China Mission: A Personal History from the Last Imperial Dynasty to the People's Republic

23. Missionary Conference in Peking

23 Missionary Conference in Peking THE SCHOLAR The evening wind Has rolled back The curtain Of the clouds. The moon shines clear, And the sky is bright With the gleam Of distant stars. Though you Are far away From home and me, I see you As you always were At this hour of the night, In your study, Poring over Your loved books. —chen shengzhi, qing dynasty (1644–1911) In the summer of 1906, Reverend Ronning was invited to attend a convention of the Mission Society in Peking concerning plans for expanding the missions. Halvor was eager to participate but felt uneasy about leaving Hannah. She, however , urged him to go. He was accompanied by Sen Li-fu and his brother-in-law Carl Landahl, who, a year after Thea’s death, had married Alice Holmberg, a secondary missionary called a Bible Woman, who worked with him in the Sinyeh mission in Henan. Alice agreed to stay in Fancheng with Hannah while Halvor and Carl went to Peking. The journey took about two weeks. The three men sailed down the Han River missionary conference in peking
195 to Wuhan and down the Yangtze to Nanking, where they boarded the recently constructed Jingpu Railway to Peking. The sleeper cars were a welcome relief, even though the bunks were too small for the tall Norwegians. The sun was nearing the horizon when they arrived at the Peking station and hailed a mule cart to ride through Qianmen Guardhouse to the main gate of the city wall, Qianmen Gate. In the broad avenue leading to the Legation Quarter they ran into an incredible confusion of vehicles, beasts, and people: sedan chairs whose color and style varied with the rank of the owner; caravans of furry, two-humped Bactrian camels trekking back and forth from the Silk Road carrying saddlebags bulging with brocades and spices. Mongolian horsemen galloped their fine ponies through the streets sending the Chinese coolies, shouldering baskets of squawking chickens on the ends of yo-sticks, scrambling for cover. Naked urchins scavenging for food looked enviously at the children of the upper classes clasping the hands of their amahs as they walked proudly down the streets wearing red pajamas with conveniently split pants. The small boys wore beribboned tufts of hair growing from the middle of their shaven heads to fool the malevolent spirits into thinking they were only girls and not worth bothering with. The boulevard was paved with crooked flagstone, making it even more difficult for the mules to pull the missionaries’ cart through the crowds. Lanterns hung from the shop fronts, sometimes three deep, where merchants, smoking opium pipes, displayed their wares in the open, haggling loudly with customers. Soup vendors , fortune-tellers, barbers, letter writers, and storytellers all carried on their trades outdoors as there is no privacy in China. Manchu women, whom Halvor had seldom seen in the interior of China, did not have bound feet like Chinese women, but strode among the men with long steps, bright flowers in their hair, their faces white with rice flour, and their high cheekbones daubed with red. Once the missionaries arrived at the gate of the Legation Quarter, where the Siege of Peking had been fought six years earlier, they paid the muleteer and walked along the banks of the Jade Canal that reportedly had run with blood during the siege. There was barely a building that had not been flattened or partially destroyed in the fighting. Gray stone walls topped with spiked glass surrounded each compound. They checked into the Grand Hotel des Wagon-Lits. The grandiose lobby, studded with gold and red pillars, was already filled with missionaries. Halvor and Landahl changed into their formal black Prince Albert coats and high white-starched collars to attend the convention, which was held in a bullet-ridden compound on the Street of Intercourse with the People. The attitudes of the new missionaries meeting to discuss the problems facing their rapidly expanding missions came as a shock to Reverend Ronning and the other 196
home leave and return veteran missionaries from the interior. A sharp difference of opinion existed about which, if any, Chinese manners and customs should be acceptable to the Christian church. Most of the overzealous missionaries had arrived in China after the Boxer Uprising and had assumed some of the superior attitudes that the Catholics, diplomats, and businesspeople living in foreign concessions had...