Why Do the Heathen Rage and the People Imagine a Vain Thing?
Those QingAnon Conspiracy Theories
One of our family stories is about the time my great grandparents faced an enraged Chinese mob.1 Come to think of it, I don’t believe I’ve ever told this story to anyone. And in this raucous U.S. election year of 2024, the story just might carry some extra salience.
Show Us the Children!
As nearly as I can establish, the incident took place in the spring or summer of 1891. There is some external corroboration. Our “correspondent” (likely the Southern Presbyterian missionary Henry Woods) to the North China Herald speaks of just this sort of thing occurring at Qingjiangpu. He reports that there was a rumor on the streets that babies had been found in the foreigners’ homes, with the result that the Presbyterian and the China Inland Mission missionaries had paid an official a bribe of $50 for each baby that had been found. Presumably, the implication was that this was a cover-up.2
So picture this. Sometime, say in the spring of 1891, the chief of police and his officers arrived at the front gate of Jimmy and Sophie Graham’s home. It was a rented home near the Grand Canal, in the close-packed suburbs of Qingjiangpu. The Grahams invited the police chief in, leaving his little entourage of officers outside the gate. Over tea, they learned of the nature of his visit. The gist of it was that a child had gone missing, and it had been reported that the missionaries had kidnapped the child. The officer even claimed that he had come under the orders of the Viceroy of Nanjing. A search of the home must be carried out.
The Grahams fully cooperated, assisting in the inspection of every imaginable hiding place for a child. Rooms, wardrobes, drawers, cupboards, chests, under beds. The officer saw a number of Western curiosities that interested him. But no Chinese child. Only their little daughter, Georgie, who with her golden curls in no way resembled a Chinese child. So having performed his due diligence, the chief of police expressed his honorable apologies for the trouble and departed.
Meanwhile the officer’s retinue, lingering on the street outside the gate, had been answering questions about what was going on in the foreigner’s house. For nothing passed without observation. And discretion was not in their job description. So word of a “kidnapping” spread like wildfire in that thickly populated suburb of Qingjiangpu. Despite the police chief’s judgment that there was no kidnapped child, the excitement swelled. For it was well known that foreigners did this sort of thing. And we might assume that, like QAnon conspiracy stories, the official word was not to be trusted and was quickly incorporated as an annex to the conspiracy.
So a throng gathered at the gate of the Graham house, noisily protesting and demanding justice. Their leaders worked the crowd to a fevered pitch. And as the story goes (and here it may have gathered acceptable accretions over time), Jimmy was in the yard when the crowd broke through a flimsy back gate. They came swinging bamboo rods, throwing rocks—even a dead puppy—as the hapless missionary retreated, warding off their blows. Meanwhile, Sophie watched in horror from an upstairs window.
The Eyes Have It
What was behind all this? While the incident was local, the perception was widespread , and it was often propelled by a narrative with a common thread. And if the police chief found no Chinese children in the Graham household that day, today’s historians, poking around in the archival remains of that past age, have uncovered a rich treasury of anti-missionary pamphlets. Our family story, it turns out, is a passageway into a backroom of QingAnon operatives.
By late 1860s, rumors of Catholic missionaries kidnapping Chinese children and gouging out their eyes or taking their hearts were circulating widely in southern, central, and northern China. The evidence was thin, of course. But it seems to have caught momentum through the innocent initiatives of the French Sisters of Charity in Tianjin. They had offered a modest cash reward to those who would deliver abandoned and homeless children to their orphanage.3 The practice, though understandable from one angle, was imprudent. For it invited corrupt characters to cash in on children who were neither abandoned nor orphaned.
The situation in Tianjin was made worse when, in the spring of 1870, a good number of children in the orphanage died from an epidemic. They were hastily buried, sometimes multiple children together in a trunk (presumably due to a shortage of coffins). When a dog dug up a child’s body in a shallow grave, the situation cascaded into a calamitous uproar that spread to other mission stations. The accusation was that eyes and hearts were being extracted from the children to make medicine. The whole debacle ended with twenty-one foreigners and thirty to forty Chinese Christians killed.4
Orphanages, of course, were a common ministry of both Catholic and Protestant missions. And so were medical missions, with numerous clinics and hospitals. From the earliest days of missions in China, one of the most common specialties of missionary doctors was ophthalmology. Eye diseases and cataracts were prevalent in China. And Chinese medicine was largely ineffective in addressing them. But Western medicine achieved dramatic results. And mission hospitals reported a high proportion of surgeries devoted to eye conditions.
For some Chinese, there was some mystery surrounding these procedures, which took place in the inner sanctums of hospitals. The American Peter Parker, an early medical missionary in Canton in the 1830s, found the Chinese immensely grateful for his successful eye surgeries. In his first three months of practice, he treated 1,020 eye cases out of 1,061 patients.5 One of Parker’s cataract patients, obviously not understanding the procedure—but enthusiastic nonetheless—told Parker, “If you like, you may take both of them out and put them back in again.”6 So it is not difficult to see how, social contagions being what they are, rumors of “eye gouging” might have hatched and taken flight. And so they did, even into the early twentieth century.
But what purpose did this eye gouging serve? There must be some benefit for the gougers. Naturally, it must make them rich. But how? The eyes must have certain properties, and particularly Chinese eyes. (Why else come to China to carry on this nefarious trade?) The cunning Western technology of photography might have something to do with it. For how did pictures appear like that? Some wag concluded that the eyes were ground to powder and used to create pictures inside the camera box. Or perhaps there were healing properties in the eyes, as well as other bodily organs that the foreign devils were stealing. Or—and this theory offered a more direct route to a payoff—the eyes of Chinese were used in an alchemical process of converting lead to silver. Westerner’s eyes obviously lacked this special property.
In the 1870 English translation of the anti-missionary tract “Death Blow to Corrupt Doctrines,” we find this:
“The reason for extracting the eyes is this. From one hundred pounds of Chinese lead can be extracted eight pounds of silver, and the remaining ninety-two pounds of lead can be sold at the original cost But the only way to obtain this silver is by compounding the lead with the eyes of Chinamen. The eyes of foreigners are of no use for this purpose. Hence they do not take out those of their own people, but only those of the Chinese.”
Sure, that’s weird. But consider this. As I write in October 2024, I come across this in The Atlantic:
“Micki [the author’s neighbor] is referring here to the QAnon-fueled conspiracy theory that global elites kidnap children to drink their blood for its adrenochrome, a chemical compound that is supposedly an elixir of youth. What can you do with a moment like this? How do you breach this epistemic chasm of cuckoo?”7
We laugh. But Micki appears to believe this. And she is the mother of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed in the January 6, 2021, uprising in Washington D.C. Micki is a leader among the “J6ers.” And, lest we forget, we in the U.S. have also recently been visited by many conspiracy theories, such as the COVID vaccine containing tiny surveillance devices. (Or, in another vein, we have this election season’s sensation of Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, eating their neighbors’ pets.)
The Anti-Missionary Pamphlets
In nineteenth-century China these conspiracy theories took flight not just by word of mouth. They were widely disseminated in anti-missionary pamphlets. This appears to have been a niche publishing industry. Xiaoli Tian, in her study of the phenomenon, analyzed an astounding 207 surviving anti-missionary pamphlets.8 And in these pamphlets, the threats of organ snatching are mentioned 137 times. (There were other instances of rumored malfeasance in the pamphlets, such as 114 mentions of the sexual seduction of women.)
Best known, perhaps, is the pamphlet translated by missionaries into English in 1870 as “Death Blow to Corrupt Doctrines,” from which I quoted above.9 But there were also illustrated pamphlets. Think of them as the social media of the day. One of them, with translation and commentary by the Welsh missionary, Griffith John, was published for Westerners in 1891 as “The Cause of the Riots in the Yangtse Valley" (Follow the link. The online version includes a notice of its “potentially disturbing nature.” You have been warned!) This pamphlet appeared close to the time of the incident at Qingjiangpu, which I have been relating. One of the interesting features of these pamphlets is that some of them adopt the authority of a “Sacred Edict” from the imperial throne. (So my “QingAnon” quip is not far off the mark!)
Eye-gouging foreigners at work. (A page from “The Cause of the Riots in the Yangtse Valley.”)
I am much indebted to Xiaoli Tian’s article. It is informative not only in relating the Tianjin incident of 1870, and in her analysis of the anti-missionary tracts, but also in reviewing the scholarship on this topic. And she has a theory over own.
While some have proposed a political or cultural impetus for these conspiracy theories, Xiaoli Tian proposes that the misunderstanding arose because the missionaries’ daily activities, and their medical practices took place in spaces that were inaccessible or contradicted Chinese spatial norms. The missionaries often lived in compounds, their medical facilities and surgeries were closed off, and their purpose-built structures included (oddly mysterious) basements. The theme of secluded spaces surfaces often in the anti-missionary tracts as well. So the rumors may have originated in the fertile ambiguities lying between two cultural norms of space.
I think there is something to this, though I don’t think it explains everything without remainder. (I am skeptical of attempts to capture these things in a sociological bottle.) Missionaries had plenty of “native” helpers (household servants, for example) who did have access to their private spaces. And missionaries did not all live in walled mission compounds. Perhaps he was one of the exceptions that proves the rule, but Hampden DuBose in Suzhou advocated missionaries living in Chinese homes, and doing so quite openly, rather than sequestering themselves in Western style homes. The Grahams, for instance, in their early decades, lived in a Chinese neighborhood home. And walled-off homes and extended family compounds were quite common in China, though socially coded in a familiar way. I think too of all of the missionaries in the interior of China—Jimmy Graham included, but particularly those in the China Inland Mission—who lived transparent lives as they itinerated far and wide, and spent nights in village inns.
But obviously, these factors were just too little to stanch the flood of misunderstanding. And as we observe in contemporary America, no amount of “fact checking” or argument seems to dislodge ideas or conspiracy theories that usefully serve settled perceptions. Although personal relationships and neighborly care can sometimes break through barriers.
A Little Child Shall Lead Them
We left our story with Jimmy Graham facing an enraged mob breaking through the back gate and flooding into the yard. Meanwhile, Sophie was viewing the scene from an upstairs window. As Jimmy recalls, both of them were fervently praying for deliverance. So what happened next?
Intuitively, Sophie picked up little Georgie and held her in her arms, in full view of the angry crowd below. Sophie knew the Chinese loved children. And Georgie, who was accustomed to being fussed over when she was with her mother out in the neighborhood, was not in the least afraid. Bright eyed and flaxen-haired, she laughed and waved her little hands at the throng below. And the crowd, seeing her, immediately changed its mood from anger to delight. How could they not?
Jimmy quickly seized the opportunity to usher the crowd out of the yard. And as he hastily mended the gate, he also sent word to the police for a guard to protect the entrance.
But soon the crowd was regrouping, recovering its surly mood, and dealing out blows on Jimmy. Just in time, the police, along with a small company of soldiers, arrived to put down the disturbance and guard the premises.
Little Georgie—and her quick-witted mother—had saved the day. A charming child had temporarily reversed the rage over the reported missing children. And as Jimmy told it, they had no more trouble of this sort again. (Though his trips into the countryside were a different matter altogether.)
Sadly, Georgie would die of dysentery on July 4, 1894. It was a hard thing to bear. But for over 130 years, Georgie’s short life has been memorialized in this story.10
The title of this piece is taken from Psalm 2:1 (King James Version, 1611). Contemporary translations often run like this: “Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?” (English Standard Version, 2001). Need I say, I am using it without reference to the context of the psalm!
North China Herald (July 17, 1891): 79.
Xiaoli Tian, “Rumor and Secret Space: Organ-Snatching Tales and Medical Missions in Nineteenth-Century China,” Modern China 4 (2015): 207.
The story is laid out in Tian, “Rumor and Secret Space,” 207-209.
Tian, “Rumor and Secret Space,” 202.
Tian, “Rumor and Secret Space,” 203.
Hanna Rosin, “The Insurrectionists Next Door,” The Atlantic, October 2024.
Tian, “Rumor and Secret Space,” 204.
You can find the English translation (Shanghai, 1870) online at: https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/server/api/core/bitstreams/d0c6819f-2be6-4c8e-aafa-33381d4eba5b/content
Many years later, perhaps as late as the 1940s, after Sophie’s death, Jimmy wrote an account of the incident in an unfinished manuscript relating their early years in Qingjiangpu. I have mostly relied on that account in telling this story.