Oberlin College and Shanxi
The Establishment of the Oberlin Missions in Shanxi.
In 1879, a graduate from Oberlin Theological Seminary in Ohio, Martin Luther Stimson proposed to Dr Judson Smith, a teacher at Oberlin that he lead a group of graduates to missionise in China. Stimson envisaged an "Oberlin Band" of missionaries consisting of twelve graduates of the Oberlin Seminary. This was an opportunity not only to save souls but also to make an international institution of Oberlin, to establish an "Oberlin-in-China". Stimson suggested his plan to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (A.B.C.F.M.) based in Boston, in 1881, which in turn assigned the Oberlin Band to the relatively unexploited province of Shanxi. In early September 1881 Martin and Emily Stimson left the U.S.A. in order to reconnoitre Shanxi and finally arrived in March 1882. Throughout the entire province of fourteen million people there were only three Protestant mission stations and a total of about fifty converts. The two Oberlin mission stations were established in Taiku in late 1882 and Fenchow-fu in 1887.
The Missionary Experience: Their Roles in Health, Education and Conversion.
The Oberlin missionaries assumed various roles in Shanxi in
order to establish Christianity, not solely through preaching. One of the
primary areas in which the missionaries sought to aid the local populace was
through medical service. The Oberlin Band was initially struck with a problem
due to the lack of a qualified doctor to accompany them. One missionary,
Iranaeus J. Atwood, studied with a British missionary in Tai Yuan Fu the
capital of Shanxi and gained sufficient proficiency as to perform simple
operations on common disorders. He was particularly successful at
"couching", a technique used to remove cataracts from the eyes.
Atwood opened a clinic in Taiku in the late 1880s and treated over one thousand
patients within the first three months of its establishment. He later returned
to the U.S.A. on furlough in 1888 and received a medical degree from Rush
Medical College in Chicago (1). In 1899 Atwood and his family left
China, this meant that there was no doctor present in the Shanxi mission, the
clinic and hospital in Fenchow-fu was closed. This was extremely bad news for
the Oberlin missionaries as medical treatment was one of the best ways of
establishing relations with the local community and thereby meeting potential
converts.
The essentially charitable nature of the Shanxi mission was very
hard to maintain financially. The Oberlin Band encountered problems with debt
and the need to spend relatively large proportions of their A.B.C.F.M. salaries
on the mission. Therefore, it was important to extract money in exchange for
medical services. Howard Clapp, a missionary, imposed a fee for day patients
who could afford to pay, this was thirty cash, the equivalent to one and a half
pence. In patients were charged fifty cash, or two and a half pence in order to
cover the expense of fuel and lighting. One thousand cash was charged not
inclusive of cart hire for cases of opium poisoning. Sales of medicines,
largely cod liver oil, totalled 73,000 cash or $36.65. In 1899 the dispensary
earned a profit of $147.98, the surplus was accordingly ploughed back into missionary
work (2).
One of the most important areas of missionary work was the
treatment of those suffering from opium addiction. The missions at Taiku and
Fenchow-fu established opium refuges in order to help deal with the massive
problem of opium in Shanxi. One addict,
Liu Feng Chih, who had once been a wealthy businessman, had reached the point
of bankruptcy due to the ruinous effects of opium when he was persuaded to stay
in the refuge in Taiku. He attended for forty days and stayed with the
missionaries for several months. Teaching the Gospel was used during treatment,
the missionaries believed, to not only boost willpower but of course to provide
the possibility of adoption of Christianity. Duly, Liu returned to his village
with a Bible, in 1891 he was baptised and became known as Deacon Liu, the first
true convert of the Oberlin missionaries after nearly ten years of preaching in
Shanxi (3).
The book entitled "The Christian Occupation of China" identifies the
A.B.C.F.M. missions in Shanxi as "marked by a special ministry through
opium refuges", clearly this field was viewed as a very important one (4).
Education was of great importance to the missionaries, after all
their ideal had been to establish an "Oberlin-in-China", a seat of
higher education devoted to the Christian faith. In 1889 the first humble
foundations of the ideal began, seven years after the arrival of the Mission.
Jennie Clapp, a former teacher, enrolled fifteen pupils ranging from five to
eighteen years in Taiku to form a boys' school. The syllabus consisted of the
studying of traditional Chinese texts in the morning. In the afternoon the
pupils studied the Bible, Christian doctrine, simple arithmetic and geography,
if they were progressing well they would be introduced to Western history and
science. The educational ambitions of the missionaries were, however, stunted
by the fact that they had to teach through interpreters. Jennie Clapp was aided
by Chinese teachers many of whom were initially not Christian. The boys' school
in Taiku experienced some major problems. There was a difficulty in finding
adequate teachers, problems of language, difficulty in persuading Chinese
parents to allow their children to attend and the disruption caused by the
leaving and arriving of different missionaries. However, in 1899 the boarding
school for boys in Taiku had a total of twenty-four pupils but a shortage of
funds to enable expansion. Seven of these pupils were undergoing special
studies that would prepare them for college, most likely the North China
College. In 1899 one previous student, K'ung Hsiang His, was already attending
this newly established institution, the first to do so from Shanxi (5).
In Li Man, outside Taiku, there was a girls’ school run by
Louise Partridge numbering sixteen pupils in 1899. In that year and vicinity
there were also believed to be over one hundred families being taught the Gospels
and a large number of women taking reading classes. Partridge was happy to
boast that forty of them had unbound feet. In Fenchow-fu the educational ideal
also saw progress. The boys' boarding school had twenty-one pupils, several of
whom had transferred from Chinese schools. There was also an increase in
Chinese Christian parents sending their children to Mission schools.
Additionally, there were two day schools in outlying villages with twenty-five
pupils in total (6).
In order to propagate Christianity, an important duty of the
Oberlin Band was to disseminate religious material in the form of Bibles and
tracts. Howard Clapp headed the Mission's Depository and reported in 1899 that
book and tract distribution had grown rapidly that year in Fenchow-fu. The
retail of scriptures, calendars, scientific books, hymnals and monthly
magazines contributed 163,426 cash or about $81.70 to the Mission that year.
Clapp was disappointed to record that sales in Taiku had been minimal due to
the lack of money to hire a colporteur and, he remarked, the lack of anyone fit
to do the job. The Oberlin Band only distributed a few cheap tracts and several
hundred old American Bible Society books in Taiku (7).
These areas, health, education and tract distribution were all a
means to an end, this end initially was conversion then the establishment of
the "Oberlin-in-China". Conversion was not as easy as the
missionaries had assumed when they were mere Oberlin graduates, in 1881 Stimson
had hoped that they would "be eminently successful in turning some portion
of the world to Christ”(8). In 1899, Eva Price remarked
sarcastically that she could imagine "a year of uninterrupted and
successful work with hundreds, yes, thousands brought into the fold. Oh, Yes I
see it all!”(9). Sadly, for the Oberlin cause they
had seriously underestimated the difficulties that they would encounter in
China having undergone no preparation by the A.B.C.F.M. Indeed, with no
training in the language, history, culture and the customs of China they
inevitably found it very difficult to attract Chinese whom they could genuinely
convert. The Chinese had already established their own system of religion and
many tenets of Christianity did not seem logical or were directly opposed to
the revered traditions of China. For example, the missionaries knew dragons to
be representative of evil, whereas Chinese mythology denoted that they were a
"symbol of intelligence, beneficence, and power.”(10)
This was just one of many ways in which the diference of culture made the
attempts to convert by missionaries such a slow process which inspired much
opposition especially from the ruling classes. The missionaries did make real
progress, however it was not of the magnitude they had hoped or expected. In
1899, the church at Taiku had (established 1894) had seventy-six Chinese
communicants and about two hundred others attended services on Sundays. The church
in Fenchow-fu (established 1897) had fifty-two probationers and about forty-one
members. The church had given only one baptism service in 1899 at which four
men were christened. The long time it had taken to establish the churches and
the small Christian community provides a good indicator as to the uphill
struggle that faced the Oberlin Band. The external difficulties associated with
conversion were compounded by problems within the missions. Brandt describes
the missions in 1899 as "Understaffed, plagued by never-ending illnesses
and death" by this time the sum of the Oberlin Band actually in China
amounted to ten (11). Their achievements in Shanxi were
statistically minute compared to those of Protestant societies in other areas
of China. By 1900 the original ideal of beginning an
"Oberlin-in-China" still seemed very distant.
The Oberlin Band and the
Boxer Uprising.
In 1900, the Christians of Shanxi suffered the worst persecution
of any province in China principally due to the ferocity of the governor
Yuxian. He was determined to follow the Imperial Edict of the 24th of June that
ordered the "extermination" of all foreigners. On Tuesday July 31st
Boxers and Imperial soldiers broke into the Mission compound of the Taiku
section of the Oberlin Band. Six missionaries from Oberlin were brutally
murdered, with approximately thirty-eight Chinese Christians, including
children. As the Peking Legations were relieved on the 14th of August, the
Christian community of Fenchow-fu was ambushed whilst being escorted from the
city in the village of Nan Kai Shih. Four Oberlin missionaries were killed with
their three daughters. Two other missionaries from the China Inland Mission
(C.I.M.) were also killed with four Chinese Christians.
The Aftermath to the
Present.
The Boxer Rising was a momentous material blow for Oberlin and
Missions in Shanxi. The obedience of Yuxian had decimated the foreign
population. According to the "Christian occupation of China", "The mission property of the three
large societies at work in Shansi was completely destroyed, and all but 3 or 4
of the foreigners residing in the province at the outbreak of the trouble were
put to death."(12) How did Oberlin recover from this shattering
blow? Surprisingly, the aftermath of the Boxer Rising was seen as an extremely
promising time by the missionary societies in China although admittedly
"all phases of the Christian program received a serious check from which
some districts have never quite recovered.”(13)
Links with Oberlin were not re-established until the return of Dr. Iranaeus Atwood, the sole survivor of
the initial Oberlin Band in 1902. In 1905 the first new missionaries from
Oberlin arrived in Taiku. During the period 1903-1917, twenty-three Oberlin
graduates arrived in Shanxi. The Oberlin Mission saw a revival and a
strengthening. "Better sites and buildings were secured...The native
leaders who had carried the burden of the work in the absence of the
missionaries were given greater responsibilities, and closer co-operation grew
up between foreign and Chinese workers.”(14) The bond between Oberlin and Shanxi was
strengthened by the formation of the Oberlin Shansi Memorial Association
(O.S.M.A.) in 1907. In the immediate aftermath of the Boxer Uprising there were
only 125 communicants attached to the Taiku mission, in 1918 there were 1,500 (15).
The Oberlin Mission continued but what about the missionaries murdered by the Boxers? The bodies of the missionaries and their Chinese Christian followers were removed from the pits into which they had been thrown and reinterred in a nine acre park to the east of Taiku in 1901. This park was known as the "Flower Garden" and was confiscated at Iranaeus Atwood's behest from the Boxer leader, Meng Ta Hsi, who had led the attack at Taiku. In 1950, when the communist government came to power, these graves were completely destroyed (16). Links between Oberlin College and the Ming Hsien Academy were severed, it became the Shanxi Agricultural University which re-established ties in 1980 (17).
Meanwhile, in Oberlin, a memorial arch was dedicated to the
missionaries who were now, according to the inscriptions "martyrs".
The monument stresses the idealism of the missionary age, religious quotes
adorn the arch such as "The Blood of Martyrs - The Seed of the
Church". The evangelical passion of the period was exemplified by Judson
Smith who pushed vehemently for the construction of the Arch. In a speech of
1900 to the A.B.C.F.M. annual meeting in St. Louis he stated "When we went
to China with the gospel it was to stay and conquer; and nothing has happened
to change our purpose.” (18) However, the fiery zeal of Smith and his
pupils is now hugely diminished, the theological seminary of Oberlin College
has been transferred to another institution and the presence of the Arch has
raised many questions. The principal one being: what does it represent? The
rise of importance of issues such as racism and ethnicity have led to a
questioning of the morality of missionising in China. Certainly, few would now
suggest that it still stood to represent a burning ideal of conversion and
Christian martyrdom. Instead it is a monument that, as Hevia puts it,
"provide[s] a rhetorically powerful answer to the critics of the
missionary's critics" and asserts "the righteousness of the
missionary cause". (19) This stance has become provocative
to large sections of a modern audience not least Asian-Americans.
Bibliography:
N. Brandt, Massacre in Shansi (Syracuse, 1994).
M. Broomhall, ed., Martyred Missionaries of the China
Inland Mission with a Record of the Perils and Sufferings of some who escaped
(London, 1901).
J. Hevia, Monuments and Memory: Memorials to
Missionary "Martyrs" of the Boxer Uprising (1997).
J. Gittings, Lost Souls, The Guardian, Saturday August
5th, http://www.guardian unlimited.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,350503,00.html.
R.P.Hart, ed., Session 132: Re-Siting the Missionaries
in China: Critical Analyses of Translation, Imperialism, and Historical Memory,
http://www.aasianst.org/abstz/1998abst/China/c132.htm
F. K-Y Hsueh, untitled, (1997),
http://members.nbci.com/fhsueh/introduction.htm.
K.S. Latourette, A History of Christian Missions in
China (New York, 1929).
M.T. Stauffer, ed., The Christian Occupation of China
(Shanghai, 1922).
The China Mission Hand-Book (Shanghai,1896)
The China Mission Year Book 1919.
Notes:
1 N. Brandt,
Massacre in Shansi (Syracuse, 1994), p.31.
4
M. Stauffer, ed., The Christian Occupation of China (Shanghai, 1922), p. 185.
5
Brandt, Massacre in Shansi, p. 114.
12
Stauffer, ed., The Christian Occupation of China, p. 185.
16
Brandt, Massacre in Shansi, p. 276.
17
F. K-Y Hsueh, untitled (1997), http://members.nbci.com/fhsueh/introduction.htm.