In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

2 Converting Chinese Eyes: Rev. W. H. Medhurst, “Passing,” and the Victorian Vision of China Elizabeth H. Chang The Reverend Walter H. Medhurst (1796–1857) begins his travel narrative A Glance at the Interior of China Obtained During a Journey to the Silk and Green Tea Countries (1850)1 with the following injunction: “In order to accomplish a journey into the interior of China,” Medhurst writes, “it is necessary, if the individual undertaking it be a foreigner, to assume the Chinese dress, to shave the front part of the head and temples, and to wear what is commonly called a tail. The traveller should also be able to converse readily in the Chinese language; and conform himself, as much as possible, to the habits and manners of the natives.”2 If this opening sentence appeared daunting to a would-be traveler unaccustomed to shaving his head, unable to speak Chinese, and altogether unknowledgeable about how to conform himself to the habits of the natives, it was Medhurst’s project in the rest of the book to enlighten that ignorance, using his own seven-week journey through the province of Jiangxi in the spring of 1845 as a model. Medhurst himself came well-prepared to this journey. He had been anticipating the opportunity to educate the “heathen” since applying to join the London Missionary Society (LMS) in 1816. Educated at St. Paul’s and Hackney College, Medhurst’s initial service to the Congregationalist LMS was as a printer. He served in Southeast Asia for over twenty years, chiefly in Malacca, Penang, and Batavia, and received his D. D. shortly before establishing the LMS mission in Shanghai in 1843. Though compelled to leave China at the age of sixty-one for health reasons, he still refused to concede the effort, writing: “it is my earnest desire and set purpose to return to my work in this country as I am never so happy as when fully engaged in the Missionary field.”3 While he never fulfilled that desire, dying only a few days after making landfall in England, he left behind a legacy of evangelical engagement for the next generation of delegates that emphasized linguistic scholarship, respect for Chinese literary and historical tradition, and daily interactions with Chinese of every class, as well as a substantial body of 28 Elizabeth H. Chang published writings of which A Glance at the Interior of China remains a little-known, but compelling, part. The first half of A Glance, a meticulous catalogue of Chinese daily practice arranged in categories including “Dress Requisite for the Journey,” “On the Food of the Chinese, and their Manner of Eating It,” and “Complexion to Be Attended To,” forms a theoretical counterpoint to the second half, a travel narrative composed largely of transcribed journal entries that detail Medhurst’s attempted visit to a school of Chinese reformers sympathetic to Christian doctrine. The two parts work together to detail how, in abstract generality and in experiential practicality, a trespassing Briton can safely see and be seen by a then almost entirely unfamiliar category: the Chinese of “the interior.” Yet, even as his volume seeks to create a specific and authoritative record of this new view of China, Medhurst is at the same time attempting to revise this vision. As a delegate of the LMS, Medhurst devotes such attention to the details of “passing” for Chinese because he hopes ultimately to make his manual obsolete.4 The opening of China’s interior to Western eyes and bodies would, Medhurst and the LMS hoped, result in a large-scale conversion of the Chinese people to Protestant Christianity and the free circulation of European Christians to all parts of the Chinese empire. As Medhurst writes in his 1838 survey, China Its State and Prospects, “This then is the field for missionary exertions; the sphere where the most influential societies should direct their chief efforts, for until some impression is made upon China, it will matter little what is achieved in other more confined and thinly peopled regions. . . . [U]ntil China is evangelized, the greatest half of our work remains to be begun.”5 In A Glance at the Interior of China, Medhurst gives a foundational Protestant account of the people and geography of China, which implicitly responds to and reshapes the tradition of writings on China by Catholics that had, up to this point, dominated European ideas of China’s interior.6 Later missionaries like Hudson Taylor, the leader...

Share