial members.


50

To illustrate such a type, John Thomson provided a caricature (see Figure 16) and

described that the figures in the images seemed to be “all taken in the same pose seated at a very

square table…On the table there is a vase containing artificial flowers – gaudy caricatures of

nature. The background of plain cloth is adorned with two curtains, arranged so as to form part

of an isosceles triangle above the sitter, who is posed as if his figure were intended to

demonstrate a proposition in Euclid”(40-41). While such a type of portrait was condemned by

Thomson to be artificial and lack the depth of depiction, it also reflected Western conventions of

the portrait: the concern about the posture of the body, the arrangement of light, the settings,

decorations, furniture, etc.

Interestingly, in Grant’s portrait of indigenous people in Honan (see Figure 17), the

depiction of the sitter included nearly all the key elements in the Chinese photographic portrait.

In Figure 17, although the man sits a little to the right, the tea table (a little to the left) at his right

side forms a balance with his figure. He is holding a smoking pipe at his left hand and sitting

squarely with his front facing the camera. His apparently new and neat garment implies that he

comes from a high economic status (perhaps he was a business man). On the top of the small

round table, there is a teapot and a teacup, and a potted flower. The background of this photo is

comprised of a Chinese folding screen decorated with Chinese drawings of birds, plants and

flowers. With such a beautiful setting that conveys a sense of symmetry, the expression of the

sitter in the photograph could be described as emotionless. There is no trace to judge his

emotions or his personality. The ground underneath his feet reveals that this image was taken out

side. But the whole setting resembles that of a studio. The only difference is the control of the

lights. Although the outdoor natural light could not be moderated, Grant had particularly avoided

any shadow from appearing on the face of the sitter.


51

Figure 17. “Friend at C.W., 1894”. Accession #: 2011.79.76, Royal Ontario Museum Collection.

Although this may be a likeness of a “Friend” of Grant’s, it is clear that the identity of this sitter

is not the focus of this image. Rather, it aims not to reveal the individuality of a person, but to

exhibit the skills of the photographer: his contemplation and construction of the whole setting.

The value of this image lies in the whole structure and the arrangements of the visual elements. It

creates a Chinese figure in an exotic and typical oriental setting - an attractive and impressing

view for the Westerners, and seems to reflect the representations constructed under Orientalism.

The scene could be described by using what Edward Said criticizes: “the figures of speech

associated with the Orient – its strangeness, its difference, its exotic sensuousness” (72). This

image invites us to think about the mutual influence of the traditions and portrait types

established by Western photographers and the native Chinese ones. With the promotion of

portraits by commercial photographers, both Western and Chinese, even amateur photographers


52

like Grant were inevitably affected by the standard model of scene setting and photo-taking. This

influence was also reflected in Grant’s portrait of Mrs. Wang Tsi Kao (see Figure 18).

Figure 18. “Mrs. Wang Tsi Kao, 1896”. Accession #: 2011.79.10, Royal Ontario Museum Collection.

This portrait, different from the one discussed above, is concise. Without the decoration of

screen, table, flowers and pots etc., the figure is more prominent in the image, her face here

isolated against the white cloth background. Yet the photograph includes within its frame the

very constructing that went into it. The image was taken in an outdoor environment. The stand

for hanging the plain cloth background is evident in the image as is the platform on which her

chair sits. The chair is in the center of the picture. She puts her hands naturally on her legs,

hiding them in her long sleeves. With her body facing front, her two bound feet are displayed

obviously before the lens, their white color contrasting with the dark color of her dress [coat?].

She turns her face a little to her left. In doing so, she reveals to the camera the earring on her


53

right ear and her chignon. The focus of this image, then, was directed from the figure to bound-

feet, the Chinese traditional chignon and her earring. In the eyes of Grant, perhaps these revealed

the basic characteristics of Chinese woman as an exotic figure. The distinct physical feature of

the bound-feet, their oriental costumes and treasures for decoration were a theme that attracted

the attention of the Western viewers. Yet we can notice a little trace of smile on the face of this

lady. She is not emotionless as the man in Figure 17. The image is enlivened by that smile and

her attentive stare to her side.

If, as Alan Trachtenberg comments, the portrait photographer aimed at “capture[ing] the

soul” as they believed that photographers “looked through surfaces to depth [and] treated the

exterior surface of persons as signs or expressions of inner truths, or interior reality” (27),

Grant’s portraiture may have failed in bringing out such “inner truth” – the personality of the

figures. It seems that he was concerned more with the exterior features of Chinese people.

Although his portraits of individuals include the elements of Chinese costumes, the features of

their bodies, the settings, etc., they only reflect partially the living style of Chinese people. We

might say that Grant’s framing of portraiture still fell into the stereotypes already set to represent

Chinese “characteristics” that were widely accepted and promoted by Westerners. This again

only reminds us of his audience back in Canada: the mission society and the donators who

expected to view the exotic, oriental portraits of Chinese heathen people: the ones that needed

their preaching and saving.

V. Conclusion

The photographs included above are a tiny portion of Grant’s collection. The reading of

them was primarily undertaken through the missionary paradigm constructed by Grant and


54

centered on the daily activities and his relationship with people on different occasions and in

different places. This paper does not present a comprehensive picture of the Chinese people at a

particular period of time, nor does it attempt to draw a general conclusion of the representations

of Chinese people constructed by Western photographs, because neither of them is possible to

accomplish due to the complexity of visual representations and the social and cultural contexts in

which those representations are constructed. Limited as it is, the paper has self-consciously put

the missionary gaze into perspective.

In the Minutes35 kept by Grant, this purpose of taking photographs was clearly explained:

“collect further information, stories, pictures, etc. for the use of the two committees [Historical &

Jubilee Committees].” The task to record history and create evidence and documents was one

agenda that Grant set when he took photographs. But other purposes were implied and involved:

the photographs were educational for the student volunteers back in Canada; they were promoted

in fund-raising activities; and they were testimony of the missionary endeavors. Regardless of

the motivations and agendas in Grant’s photographs, those images illuminate a wide range of

themes in depicting Chinese people and China. Even though they were set within the Christian

religious environment under the missionary paradigm, they also captured “much broader currents

of cultural diffusion and the economic, political, and technological transformation of traditional

societies” (Miller 85). Other meanings are potentially present, notably those from a Chinese

perspective.

This paper has also brought to light the information that was previously preserved in this

archive that had been private for a long time. The donation of this private collection makes it

possible to witness the different representations of Chinese people in their daily life. Meanwhile,

the reading process and the analysis have combined the visual elements with particular contexts 35 See Grant’s manuscript, Minutes for Historical & Jubilee Committees meeting, Weihwei, January 30, 1935, p. 19.


55

to reveal the possible meanings embedded in the photographs. The interpretation in this paper is

both objective and subjective. It is based on the historical, cultural factors and the visual

components but read by me within my own time and place. Obviously, as a viewer, I cannot

provide an exhaustive reading of the images due to my own background and knowledge. As a

Chinese woman student studying Western cultural theories in a Canadian university, I could only

combine my understanding of Western theories with my knowledge of Chinese society, history

and culture to interpret images that were produced over one hundred years ago. I hope that this

project has allowed the embedded stories in the images to be told from one perspective and

would give the viewers a further possibility to produce their own interpretation. In this paper two

gazes - Grant’s gaze as a missionary and my gaze as an interpreter – have met and interacted

with each other. More gazes are expected.


56

VI. Appendix:

Dates of Important Events in History of China and the Honan Mission (1858-1937)

1858 Treaty of Tientsin, Christian missionary activities were allowed.

1860 Treaty of Peking, Missionary activities into interior China were permitted.

1867 British North America Act, the Dominion of Canada was formed.

1875 General Union of Presbyterians as the Presbyterian Church in Canada.

1887 Honan province suffered great distress from flood. Mission to Honan, China, commenced.

Mr. Jonathan Goforth and Mr. James Frazer Smith were appointed by the General

Assembly of the Foreign Mission Committee of the Presbyterian Church in Canada as the

vanguard to Honan.

1888 Mr. and Mrs. Goforth, Dr. and Mrs. J. Frazer Smith, Dr. and Mrs. William McClure, and

Mr. Donald McGillivray arrived separately in China. They were called “The Canadian

Seven.” Headquarters of the mission were built in Cheefoo, Shantung province.

1889 Messrs. Murdock Mackenzie, John MacDougall and John H. McVicar arrived in China.

Headquarter of the mission was removed to Lin-Ching, fifty miles from Honan.

On December 5th, 1889, Presbytery of Honan was established at Lin-Ching. Mr. Goforth

was appointed as Moderator and Mr. McVicar as Clerk.

1890 Chu Wang as temporary mission premise was rented. Medical work inaugurated.

1891 Hsin Chen as temporary mission premise was secured. Medical work inaugurated.

1892 Mr.William Harvey Grant arrived at Honan. First Protestant baptism was held in Honan.

1894 First permanent mission premises at Changte were secured.

1896 First Christian school for boys was opened at Changte, Honan.

1897 Medical treatment for women commenced at Chu Wang.


57

1900 The Boxer Uprising. Missionaries fled to Chefoo and Hankou respectively.

1901 Missionaries returned to Honan. Stations at Chu Wang and Hsin Chen abandoned. Five

new cities: Weihwei, Hwaiking, Taokou, Wuan and Siuwu were opened to resident

missionaries.

1905 Summer school for intensive preparation of Chinese Christian leaders began. A large

number of Primary schools for boys and girls were opened successively.

1906 Boarding schools for girls started by Woman’s Missionary Society.

1907 The Mu Yieh Junior Middle School for boys opened at Weihwei.

1911 The 1911 Revolution (Xinhai Revolution) overthrew the Qing Dynasty and established the

first Republic China.

1913 The first permanent nation-wide Christian organization was formed in China: National

Christian Council.

1920 The Great Famine

1923 The Presbytery of Honan was divided into the Weihwai and the Chang-Tzu Presbyteries,

which constituted the Honan Synod of the Church of Christ in China.

1927 The Anti-Christian Agitation

1937 The Japanese Invasion


58

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