The Virgin Mary and Catholic Identities in Chinese History

2. After the treaties

The Treaty of Nanjing marked the cessation of the First Opium War, fought between Great Britain and China. The fact that this formal agreement, signed on 29 August 1842, was “imposed by the victor upon the vanquished at gunpoint, without the careful deliberation usually accompanying international agreements in Europe and America”, undoubtedly contributed to the outbreak of the Second Opium War in the next decade.1 Although signatures were exchanged on board the British naval vessel HMS Cornwallis on that date, the process of ratification by both nations’ rulers, the Daoguang Emperor (r. 1820–50) and Queen Victoria (r. 1837–1901), was not completed until the end of the year. The actual implementation of the provisions of the treaty occurred even later. Among the thirteen articles of the treaty, some of the main provisions were the opening of five ports—Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai—the cession of Hong Kong Island, and the imposition of an indemnity .2 There were also numerous provisions regarding trade, which, after all, was chief among the underlying reasons for the war in the first place. As stated by Immanuel Hsü, “Opium, the immediate cause of the war, was not even mentioned —the question of its future status cautiously avoided by both sides.”3 This treaty did more than cede Chinese trading rights to the British and create foreign enclaves in treaty ports. It also began a process by which the slow and furtive entry of Christian missionaries was transformed into a numerically significant and legally sanctioned enterprise. The growth of the Catholic Church in China had slowed down after the persecutions and restrictions it experienced from the mid- to the late 1700s, which had dramatically decreased the number of foreign missionaries able to enter the country. This did not mean, obviously, that there were no more clergy for the Catholic population, as there was a significant number of Chinese priests by this time, but it did mean that these Chinese priests were usually overworked and were not replaced 2 After the treaties 52 The Virgin Mary and Catholic Identities in Chinese History when they died.4 In the case of the Jesuits, for instance, their suppression in 1773 also meant that there were simply no more members of the Society to be sent on mission anywhere, let alone to the towns and villages of China.5 The legal return of the missionaries was not a major aim of the war; the treaty did not even include religion as one of its main provisions. Even so, by Christmas 1842, Fr. Napoleon Libois was able to write that it seemed “easier than ever to get into China.”6 Libois, a French priest of the Society for the Foreign Missions of Paris (Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris, or MEP), was based in Macau and was the procurator of his congregation.7 This meant he was responsible for the material and spiritual support of his fellow Foreign Missions missionaries who were already in China or on their way there. His predecessor, Fr. Pierre-Louis Legrégeois, had resided in Macau for almost thirteen years, from 1828 to 1841, and had performed a similar role.8 Their society had much experience getting men into China, therefore; they welcomed the changes brought about by the new situation. Insofar as the Western countries (that is, the United States of America in addition to the European powers) thought their own cultures more developed and civilized than the Chinese, the new possibility for Western religions to be preached without hindrance was certainly welcome. There are too many references in the primary literature of the period for there to be much doubt that many of those who came to China, or reported on what they experienced there, saw a nation and culture they considered as inferior to their own. Two small examples will suffice to illustrate. An interpreter for the British forces was quoted as saying that “a more subtle, lying and thievish race it never was my luck to live amongst.”9 The missionaries too, both Catholic and Protestant, were guilty at times of a similar sense of cultural superiority. The Catholic missionary Fr. Jean-Henri Baldus was a French Lazarist who had worked in China since the beginning of 1835 (and thus technically there without formal permission), and who died in Jiujiang, Jiangxi Province, in 1869.10 Father Baldus reputedly developed very good Chinese-language skills over the course of his thirty years in...