by Carl Crow
The first thing the American missionary of this type attempts to do is to make himself a useful citizen of his community. A great many have been surprisingly successful. There are hundreds of towns and villages in China where the pioneer American missionary is the leading citizen whose advice is sought and wishes considered on all local matters. Their influence is not confined to the converts but extends to saint and sinner alike. They maintain schools, hospitals and dispensaries and head committees and organize charities.
A large portion of the American missionaries were either born on a farm or were steeped in farm traditions and found themselves at home with the Chinese farmers. They watched with delight the loving care with which he cultivated his soil, conserving every ounce of fertility and it was through plain farmer talk that many of them established their first and most useful human contacts. The missionary spirit as well as interest in farming inspired them to attempt to help their farmer neighbors and hundreds of them when returning from their sabbatical home leave brought back seeds superior to those used in China.
A single obscure missionary is responsible for the fact that China exports every year thousands of tons of peanuts, supplies in fact a very large proportion of the nuts used in America. China had always grown peanuts but they were of small size and inferior quality. One year a Southern missionary returning from his sabbatical leave brought back a few sacks of American peanuts which he gave to the farmers living in his neighborhood and told them how to care for this new crop. It wasn’t very long until the planting of peanuts from this American seed had spread to all parts of Shantung province and a big export market was developed.
There were dozens of missionaries who set out American fruit trees in their own gardens and often with surprisingly satisfactory results, for some of the transplanted trees appeared to thrive better in their new home than in the old one. The “Chefoo pear” which everyone eats in the autumn was introduced by an American. Another one was unwittingly responsible for China’s wine and brandy industry which is controlled by the Germans at Tsingtao. His intention was to introduce a good variety of table grapes in which he succeeded, but the Germans found that the grapes would also make excellent wine. One missionary in North China imported a pedigreed bull and the result over a period of years was the creation of a superior breed of cattle bringing added prosperity to an entire country.
Unfortunately for missionary work in general, the reputation of foreigners living in China - to say nothing of the long-suffering Chinese - a great many independent missions still exist. In fact every conceivable brand of Christianity has been tried out. When Sister Aimee threw the glamour of her presence on the China Coast she was welcomed by adherents who were living there. Father Divine has his supporters. Each of these stray sects appears to have picked out some particular sin on which to concentrate its attention and as China enjoys a wide variety of iniquities, there are many from which to choose. One gaunt and sallow old Connecticut Yankee used to make a nuisance of himself riding on the busses in Shanghai and passing out tracts on the evils of strong drink. He talked incessantly whether or not anyone was listening and always with an accusing glare at any white man who might be on the same bus. A poor wisp of a man, whom the wildest life of dissipation could not have made more decrepit, was for years a leader of the anti-tobacco movement, bitterly denouncing cigarettes as the archdestroyers of the human body. At a small port on the Yangtze passengers on the river boats were for years welcomed by an American who blew Christian anthems at them through a cornet. He wasn’t such a bad soloist, but when he woke me at daybreak one morning, I am afraid he would have been shocked at the emotions he aroused.
Some of these independent missionaries are supported by an individual church, some by denominations one never hears of in America, and some support themselves by various enterprises - honest but not quite clerical. In a laudable effort to help their converts earn a living some missionaries have taught them how to adapt their native handicrafts to meet foreign demands, as in the making of laces and embroideries. With very few exceptions the converts made by the missionaries came from the poorer classes to whom the problem of getting enough food was a serious one. Others have helped their converts to earn money but with less disinterested motives, casting suspicion on all industrial mission enterprises. In their efforts to make money for the support of their missions or for their own private gain a few wander into strange paths. One of the slickest and most unscrupulous advertising solicitors I ever met was the representative of a juvenile religious society. The way in which he could chisel large sums of money out of hard-boiled taipans for completely worthless advertising was the envy of all the local highjackers. One independent missionary in Shantung leased a stuffed whale a few years ago and traveled about the country exhibiting it until the expenses greatly exceeded the paid admissions and the railway authorities seized the whale.
At frequent intervals some upcountry missionary would come to Shanghai to denounce the wickedness of the city as exemplified by the lives of the foreigners. I suppose all of us could qualify as horrible examples. About fifteen years ago one of these missionaries, after a careful but inexpert survey of the iniquities of the place, came to the conclusion that Gabriel would soon blow his horn if for no other reason than to bring destruction to the sinful foreigners of Shanghai. He said it was the most wicked city in the world, but there were some doubts as to his authority to express an opinion on this subject, for investigation showed that he had never been to Port Said or Saigon and had passed through Nagasaki without becoming acquainted with its waterfront dives. He deserted his post upcountry to come to Shanghai with this direful message and preached a good many sermons and passed out tracts.
The Chinese greatly enjoyed listening to a denunciation of the sins of the foreigners, but their enjoyment palled when they learned that they were included. He finally set the day - a very inconvenient day - for it meant that the end of the world would come just when Shanghai people would be enjoying the spring races. He had gone too far. Shanghailanders surveyed themselves and their neighbors and came to the conclusion that the city was not so sinful as it had been painted. They felt about the same as New Yorkers felt a short time ago when the supposed wickedness of the place was assailed by a visiting governor. They were so far above the level of iniquity he had described that they felt positively virtuous. The community was pondering what to do about it when the problem was solved for them.
Some waggish newspapermen got together and issued an extra “doomsday” edition of a fake newspaper confirming the fact that the prophecy of the missionary had been fulfilled. Crowds at the race track were startled and then amused when newsboys offered them papers with a screaming banner headline announcing:
World comes to an end
The paper containing news dispatches from all the great capitals told of the event and in interviews told of the reactions of many famous men. The news editor, in a summary of these dispatches, noted that the world had apparently come to an end no earlier in Shanghai than in the home town of the apostle who had denounced its wickedness. The leading editorial was very philosophic in tone and came to the well-reasoned conclusion that it had not been such a bad world after all. There was also a pleasant little editorial note commending the always efficient Shanghai Municipal Police on how they had handled a very unusual situation. The sensational missionary soon went on home leave and never was heard of again in Shanghai.
Many of these independent American missionaries are witch-burning fanatics; many are stupid and inadequately educated; and a few are downright dishonest. I would not condemn them as a whole, for a few are honest and sincere and have accomplished a great deal of good; but as a class it would have been far better for everyone including themselves and their children if they had remained at home. Especially the children. What sad and unwholesome lives many of them lead!
Every time I see a cake of the guest-size toilet soap one finds in a hotel bathroom I think of a letter which a Shanghai shipping firm rec
eived from one of these independent missionaries. The letter read substantially as follows:
My two daughters returned by your steamer from school in Chefoo, and I was shocked to find that they had actually stolen three cakes of soap from you. I am returning the soap herewith. One cake has been partly used. The second cake has not been used, but the wrapper has been removed and my daughters do not know what they did with it. The third cake is intact and the wrapper has not been broken. It is as good as new.
It is a great humiliation to me to have to confess that my daughters are thieves. As a punishment to them they will have to keep themselves clean for the next six months without the use of soap. I am praying God daily for their forgiveness and ask you to forgive them.
There was a good deal more to the letter but that was the essential part of it. I happened to be advertising the brand of soap which had tempted the two little girls into this terrible sin. The cakes were samples and were sold at less than the cost of production as a part of the advertising campaign. The total cost of the three cakes of soap was less than two cents.
That was not a typical but an extreme example of the bigoted narrow-mindedness that enveloped some missionaries in China. Somerset Maugham in his On a Chinese Screen tells of the young American employee of a cigarette company who was growing morbid with loneliness in an isolated station and the missionary who refused to have dinner with his fellow countryman when he learned what business he was in. That could have happened over and over again. The lonely young employees of the tobacco companies soon learned to keep away from the Protestant missionaries but never failed to call on the Catholic priests.
The work of missionaries always appears to me to have a very profound effect on the missionaries themselves. It developed saints, martyrs, and witch burners; but of all the martyrs I think those deserving the greatest sympathy were the children of the missionaries themselves. Often they lived in isolated mission stations with no playmates of their own race, compelled by the missionary parents to live in a strait jacket that left them no liberty of thought or action and magnified the slightest fault into a grievous sin.
There are always many children in a missionary community. Employees of commercial firms in China are not allowed to marry without the consent of the manager; and though this was not often withheld, it was frequently postponed until the girl at home got tired of waiting and married someone else. On the other hand, missionary bachelors do not have to ask anyone’s consent and are encouraged to marry - not only to marry but to raise families, for their salaries are regulated by their needs rather than their abilities. The lowest unit of missionary compensation is paid to the bachelor. He receives his first increase when he marries and another with each child. This is hopefully known as a “living allowance” and is not generous enough to make marrying and the begetting of children a profitable enterprise in itself, but the wags of the China Coast prefer to think otherwise.
However that may be, almost all the missionaries did marry; and when it came to the mass production of off-spring, they ran the Chinese a very close second. One missionary became famous because of his many marriages, for he set a record. The old foreign cemetery of Ningpo provides a curious sight for the visitor, for here is to be found the gravestone of the Rev. E. C. Lord of Carlisle, New York, buried in Ningpo with his six wives, all of whom died in that port. The inscriptions on the headstones tell the familiar story of the romances of an aging man: for his first wife was approximately his own age, but each of her successors was younger than the last, and the sixth one was forty years younger than her aged husband. The epitaph on his gravestone contains the injunction: “Be ye temperate in all things.”
No picture of the missionary would be complete without these daubs of color, but they are unimportant. The senile romances of the Reverend Lord are recorded on limestone slabs which will soon crumble. The stuffed whale with which one missionary made himself ridiculous rotted while in the railway yards at Shanghai. The many cranks will be forgotten by the generation which suffered them, but the influence of the others will live. If there is any one consistent characteristic in a race which is so full of contradictions, it is found in the Chinese respect for scholarship. The Jesuits met this by exploiting their own learning in many ways which redounded equally to the good of China, the glory of the Jesuits, and the advancement of their cause. The American missionaries did more than this by first awakening and then satisfying a desire on the part of the younger Chinese for what is known as Western education. Peter Parker started it in Canton with the establishment of a small school where a few Chinese were given medical training. Every generation which followed added to this modest structure until, at the time of the Chinese Revolution of 1911, American middle schools, normal schools, and universities were scattered all over the country, providing not only the backbone but most of the meat and sinews of the educational system of China.
There are few of the leading men of China today who have not been indirectly influenced by the American educational system which was introduced and promoted by the missionary. It was missionary suggestion and influence which led to the allotment of the American share of the Boxer indemnity funds to be used for sending young Chinese to American schools, and it was the American missionary model which the Chinese followed when they began to build up a modern educational system of their own. As long as China exists it will bear the imprint of the American missionary.
XII
Two missionaries and two soldiers
“Each cup of wine and each bite of meat is destined from aforetime.”
There was something just the least bit suspicious about the enthusiasm with which Americans helped Robert Morrison start his missionary work in China after the Honorable East India Company had blocked all his attempts to buy a ticket on a British ship. The war for independence was still fresh in the memories of all but the youngest ones, and the country was full of veterans who would sniff the air and declare they had smelled the blood of an Englishman. The great company was the concern that had gouged the colonists on the price of tea. The Americans now had ships of their own and it was soon arranged to smuggle Morrison into Canton. James Madison, who was then Secretary of State, wrote Morrison a letter of introduction to the American consul in Canton which was, in effect, a special passport. The missionary arrived there in 1807 and was the guest of one of the pioneer New York firms that was exporting Chinese tea and trying to sell wild ginseng roots. Because he remained in seclusion there were stories in America that he had to keep out of the way of the British officials in Canton for fear of being arrested and deported.
A much more plausible reason for his seclusion was the fact that he was at work on the compilation of a dictionary and a Chinese translation of the Bible; and as he completed both of these tasks in a very few years, he could have spent very little time outside his study. The Bible and the dictionary prepared the way for the work of other missionaries who were to follow him and he did not live to see the holocaust of civil war for which he was indirectly and innocently responsible. His one convert was a Chinese type cutter from Malacca who was employed to help him in this work, and tracts written by this convert played an important part in launching the great Taiping Rebellion nearly a half-century later.
These poorly written tracts might have slipped into the oblivion that they deserved but for the somewhat superstitious reverence with which the Chinese regard their written language. Many Chinese will carefully preserve all printed matter that may fall into their hands. In a village about thirty miles from Canton, Hung Siuetsen, a young Chinese scholar, picked up a few of these tracts and put them away with other papers without looking at them. He was at the time preparing himself for the civil service examination, which he failed to pass after years of study. The disappointment following his failure and the exhaustion caused by the rigorous examination brought on a protracted illness during which his fevered brain was harassed by images so vivid that they remained with him long after he had recovered his physical health.
These disordered dreams affected him so seriously that his neighbors thought he was just a little crazy, in which they were undoubtedly correct.
He might have been just another one of thousands of young Chinese scholars whose minds became temporarily deranged by long hours of study if he had not by accident picked up the tracts which had been accumulating dust for many years. In his fevered dreams he had seen a patriarch and his son who had complained about the sinfulness of the world. As he now read the tracts for the first time, Hung came to the conclusion that the patriarch was God, the younger man was Christ, and that through his dreams they had been speaking directly to him. It is from such illusions as this that many religious sects have been born.
Hung wanted to learn more about this new religion of which he assumed that he had been chosen to become leader but was not very fortunate in his chance selection of a teacher. The Reverend Isadore J. Roberts was an erratic and poorly educated missionary who had financed his own mission by selling all his property and sailing for China where he worked independently, though he was affiliated with one of the Baptist sects. Hung spent two months with Mr. Roberts who must have done little to discourage his illusion, for he left more convinced than ever that he had a divine mission to perform. Roberts had felt the same way when he sold his farm in Tennessee.