Title: Chinese Language as an Obstacle to Christian Evangelicalism and the introduction of Western Scientific Learning in the Nineteenth Century

Submitted by: Kai-wing Chow ,University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, USA

This paper aims to show how the discourse on the Chinese language produced by Christian missionaries in the nineteenth century was shaped by their frustrated experience in evangelical work which demanded not only knowledge of local dialects, but also knowledge of the Chinese writing. The diverse local dialects and the Chinese script presented enormous challenge to all European and American missionaries who had to work at the lower strata of the Chinese society. At the same time printing religious tracts was important for the missionaries' attempt to reach the literate population more effectively. Printing tracts required knowledge of the Chinese writing. As John K. Fairbank has noted: "The Protestant mission to the Chinese became in larger part a matter of print." "The difficulty of learning Chinese was best revealed in the almost universal complaints against the language. Of all the cultural differences missionaries encountered--crowded housing, different foods, lack of sanitation, starnage customs--the one item uniformly discussed in autobiographies and letters home was difficult learning the language."

It was particularly frustrating for missionaries who chose to teach the Chinese Christianity in the Chinese language. When missionary schools were established, they could not but hire traditional Chinese tutors and used their texts. Few missionaries had acquired the adequate language skill to teach in Chinese and there were no alternative textbooks other than those traditional Thousand-character Essay and the Trimetical Classic. The majority of the Protestant missionaries who went to China had to learn the language on hand. They had to learn the language as a foreign language without learning aids like dictionary or more importantly, a familiar system of concepts for understanding the "grammar" of the written language. It is understandable how difficult and frustrating the learning process had been for all the missionaries who came to China as adults. This agonizing experience had shaped the missionaries' discourse of the Chinese language as an obstacle to spreading literacy, and hence the introduction of Western knowledge

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Carol Burnett
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