Protestant missions in China
In the early 19th century, Western colonial expansion occurred at the same time as an evangelical revival – the Second Great Awakening – throughout the English-speaking world, leading to more overseas missionary activity. The nineteenth century became known as the Great Century of modern religious missions.
Beginning with the English missionary Robert Morrison in 1807, thousands of Protestant men, their wives and children, and unmarried female missionaries would live and work in China in an extended encounter between Chinese and Western culture. Most missionaries represented and were supported by Protestant organizations or denominations in their home countries. They entered China at a time of growing power by the British East India Company, but were initially restricted from living and traveling in China except for the limited area of the Thirteen Factories in Canton, now known as Guangzhou, and Macau. In the 1842 treaty ending the First Opium War missionaries were granted the right to live and work in five coastal cities. In 1860, the treaties ending the Second Opium War with the French and British opened up the entire country to missionary activity.
Protestant missionary activity exploded during the next few decades. From 50 missionaries in China in 1860, the number grew to 2,500 in 1900. 1,400 of the missionaries were British, 1,000 were Americans, and 100 were from continental Europe, mostly Scandinavia. Protestant missionary activity peaked in the 1920s and thereafter declined due to war and unrest in China. By 1953, all Protestant missionaries had been expelled by the communist government of China. It is difficult to determine an exact number, but historian Kathleen Lodwick estimates that some 50,000 foreigners served in mission work in China between 1807 and 1949, including both Protestants and Catholics.
Missionary activity (1807–1842)
For Robert Morrison and the first missionaries who followed him, life in China consisted of being confined to Portuguese Macao and the Thirteen Factories trading ghetto in Guangzhou with only the reluctant support of the East India Company and confronting opposition from the Chinese government and from the Jesuits who had been established in China for more than a century. Morrison's early work mostly consisted of learning Classical Chinese, Cantonese, and Nanjing Mandarin; compiling a bidirectional dictionary based on the 1714 Kangxi Dictionary; and translating the Bible. He was forced to take work with the East India Company in order to fund these activities and remain at Guangzhou. In such conditions, his proselytizing was limited to his employees, whom he compelled to attend Sunday services and daily meetings including prayer, Scriptural readings, and the singing of hymns. It took years before Cai Gao was interested in baptism. Nonetheless, as Morrison's first converts—Cai Gao, Liang Fa, Qu Ya'ang—were literate men who also became the first Chinese trained in western printing and lithography, they began to express his message in more effective terms and to print hundreds, then thousands, of tracts.Though Morrison and his fellows largely escaped punishment, his converts were much less lucky. Morrison's earliest efforts—even before his first convert—saw Christianity added to the list of banned religions under the Qing Empire's statue against "Wizards, Witches, and All Superstitions". Existing statutes against Chinese travel abroad and against teaching foreigners to speak or read the Chinese language provided additional avenues for persecution. Upon his first attempt to print tracts for his village kinsmen, Liang Fa was arrested, beaten on the soles of his feet with bamboo, and released only to pay a massive fine which Morrison on principle refused to help him with; instead, he used the savings he had laid aside for new houses for his wife and father. On the occasion, Morrison sanguinely noted that the conversion of China may well require many such martyrs.
In 1826, the Daoguang Emperor revised the law against superstitions to provide for sentencing Europeans to death for spreading Christianity among Han Chinese and Manchus. Christian converts who would not repent their conversion were to be sent to Muslim cities in Xinjiang and given as slaves to Muslim leaders and beys.
The first American missionary to China, Elijah Coleman Bridgman arrived in Guangzhou in 1830. He established a printing press for Christian literature. The first medical missionary to China was American Peter Parker who arrived in Guangzhou in 1835. He established a hospital which gained support from the Chinese, treating thousands of patients.
Following the appeal of Karl Gützlaff, who started work in China in 1831, German, Scandinavian, and American Lutheran mission societies followed with Lutheran missions to China.
Expanding missionary influence (1842–1900)
The defeat of China by Great Britain in the First Opium War resulted in the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 which opened to trade, residence by foreigners, and missionary activity five Chinese port cities: Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai. Protestant missionary organizations established themselves in the open cities.In the Second Opium War Great Britain and France defeated China. The Convention of Peking in 1860 opened up the entire country to travel by foreigners and provided for freedom of religion in China. Protestant missionary activity increased quickly after this treaty and within two decades missionaries were present in nearly every major city and province of China.
Image:Hong Xiuquan.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Hong Xiuquan
Protestant missionaries were indirectly responsible for the Taiping Rebellion, which convulsed southern and central China from 1850 to 1864. Experiencing a severe mental disturbance after a series of failed imperial examinations, the scholar Hong Xiuquan had a dream which he interpreted in light of the 500-page Liang Fa tract given to him years before. Forbidden baptism by the American Baptist Issachar Jacox Roberts, Hong grew more heterodox. Although he used the Protestant Bible and tracts as his movement's holy books and attached great importance to his version of the Ten Commandments, he preached his own form of Christianity, including the belief that he was Jesus's younger brother. Roberts became an advisor to the Taipings but fell out with them in 1862, fleeing for his life and denounced them.
Image:Open Air Preaching WB.jpg|thumb|right|200px|Missionary preaching in China using The Wordless Book
The 1859 Awakening in Britain and the work of J. Hudson Taylor helped increase the number of missionaries in China. By 1865 when Taylor created the China Inland Mission there were 30 different Protestant groups at work in China. But in the seven provinces in which Protestant missionaries were working, there were an estimated 204 million people with only 91 workers. Eleven other provinces with a population estimated at 197 million, had no missionaries. Taylor and others aroused the West put more people and resources into the effort make China a Christian country. Missionary societies and denominations on both sides of the Atlantic responded. Many new societies were formed and hundreds of missionaries were recruited, many from university students influenced by the ministry of D. L. Moody. The most prominent of the missionary organisations were the CIM and the London Missionary Society, and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Other missionaries were affiliated with Baptists, Southern Baptists, Presbyterians, American Reformed Mission, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Wesleyans.
The Protestant missionary movement distributed numerous copies of the Bible, as well as other printed works of history and science. They established and developed schools and hospitals practicing Western medicine. Traditional Chinese teachers viewed the mission schools with suspicion and it was often difficult for the Christian schools to attract pupils. The schools offered basic education to poor Chinese, both boys and girls. Before the time of the Chinese Republic, they would have otherwise received no formal schooling.
Influential Protestant missionaries arriving in China in the nineteenth century included the Americans William Ament, Justus Doolittle, Chester Holcombe, Henry W. Luce, William Alexander Parsons Martin, Calvin Wilson Mateer, Lottie Moon, John Livingstone Nevius, and Arthur Henderson Smith. Prominent British missionaries included James Legge, Walter Henry Medhurst, Fred Charles Roberts, and William Edward Soothill. Prominent among the China missionaries were idealistic and well-educated young men and women who were members of the Oberlin Band, the Cambridge Seven, and the Student Volunteer Movement.
The slogan of the missionary movement was "The evangelization of the world". Later, to give urgency, the slogan was expanded to be: "The evangelization of the world in this generation". China, resistant to missionary efforts and the most populous country in the world, received a large share of the attention of the burgeoning worldwide missionary movement.
Missionary life in China
The China missionary lived an arduous life, especially in the 19th century. Attrition was high because of health problems and mental breakdowns. Learning the Chinese language was a long-term and difficult endeavor. A majority of missionaries proved to be ineffective. "Of the first fifty-three missionaries sent out....by the China Inland Mission, only twenty-two adults remained in the mission, and of these only four or five men and three or four women were much good. It took about five years of language study and work for a missionary to function in China—and many fledgling missionaries resigned or died before completing their tutelage. Overall, in the 19th century, although missionaries arriving in China were usually young and healthy, about one-half of missionaries resigned or died after less than 10 years of service. Health reasons were the principal reason for resignation. Mortality among children born to missionary couples was estimated to be three times that of infant mortality in rural England. In the late 19th century, health and living conditions began to improve as missionary organizations became more knowledgeable and the number of missionary doctors increased.A blow to the morale of China missionaries was their low rate of success in the achievement of their primary objective: the conversion of Chinese to Christianity. Robert Morrison in 27 years of missionary effort could only report 25 converts and other early missionaries had similar experiences. The pace of conversions picked up with time but by 1900 there were still only 100,000 Chinese Protestant Christians after nearly a century of endeavor by thousands of missionaries. Moreover, critics charged that many of the Chinese were "Rice Christians", accepting Christianity only for the material benefits of becoming a Christian. Missionaries turned towards establishing hospitals and schools as more effective in attracting Chinese to Christianity than proselytizing.
In Chinese eyes, Christianity was associated with opium, the Taiping Rebellion with its millions of dead, imperialism, and the special privileges granted foreigners and Christian converts under the Unequal Treaties. A Chinese nobleman said of the European and American presence in China: "Take away your missionaries and your opium and you will be welcome."
Xinjiang was proselytized by Swedish missionaries to preach and convert Uyghurs.
Christian missionaries such as British missionary George W. Hunter, Johannes Avetaranian, and Swedish missionaries like Magnus Bäcklund, Nils Fredrik Höijer, Father Hendricks, Josef Mässrur, Anna Mässrur, Albert Andersson, Gustaf Ahlbert, Stina Mårtensson, John Törnquist, Gösta Raquette, Oskar Hermannson and the Uyghur converted Christian Nur Luke studied the Uyghur language and wrote works on it. A Turkish convert to Christianity, Johannes Avetaranian went to China to spread Christianity to the Uyghurs. Yaqup Istipan, Wu'erkaixi, and Alimujiang Yimiti are other Uyghurs who converted to Christianity.
The Bible was translated into the Kashgari dialect of Turki.
An anti-Christian mobs was broke out among the Muslims in Kashgar directed against the Swedish missionaries in 1923.
In the name of Islam, the Uyghur leader Abdullah Bughra violently physically assaulted the Yarkand-based Swedish missionaries and would have executed them except they were only banished due to the British Aqsaqal's intercession in their favor.
George W. Hunter noted that while Tungan Muslims would almost never prostitute their daughters, Turki Muslims would prostitute their daughters, which was why Turki prostitutes were common around the country.
Swedish Christian missionary J. E. Lundahl wrote in 1917 that the local Muslim women in Xinjiang married Chinese men because of a lack of Chinese women, the relatives of the woman and other Muslims reviled the women for their marriages.
—A number of British and German friends are subscribing to support a new mission with headquarters in Kashgar and Yarkand, two cities of Chinese Turkestan, and the work is to be carried on not among the Chinese, but among the Mohammedans, who are in a large majority in that district. The new mission is interesting, in that it is an attack upon China from the west. Two German missionaries, accompanied by a doctor and a native Christian, will in Kashgar next spring and begin work. It may be added that the British and Foreign Bible Society is at present printing the four Gospels in the dialect of Chinese Turkestan, and that in all probability they will be ready before the new mission is settled at Kashgar.