God's Chinese Son (6 page)

Liang Afa was an expert at the printing and distribution of tracts. He
travelled constantly by boat and on foot among the villages around Canton,
choosing the perfect blocks, hiring extra carvers when he could find them
(bargaining with them for the best price), then collating their labors while
another Christian Chinese friend, named Agong, stitched the works into
neat volumes. The two men also learned to use the new lithographic press
that the missionaries made available to them, and were soon able to pro­duce single broadsheets with an illustration on one side and a short text
on the other, or lengthy and complex evangelical works.
¹³

By the time Edwin Stevens met him, in 1832, Liang had begun a pro­gram of roaming the countryside around Canton, traveling as much as
250 miles and handing out as many as seven thousand Christian tracts on
a single journey. Protestant missionaries had already begun illegally to
prowl China's coast by sea, dropping off Bibles or tracts wherever they
could go ashore. Now Liang developed a new strategy: together with
Agong, he began to follow the itinerary of the
Qing
dynasty officials who
went from town to town to administer the local Confucian examinations,
hoping thus that his tracts would reach the hands of the examination
candidates, an influential audience
—
if not necessarily a sympathetic one.
¹⁴
By the mid-1830s Liang had refined this strategy further, and began to
hand out his tracts near the examination hall in Canton city, where those
who had proved successful at the local towns' qualifying examinations
met to be tested for the second time. In no other place in southeast China
could one find a larger gathering of Chinese of proven education and of
potential influence in their country's life.
¹⁵

Stevens quickly saw the benefits of spreading the Christian message by
means of the printed word:

To have any sort of access to ten or twenty millions, and to leave there
the Christian Scriptures and books, which may preach during the necessary
absence of the living herald, is very different from entire exclusion. Nay,
who will believe that of the many thousand volumes circulated there during
the last three years, all are forgotten before God, and will "return void?"
May we not rather indulge the hope, that at this very time these tracts are
giving instruction to the inmates of some humble Chinese dwelling on the
coast; yea, even carrying the true light from heaven into some heart that was
lost in the darkness of paganism?"'

One need expect no political revolution in China, thought Stevens, "we
do not speak of a growing public sentiment in China, as in other countries,
which is soon to burst forth in a universal call for rational liberty and the
natural rights of man." But the Chinese were "as intelligent and as
wronged as the lamented Poles," and had a natural openness that
—
were
their government leaders absent—led them to see the foreigners as their
friends, and to be potentially open to the Christian message.
¹⁷

That being so, how close could a Westerner in this environment come
to emulating Liang? In two lengthy and adventurous expeditions with
Chinese-speaking Western missionaries, one in the spring and one in the
autumn of 1835, Stevens put one side of these dreams of wider tract distri­bution into effect. Taking temporary leave from his Whampoa ministry,
he shipped out of Canton on an American brig, cruising along the coast
of China, as far north as the mountainous inlets of Shandong, exploring
the narrow waterways and mudflats of the river Min in Fujian, negotiat­ing the wide stretches of the Woosung River that led him at last to see the
serried masts of the Chinese vessels in Shanghai. The trips elated Stevens,
both for the number of tracts distributed and for the beauty of China,
especially the coastal reaches of Fujian, which few Westerners had ever
seen before. And as the foreigners sailed back, out of the local residents'
lives, Stevens could reflect how he had left behind him several hundred
"volumes of books, which may teach the way of salvation," books that
would remind the Chinese "of the kindness of foreigners, long after the
noise of the present events had died away."
¹⁸

In the brigs' longboats, with a mixed crew of Lascars and Malays, lying
under a tarpaulin slung aft among the piled supplies of rice, oil, vegetables,
and meat, or else hiking on foot among the fields and villages of the busy
countryside, Stevens travelled with his boxes of Chinese Christian books,
prepared so laboriously by Milne, Liang, Morrison, and others: translated
lives of Christ, commentaries on the Ten Commandments, collections of
homilies, Gospel elucidations, hymns. He and his companions distributed
several thousand copies on the first voyage, more than twenty thousand
on the second. Chinese government war junks, full of troops, often shad­owed the brigs, and Chinese patrol boats glided along behind Stevens'
longboat as he probed the inner waterways. Once a cannonade was fired at
his boat, and two crewmen wounded. Mounted Chinese military officers
sometimes warned back the Chinese villagers, plainclothes policemen
mingled with the crowds, students from local schools cried out in protest
against the anti-Confucian Christians, and one grim day the local officials
shredded an entire consignment of his books in front of his eyes, dropped
the pieces in a basket of loose-packed straw, and set them afire.

But despite such interdictions the books left Stevens' hands as fast as
they could be unloaded and carried ashore. On some days the crowds
were eager and smiling, neat and courteous, as the decorous distribution
proceeded; on others, they pressed around with such uncontrollable force
that Stevens clambered up on walls to escape the grasping hands, or flung
the books and tracts at random up into the air above the waving arms of
the potential converts. Sometimes, in lonely villages, he laid a copy on the
stoop of every home. Once a huge crowd stood sodden and motionless in
the driving rain as—equally soaked—Stevens shared the word. Once the
Chinese onlookers stood around him with fingers on their lips, showing
him they had been forbidden by their officials to speak aloud to foreigners.
Yet still they took the books, as did priests in Buddhist temples, and schol­ars in their homes. Sometimes, as if in anticipation of baptismal rites, the
Chinese waded out through the water to his boat before he could go
ashore, and asked him for their copies.
¹⁹

With these exemplars and experiences to draw on, Stevens by 1836 has
other thoughts to ponder. As one spreads God's word in China, how much
should one try to be, or act, Chinese? Stevens knows something of the
different adaptive skills shown by different missionaries at different times.
He has been privileged by two years' friendship with Robert Morrison,
and has heard how that distinguished scholar-missionary, on first arriving
in China, dined with his Chinese-language teachers, ate with chopsticks,
"imitated the native dress also, let his nails grow long, cultivated a queue,
and walked about the Hong in a Chinese frock and thick shoes," and even
said his good-night prayers "in broken Chinese."
²⁰

Although Morrison's "Chinese habits were soon laid aside," that was
not true for Karl Gutzlaff, a missionary from Pomerania with whom
Stevens traveled up the coast in 1835. Gutzlaff loved to dress in the Chi­nese garb of a Fujian sailor when he traveled, or in other variants of
Chinese clothes. Thus arrayed, he looked to some Chinese so like them­selves that they thought he was a foreign-born Chinese. The confusion
was compounded by Gutzlaff’s uncanny skill at Chinese language: he
could pick up the nuances of each local dialect after only a short period of
fierce concentration. Hearing Gutzlaff speak their dialect, baffled Chinese
would peer under his hat, to see if he did not have concealed there the long
queue of hair that all Chinese wore.
²¹
Such ambiguity bore advantages and
dangers. "If the Chinese costume were adopted," wrote Stevens after one
of his trips, "this might prolong the time of detection, but would much
more diminish personal safety"—for discovery was inevitable, and heavy
punishment would follow.
²²
News of the illegal coastal journeyings had
swiftly reached the emperor, who issued a strict denunciation of those
who sought "to distribute foreign books, designing to seduce men with
lies,-—a most strange and astonishing proceeding!" and likened their actions to those who earlier "clandestinely brought foreign females to Canton."
²³

Suppose, whether in disguise or not, one were to penetrate the walls of Canton? There were some Chinese inside who would be sympathetic— that was certain—though it was hard to tell how many. The English- language newspaper
Canton Register
in the spring of 1834 had noted in detail how Gutzlaffs continuation of the
Chinese Monthly Magazine,
a journal first conceived and written in Chinese by Milne and Liang Afa almost twenty years before, was flourishing still. Each new issue of this journal, "written in the Chinese language by a foreigner" and "printed withinside the city walls," was "delivered from the Chinese press to the agent of the editor; sent by him to the subscribers; and by them distributed gratuitously" to the Chinese, thus "making its way among the native pop­ulation of Canton." Private initiative then took over and speeded circula­tion, for "portions of their contents have been copied, and hawked about the streets for sale. Parties of Chinese have been observed clubbed together reading and explaining them." The
Canton Register
editor focused on the scientific and commercial information that the Chinese were thus acquir­ing, and speculated that by such means the West could "get a hold of the Chinese mind." How could the missionary not reflect that by such means one might also get a hold of the Chinese soul?
²⁴

By 1836 the pressures are mounting along with the sense of growing opportunities. Partly because of the emperor's edict attacking the illegal voyages, and also because of new activities by Catholic missionaries operating out of Macao, the local Canton officials have felt the need to act. In early 1836 their staff raid the workshop of a leading printer in Macao, and seize there "eight kinds of foreign books." The printer has been thrown in jail, his stock confiscated. The Chinese residents of the Macao and Canton region have been given six months in which to hand over to the magistrates all foreign books that teach the religion of "Yasoo" (Jesus) or of the Lord of Heaven. If they meet this deadline, they will not be punished, but after the deadline punishment will be severer
¹

And there is a final factor. Even if one enters the city and hands out religious books, the motives of the Chinese accepting the books will be mixed; that much Stevens knows. For there is always idle curiosity and greed along with good will, as he has noted on his two coastal journeys. As if to balance those Chinese with open countenance, who seemed to understand the purpose of the books and offered little presents in return— white grapes, for instance, or pears, a pinch of tobacco, a handful of millet or a little mound of salt-fish roe—others fought among themselves to add a red-jacketed book to a brown-bound one, though each was otherwise the same, or offered the books they had just received for sale in the village streets before Stevens had even left; some pressed around, wheedling, beg­ging for opium (which the brigs indeed had carried), or for medicines from the supplies the missionaries had with them, showing that desire for cash or fear of potential sickness might be their motive more than any spiritual need.
²⁶