Beijing
Background
Beijing is and was the capital of China, and was located in the province of Zhili. It was where the main seat of the Chinese government was, and therefore where large numbers of the educated Chinese lived. As a result it was considered crucial to missionary work that Christianity should be established there. It was, however, sometime after the first missionaries arrived in China that they began work in Beijing itself. There had been a Christian missionary presence in China since the sixteenth century but it was not until 1863 that there was a Protestant mission in Beijing. W.A.P. Martin had been one of the Anglo-American pioneers, along with S. Wells Williams, who had begun work in Beijing following the two British wars that had resulted in treaties that opened up the main treaty ports. Martin established the mission in Beijing because he felt that without it the city would be occupied by Jesuits to the exclusion of Protestantism. Martin went on an exploratory visit in early 1863 and reported back that he wanted to start work as soon as possible for that reason.
Establishment of the Beijing mission began in autumn 1863 when buildings were secured for a mission hospital and school in the Tartan city near Tsungli Yamen. The mission began on a small scale with Martin working with two native converts from Ningpo. When he started work Martin regarded the city as the ‘fountain of political influence for the whole empire’¹. It turned out to be the case that politics and Martin’s work would become interlinked.
Martin found preaching especially difficult because of the suspicious attitude of the Chinese government. He was even called to a special meeting with Prince Kung’s right-hand man who cautioned Martin neither to draw too much attention to himself and his work nor to create any untoward disturbances for fear that a riot would be provoked. As a result of this Martin began by only holding quiet meetings in his house. Eventually he opened a small chapel on one of Beijing’s main thoroughfares and in 1867, four years after the mission was established, a large church of western design was built near one of the city’s gates.
Martin’s work was by no means easy; his preaching was sporadic and not too successful. He was dependent on his two native assistants to do much of the work whilst he pursued teaching and translating. This was by no means unusual at the time – missionaries often translated Chinese philosophical and religious works because they thought that it would be of great value to the missionaries stationed in China. When Martin began his work the novelty of the mission attracted listeners but gradually the numbers began to fall, however there were several who attended fairly regularly.
Converts were fairly small in number, with there only being about six or seven a year. The converts tended to be relatively old, minor officials, scholars or young students who attended the mission school. Peter Duus thinks that the scholars were probably experiencing some form of intellectual conversion². Martin also suspected that there was a mercenary motive on the part of many converts and most of the people who sought out the chapel were the very poor. Most of the native population that Martin met on his itineration was curious and friendly but the Christian message had little effect on them.
A crucial part of missionary activity in China was the establishment of mission schools, Brian Stanley writes that, ‘Mission…schools enabled…colonialism to satisfy humanitarian obligations at minimum cost.’³ Education as part of missionary work was certainly the case for Martin in Beijing. Martin found his work on education to be far the most satisfying part of his work. On his arrival in Beijing Martin had immediately begun work on a school project. Martin had secured buildings and money for its support through the patronage of Robert Hart, the Acting Inspector-General of Imperial Maritime Customs. Hart wanted to promote the dissemination of western knowledge and was able to direct funds from customs revenues to encourage such endeavor. Martin’s hope was that the school would turn into a mission college that would compete with native schools and would therefore win the respect of the educated class. It was necessary to gain the support of the educated for the spread of Christianity to be successful. Martin also wanted the college to be of a more advanced grade than an ordinary mission school that would provide a finished education according to Chinese standards of learning and in addition to teaching in the sciences and medicine it would teach a foundation in Christian theology. It was thought that the school would act as a training ground for native shock troops of evangelism. Unfortunately for Martin, that never came into effect. When it became clear that would be the case, Martin began to press heavily for an assistant who would be capable of teaching medicine.
The mission school in Beijing was not an immediate success such as Martin had hoped. The two native converts taught pupils the Chinese subjects and Martin taught English and science. In the school’s first four months of opening there were no more than six students. Only the poor patronized the school because the richer classes avoided it because the school did not adequately prepare the pupils for passing the qualifying examination for the civil service. The upper classes were suspicious of the school and they refused to believe that foreigners could teach either them or their children anything. However by the end of 1864 the school was beginning to flourish but the students were still mainly from poorer classes who saw mission education as the path to a better place in society and as a temporary escape from poverty. It is clear that there was a mercenary motive for many students because they received meals and clothing as well as lessons.
W.A.P. Martin made science an important part of the mission school’s curriculum and he requested from the Board a small philosophical museum in order to demonstrate the principles and abilities of western science. This request was also refused but Martin was able to secure funding from other sources. Martin also continued to teach his pupils the Christian message and he expressed hope at the sentiments that they held for Christianity. Martin’s students largely showed no antithapy towards Christianity and some even converted. The school did not produce many scientists but in 1867 the examination for a scholarship to the T’ung-wen Kuan (which was a government school for the training of interpreters) was passed by one of the students from the school.
In addition to running the Beijing mission, Martin began in 1865 to teach at the T’ung-wen Kuan. Martin also continued to work as a translator by helping to develop a definitive version of the scriptures in Mandarin. However, of greater significance was Martin’s work in translating and writing secular works. He began a textbook on natural philosophy that was intended largely for use in schools but Martin’s own hope was that it would also be used at the T’ung-wen Kuan. Of greater importance than this was Martin’s translation of Wheaton’s International Law, which was then the standard work on international law. Martin’s translation of Wheaton’s International Law brought increasingly into contact with the high official class in Beijing. Prince Kung, who was head of the Tsungli Yamen, was even presented the Evidences of Christianity and the Chinese government of the time was showing an increasing interest in Western studies – this afforded Martin the opportunity to reach a whole new class of people with his Christian message. It was at this point that Martin was offered the post of teaching English at the T’ung-wen Kuan. He accepted the offer and ceased to draw his salary as a missionary and instead relied upon his payment from the government. Then in December 1867 Martin was offered the position of professor of International Law and Political Economy. Again Martin accepted but this time he handed the mission over to his successors.
In 1869, Sir Robert hart urged him to resume his presidency of the mission school because it was on the verge of disintergration. Martin accepted and at the end of 1869 he officially resigned from the Mission Board in New York. However, Martin continued to deliver the occasional Sunday sermon at the Beijing station and to contribute articles to missionary publications. Martin remained in Beijing teaching in various posts and was still there, attempting to establish a faculty of International Law at the National University, when the university came to an abrupt end as a result of the Boxer Rebellion. The rebels destroyed the buildings, equipment and many of Martin’s private papers. Martin was just beginning to reorganize the faculty when he and the rest of the faculty were relieved of their positions by the government following the Boxer rebellion.
Martin was fairly atypical in his attitude to missionary work – for example, he would have strongly disagreed with James Hudson Taylor (founder of the China Inland Mission) who thought that if the Christian message was preached as widely and as rapidly as possible through the use of the Gospel then the conversion of the Chinese people would be inevitable. Martin, however, thought that in addition to the missionary being responsible for saving the souls of the sinful Chinese it was their responsibility to convert the secular mind of China in order for the conversion of the country to take place. In order to do this Martin did not follow the ordinary missionary approach – most favoured preparing the foundations for Christianity so that when conversion came it would be far more wide-spread and so, in other words, they felt that certain aspects of Chinese culture that were incompatible with Christianity had to be swept away. It was missionary activity such as this that angered the native Chinese to the extent of rebellion in the form of the Boxers. Martin, however, thought it to be far better if Christianity could be introduced as something to enrich, rather than replace, Chinese orthodoxy.
Martin placed a heavy emphasis on the role of education in missionary work. He felt that this would rationally help to reshape Chinese attitudes. Education was considered by Martin to be the way that the character of a nation was formed and so was a crucial aspect of missionary activity. By founding the mission school in Beijing Martin was attempting to reach the Chinese not through direct preaching but rather through the printed word.
In addition to education and to not sweeping away Chinese culture, Martin thought the way to convert the Chinese was to reach the upper echelons of Chinese society. If the influential classes and the government could be converted then Martin felt that the mission cause was guaranteed success. This idea is clearly reflected in Martin’s desire to work in Beijing.
It can clearly be seen that Martin was no ordinary missionary and certainly did not fit the Boxers’ stereotypical idea of missionaries and their attitudes. Martin was not the kind of missionary who wanted to be able to superficially convert large numbers of Chinese – instead he wanted to be able to develop a deep-seated conversion that although it may have taken many years would have resulted in a far more widespread and real conversion of the Chinese people. Unfortunately, the different ideas that other missionaries held contributed to the Boxer Uprising and so put an end to much of Martin’s hard work, but he did not abandon China. Martin did not retire from public life until he was nearly eighty and then he spent the last years of his life in Beijing: writing, teaching and occasionally aiding the Presbyterian mission station there. Martin finally died on December 17th 1916 of bronchial pneumonia after serving nearly six decades in China.
¹Peter Duus, ‘Science and Salvation in China:
The Life and Work of W.A.P. Martin (1827-1916)’ in Kwang-Ching Liu (Ed.), American
Missionaries in China: Papers from Harvard Seminars, (Harvard, 1966), p.22
²Peter Duus, ‘Science and Salvation in China:
The Life and Work of W.A.P. Martin (1827-1916)’ in Kwang-Ching Liu (Ed.), American
Missionaries in China: Papers from Harvard Seminars, (Harvard, 1966), p.23
³Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag, (Appollos, 1990), p.48