In my reading of the Report of the Shanghai Missionary Conference of 1890 I came across a paper by Joseph Edkins. There he is reviewing “Current Chinese Literature: How Far Is It Antagonistic to Christianity?” It is a useful piece for gauging Chinese assessments of the Protestant missionary enterprise, and it reveals Edkins as a curious and insightful observer of the Chinese.
If you spend enough time studying early China missions, you get to know some of the figures who play leading and minor roles in nineteenth-century missions. In fact, if you’ve been following along with my explorations, Joseph Edkins might ring a bell. We encountered him in his engagement with the Taiping in Suzhou and Nanjing. And I find him an interesting figure.
Edkins arrived in China in 1848 as a missionary with the London Missionary Society. He died in Shanghai in 1905. He was first involved with the London Missionary Society Press in Shanghai. His eventual mastery of Mandarin is evident from his work in translation projects and a substantial list of his publications on Mandarin grammar and language-learning aids. But he was regularly involved in direct evangelism and preaching. In 1880 he resigned from the London Missionary Society to become a translator for the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs. There his chief contribution was in producing a sixteen-volume series of primers on scientific topics (e.g., zoology, botany, chemistry, physiology). That such an earnest missionary could see this work as an extension of his missionary calling suggests a deep resonance between the Christian gospel and Western culture.
I have commented before on this missionary promotion of science in China. It was an “Aha!” moment when I first encountered it, for it suggested an intriguing historical precedent for my own grandfather’s initiative in founding a college of science and engineering in Taiwan in the 1950s (now Chung Yuan Christian University). So you can count on this being a leitmotif in my explorations, and I will be further considering its presence in the 1890 Shanghai missionary conference.
While on furlough in England in 1858-1859, Joseph Edkins married a young Scottish woman. Jane Rowbotham (Stobbs) Edkins (b. Oct 28, 1838) was raised in a Presbyterian manse in Orkney, Scotland. From an early age she demonstrated an interest in Scripture and spiritual things. Slender and petite, intelligent and curious, at school she excelled in literature and the arts, became a “respectable Latinist,” and acquired some competency in French and Italian. And as her letters from China would reveal, she was a very able writer, her pen capturing the scenes that met her eyes.
Jane Edkins
At the age of fifteen Jeanie, as she was familiarly known, was admitted into the Presbyterian church. She had already been deeply impressed by “the fearful condition of the heathen,” and took a keen interest in missionary work. Her parents expected this to pass. But it took deeper hold. And on February 7, 1859, she married Rev. Joseph Edkins, now a veteran of ten years in China, and fifteen years her senior.
Together they sailed for China. And by midnight of September 14, 1859, twenty-year-old Jeanie had stepped onto Shanghai’s Bund. In her first letter home to her mother, who was in frail health, she wrote: “It is my soul’s desire to do this work…. I’d rather spend and be spent for Christ, than anything in the world beside.”
Jeanie was soon beset by illness in Shanghai. Tragically, she would die of dysentery on August 24, 1861, aboard a ship off of Dagu, at the mouth of the Beihe River. It had been only a year and three days since Lord Elgin’s guns had decimated the Chinese forts at Dagu.1 But the treaty of 1860 had now allowed missionaries to travel freely and reside throughout China, and to build schools and hospitals and churches.
In the heat of summer, her husband clothed her in her bridal dress, packed her slight form in ice, and transported her body by boat to Tianjin. Her wooden coffin was then borne by British soldiers to the foreign cemetery, where she was buried.
After her death, her husband found a note she had written shortly after visiting the graves of some China missionaries: “Surely it is a noble to thing to die for the cause of Christ as a missionary among the heathen.”2
Jeanie Edkins’ story, framed as a missionary martyrdom, is emblematic of many who joined the nineteenth-century missionary experience in China. Her spiritual and romantic fervor for the cause of Christ—to take the gospel to the heathen—radiates from her letters to her family back home. She desired to “be useful” in missionary service, to submit her will to God’s will, to live a life of eternal significance. She displays an enchantment with China, a hopeful view of bringing to China the gospel of Jesus Christ and—as was often the case—the benefits of Western culture. Her enthusiasm overflows: “The more I see of China the more I love it, and my heart warms to the people already.”3
And yet beneath this calling we find a subtext of shortcomings, of struggling to find an outlet for ministry, of wrestling with learning a new language, of living in the shadow of her husband’s expertise, of feeling “day by day how young and inexperienced I am.”4 To read her letters and journal is to enter into a historically distant but intriguing frame of mind. Her deep-rooted piety, her self-examination, her striving toward self-improvement and service are all evident. But so too her keen eye and deft portrayals of landscape, people, and social interactions, as well as her confessed frailty in the face of so immense a task. And as it would be for many, a life short lived.
And yet she could be quite forthright as well. In Shanghai she encountered American missionaries who were “favourable to slavery in America, and I know one lady who is a slaveholder. This is very melancholy; it seems fearful to me.”5
Jeanie Edkins’s letters—collected and published as memoir and eulogy—disclose a layer of the nineteenth-century missionary phenomenon. They are informative, moving, and infused with an evangelical spirituality of a distant era. Arriving in Java, en route to Shanghai, she wrote:
There it lay before us, its rich green trees and lofty hills seen dimly through the mist. Mr. Edkins and I sat and watched until we saw the mist gather up and pass slowly away, first from soft green grass, then from shady tree, and last, but finest of all, from the tops of those lovely hills, crowned with rich foliage. There was something new and fresh in this living scene, with all the soft dews of morning glistening over it, and the first sweet rays of a summer sun gilding its hills.6
Her published letters must have connected with the hearts and aspirations of many a young woman of her day. The notion that you too—whether in Glasgow, Scotland, or London, England, or Staunton, Virginia, or Holyoke, Massachusetts—might join in this glorious enterprise, must have lit young hearts aflame.
By the time of Jeanie’s death, Joseph Edkins had already etched his name into history when he had visited the Taiping the previous year at Suzhou and then at Nanjing.[6] And he would remarry within a year of Jeanie’s death.
In the West, young men and women of Christian faith and commitment were attracted by the call to evangelize China. Most, of course, knew little of China or Chinese culture other than what they had heard from missionaries. They had no training specific to cross-cultural communication. They were responding to a challenge to invest themselves in a work of great and eternal consequence. And like so many men and women inspired by visions, they could not at first grasp the true scope of what they would be attempting.
The images of China formed in the Western mind were varied. But whatever shapes they took, they were magnified by the optics of space and time. For China was both vast and ancient, strangely other and irresistibly attractive. The future was unpredictable, but full of adventure and promise.7
Jane Edkins, Chinese Scenes and Places (London: James Nisbet, 1863), 47.
Edkins, Chinese Scenes, 34.
Edkins, Chinese Scenes, 56.
Edkins, Chinese Scenes, 52.
Edkins, Chinese Scenes, 71.
Edkins, Chinese Scenes, 10.
For full exploration of this theme, as well as comments on Jane Edkins, see Jonathan D. Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York: Norton, 1998), 109-14.