Twelve days in the career of a China missionary: Timothy Richard at the Protestant Conference in Shanghai in 1890
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Date
2025
Authors
Kwong, Luke
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Cambridge Core
Abstract
This article proposes to examine an obscure episode in the long career of the well-known Welsh Baptist missionary Timothy Richard, who went to China in 1870 and spent most of the next 45 years there. Richard attended the second general Protestant Missionary Conference in Shanghai in 1890 and served on committees, spoke at meetings, and presented a paper. The information available, though scanty, confirms key components of his approach to mission at this time: his goal was to achieve Chinese ‘salvation’ by promoting the principles and practices of what might be broadly termed ‘Christian civilisation’; his means of propagation was the written word; his preferred point of entry was contact with members of China's ‘ruling’ or ‘governing’ classes. In response to his call for action against anti-Christian, anti-Church propaganda, the conference appointed a permanent committee, with Richard as chair, to present an address on the ‘missionary question’ to the Qing government. It was this project that took him to Beijing in 1895, where he met with court officials and members of the educated elite, and established connections that involved him, rather haphazardly, in court politics in 1898. The sequence of events sheds light on an intriguing aspect of Sino–foreign relations during the late Qing period.
Description
Open access article. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0) applies
Keywords
'Blue-books' of China , End and means of Christian mission , Protestant Conference , Timothy Richard
Citation
Kwong, L. (2025). Twelve days in the career of a China missionary: Timothy Richard at the Protestant Conference in Shanghai in 1890. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 35(1), 223-240. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1356186324000403