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The Stories of Urban Christian Women in Nineteenthcentury South China: With Special Reference to Missionary-related Sources1 Wong Man Kong This chapter constructs the stories of two Chinese women in nineteenthcentury South China so as to reveal some of the qualities and lived experiences of urban Christian women. By any standard of measurement prevailing among the Chinese women of that period, they were indeed remarkable figures. In order to investigate their stories, use has been made of a variety of source materials, such as family history materials (oral and printed), missionary-related materials, diplomatic papers, and government records. This approach shows the potential of different sources to provide us with a better understanding of the Chinese women in late imperial China. Before the unfolding of their stories, it is useful to begin with some necessary background in historiography. The voices and views of nineteenth-century Chinese Christian women were seldom heard. This was due to a conservative attitude which held that women were subordinate to the male members of their immediate families. In other words, their identities were established through their family affiliation.2 Their names and their activities were thus rarely the major focus in missionary records. It should be noted that the contributions of their Chinese coworkers were never the center of attention in reports written by missionaries. It was not that Chinese Christians, male or female, did not contribute a significant share to the missionary enterprise. On the contrary, “Chinese collaboration and assistance was crucial for all missions, especially those of the Protestants, whose many institutions needed Chinese staff to do most of the real work,” as Daniel Bays pointedly remarks. Such an invisible position was due to the fact that, as he goes on to say, “in most aspects of missionary endeavour in the late 1800s and especially in the reports and publicity written for the home constituency in Europe or North America, the foreign missionaries took centre stage.”3 544 | Overt and Covert Treasures In order to illuminate this point, a few words about the salient features of missionary writings are necessary. For the purpose of soliciting more support for missionary endeavours, almost from the very beginning of their work among the Chinese the missionaries were cautious in writing their assessment of the “fruits” of their labor. As a result of this, some significant information about Chinese Christians became available. Writing history became a common practice among missionaries, even though they might in fact have had a stronger interest in religions, languages or customs. The same was also true of the female members of the missionary circle in China.4 For religious or other reasons, the histories that missionaries produced were widely read by the public in general and churchgoers in particular, and they become the sources of historical imagination about China in the West. The state of the historiography of Chinese Christianity has seen a two-stage change of orientation in the twentieth century. The first stage saw the swing from rejecting to incorporating the studies of Christian missions in the historical scholarship of modern China. During the 1950s, the joint efforts of John King Fairbank and Kwang-ching Liu in encouraging some of their graduate students to study missionary history as a relevant topic in Sino-American history made possible a revival of interest in the history of Christian missions in China. Again, missionaries and their sponsoring agents were the focus. The second stage saw a growing interest in the study of Chinese Christians, a shift of interest which echoes the paradigm of a “China-centered history of China.”5 It thus seemed logical and sensible to give Chinese Christians an equal share of scholarly attention. Parallel to these changes there was increasing interest in the female members of the missionary circles and churches, women missionaries, Chinese Christian women and Bible women alike. In 1996, Daniel Bays edited Christianity in China: from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, which presented a new standard of scholarship in the field, and in which there was a full section devoted to discussion of Christianity and Chinese women.6 As Bays rightly pointed out, historians owe a debt to Jane Hunter and Kwok Puilan , whose works become the model for those interested in gaining a general picture of American women missionaries and Chinese Christian women in nineteenth and early twentieth-century China. In particular, Kwok’s Chinese Women and Christianity, 1860–1927 remains a significant reference because she provides a general picture that covers the different levels...

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