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4 - Chinese Christians
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
- Chapter
- Additional Information
4 Chinese Christians Almost four years before the Congers’ arrival in Beijing, in November 1894, the Empress Dowager Cixi, then in her third year of retirement, was presented with a gift which, as one of her biographers puts it with pointed understatement, “is supposed to have led indirectly to very important developments.”1 Following the lead of the missionaries who had converted them, Chinese Protestant women throughout the empire had raised a subscription to help pay for an elegantly printed edition of the New Testament, translated into Chinese and bound in silver repoussé with a scene of Christ rising to heaven, to be given to Cixi for her birthday. Unlike the Jesuits, who in the China of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties had seen the wisdom and the expediency of incorporating Chinese and Christian systems of faith and worship in their efforts to convert the Chinese, the Protestants who had swarmed into China from Britain and America in the nineteenth century proved to be largely tone-deaf to the culture that hosted them. What Cixi already knew of Christianity was hardly likely to dispose her toward it. She had lived, after all, through the Taiping Rebellion, in which a failed scholar of the 40 The Empress and Mrs. Conger Confucian classics turned to a sketchy knowledge of Christianity in recasting himself as a Jesus-like freedom-fighter against Manchu rule (and was assisted by foreign Christians interested in booty, saving souls, or both). Nor did Cixi like the notion of foreigners coming to China to sway the Chinese away from their ancient religious allegiances. Cixi was a devout Buddhist, scrupulously adhering to the rites, to which she added the more mystical rituals of Daoism. As she told her lady-in-waiting, Der Ling, there were many foreigners who were “very nice and polite,” but she saw in Christianity a threat not just to Buddhist belief but to the basic structure of Chinese culture. Christianity was a “new idea,” a fad, which influenced the young and the ignorant to “chop up their Ancestral Tablets and burn them. I know many families here who have broken up because of the missionaries, who are always influencing the young people to believe their religion.”2 The specter of foreigners as drug pushers extended to macabre tales that missionaries used Chinese children’s eyes as ingredients in their potions. Even when Der Ling told Cixi that her own father, diplomat Yu Keng, had met some of these children and discovered they had been taken to the missions by their families because of their condition, in the hope they would be helped there, and that the children had been coached by the local prefect, the old lady was still not entirely convinced. There were few such liberal voices at court to help broaden her view. Yet it was really not the missionaries Cixi disliked most—it was Chinese converts. “These Chinese Christians are the worst people in China!” she told her lady-in-waiting. It was they, she believed, who stirred up civil unrest by refusing to obey the laws that had been part of Chinese society for millennia, disrupting the Confucian structure of containment and order, and of respect for the authority of emperor and parents. What made Christianity especially repugnant to devout Chinese was the absence of the rite of recognition and duty toward one’s ancestors. Unhappy ancestral ghosts were condemned to roam the land and were the disrupters of the harmony toward which all ritual in China strove. And of course, the worst thing about the Christians, especially to Cixi, was that their allegiance to the emperor as living god was compromised by their conversion to the worship of the single god of the Christian Bible. It was [3.88.60.5] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:00 GMT) 41 Chinese Christians this compromised allegiance that would lead the throne, in a few years, closer to disaster than it had ever been before.3 So in presenting a copy of the New Testament to Cixi, Chinese Christians and their missionary advisors, as well as the foreign ministers of Britain and the United States who personally offered the gift to the Zongli Yamen (Chinese Foreign Office), did not understand with what apprehension their Christian Pandora’s box might be received. Cixi issued a polite acknowledgement, sent gifts to the missionary women responsible for organizing the project, and that might have been that. Guangxu, however, had heard about the New Testament...