The Land of Sinim
A Hope Deferred, Denied, yet Never Discarded
Prologue: The Land of Sinim
On an autumn Sunday in 1891, in a white clapboard church in the Western Reserve of Ohio, a missionary on furlough stood before a congregation of two hundred and opened his Bible to the book of Isaiah. He had been home for three months, and the furlough had its own rituals: the prayer breakfasts, the women’s society teas, the lantern-slide lectures in which he displayed photographs of Chinese faces—patients healed, students baptized, converts standing solemnly in their new faith. But the Sunday sermon was the main event, the moment when the appeal for funds acquired the force of prophecy.
He read from the forty-ninth chapter, twelfth verse, in the language of the King James Version that his listeners knew almost by heart:
Behold, these shall come from far: and, lo, these from the north and from the west; and these from the land of Sinim.
He paused on the last word. Sinim. The congregation knew what it meant, or believed they knew. The land of Sinim was China. Isaiah, writing seven centuries before Christ, had foreseen the conversion of the Chinese people. Their donations—the silver dollars pressed into the collection plate, the pledges penciled onto subscription cards—were not merely charitable acts. They were participation in prophecy itself.
This was not an unusual sermon.1 Across the final decades of the nineteenth century, in Presbyterian churches in Pennsylvania and Baptist churches in Virginia, in Congregationalist meetinghouses in New England and Methodist chapels in the Midwest, the same verse was quoted, the same interpretation offered, the same appeal made. Isaiah had spoken. China was in the Bible. The matter was settled.
Except that it wasn’t.
A Word That Appears Once
The Hebrew word that the King James translators rendered as “Sinim” is סִינִים. It appears exactly once in the entire Hebrew Bible—what scholars call a hapax legomenon—a word that occurs only once, its meaning stranded without the context repetition provides. For a text as extensively studied as Isaiah, this is an unusual degree of obscurity. The word is a proper noun, clearly referring to a place or a people in the east or south, but which place, which people, has been debated for centuries.
The manuscript traditions do not agree. The Masoretic Text, the standard Hebrew version that underlies most Christian translations, reads סִינִים—Sinim. But the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa), found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran in 1947 and dating to approximately 125 BCE, reads סוניים—Svenim or Swnyym, a variant that points toward a different identification entirely.2
These divergences matter. The Dead Sea Scrolls reading, Svenim, strongly suggests Syene—the ancient name for the city known today as Aswan, in southern Egypt. This identification is not speculative. A substantial Jewish military colony existed at Elephantine, an island in the Nile opposite Syene, from at least the sixth century BCE. The Elephantine Papyri, first acquired in the 1890s and excavated in the early twentieth century, document a thriving Jewish community there, complete with its own temple. Isaiah’s promise that the dispersed of Israel would return “from far… from the north and from the west; and these from the land of Svenim” fits naturally into the geography of the Jewish diaspora as it existed in the prophet’s era: the north (Mesopotamia), the west (the Mediterranean world), and the south (Upper Egypt). China, by contrast, lay far beyond the horizon of any biblical writer’s known world.
The scholarly consensus today favors Syene. The leading critical commentaries—Brevard Childs, John Goldingay, Joseph Blenkinsopp—identify the referent as Aswan in southern Egypt,3 and the reading is not controversial in most academic circles.4
But for most of the nineteenth century, it was not settled at all. And the man who unsettled it was one of the most influential Hebraists of the age.
From Lexicon to Pulpit
Wilhelm Gesenius, professor of theology at the University of Halle, published his Hebräisches und chaldäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament in 1810 and 1812—a Hebrew-Chaldee lexicon that became, in its various editions and translations, the standard reference work for biblical Hebrew throughout the Protestant world. Under the entry for סִינִים, Gesenius noted the phonetic resemblance between Sin and the name by which China was known in many Asian languages, derived from the Qin dynasty (秦, Qín, 221–206 BCE), formerly the State of Qin (as early as 9th century BCE), whose first emperor unified the country—and concluded, with the cautious hedging of a working philologist, that “China is at least not as unsuitable as several interpreters assume”.5
Half a century later, Julius Fürst—who had taken his degree in Oriental languages and theology under Gesenius at Halle in 1832—published his own lexicon under the same title, and carried the identification further: he acknowledged that Jewish tradition had identified the place as the southern land of Egypt, but set that reading aside as “less fitting for the context”.6 The Jewish tradition Fürst dismissed was not vague rabbinic folklore. It included the Targum, Jerome, and Saadya Gaon. From those authorities through the medieval Jewish commentators, the verse had been read as pointing south. The China reading was not original to either man: Azariah dei Rossi, a sixteenth-century Italian Jewish scholar, had proposed it in his Meʾor Einayim (Mantua, 1573).7
Dei Rossi’s move in 1573 is not a contrarian philological claim but a geographer’s aside.8 Mapping the inhabited quarter of the globe, he runs it “from the eastern edge, which begins near the land of Sinim, to the western edge, the place of the islands, Fortunate or Canaries”,9 and anchors the sketch in the canon of Jewish learning.10 The China identification is not asserted; it is deployed, as common knowledge among the learned—the natural eastern counterpart to the western isles at the edge of the classical map, two and a half centuries before the missionary movement needed the verse to mean what it had quietly meant in Mantua all along.
But the successive imprimaturs of the two great German Hebrew lexicons of the nineteenth century—the first by the master, the second by his pupil—carried it from cautious philological speculation into the bloodstream of Anglo-American Protestantism.
The channels of transmission were remarkably efficient. Albert Barnes, a Presbyterian minister in Philadelphia, published his Notes on the Bible beginning in 1832. Barnes’s commentary was not a work of original scholarship; it was a synthesis designed for lay readers, and it was spectacularly popular. For decades, it sat in the studies of American ministers and on the parlor shelves of Protestant families alongside the Bible itself. Barnes had not always identified Sinim with China; in his first edition he had given “a different view”, and his Isaiah commentary recorded the change with rare candor. He had reconsidered, he wrote, because if the China reading was correct, “then the passage furnishes an interesting prediction respecting the future conversion of the largest kingdom of the world.” There was, he added, “some plausibility in the supposition that while so many other nations, far inferior in numbers and importance, are mentioned by name, one so vast as this would not wholly be omitted by the Spirit of Inspiration.” Among the authorities Barnes cited was the Rev. Peter Parker, M.D., the American medical missionary in Canton, who had told a Philadelphia audience that “the Chinese have been known from time immemorial by the name Tschin.”11 The German philology, confirmed in the field by the American missionary, returned to the Philadelphia pulpit as biblical certainty. The argument was theological, not philological.
The references that followed were not unanimous. James Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (1890) listed Sinim warily as “an otherwise unknown name”, a “distant Oriental region”,12 while Robert Young’s Analytical Concordance to the Bible (1879) gave it plainly as “the Chinese”.13 The pulpit and the Sunday school lesson followed Young. The interpretation moved from the lexicon to the commentary to the concordance to the pew, shedding caveats at every transmission, until by the time it reached the ears of the congregation in Ohio it had acquired the weight of established fact.
The Chinese themselves, or rather the Chinese Christian translators who produced the Chinese Union Version of the Bible—the 和合本 (Héhéběn), completed in 1919 and still the most widely used Chinese Protestant Bible today—translated סִינִים as 秦國 (Qín Guó): the State of Qin.14 That is to say: China. The translators, working under the supervision of Western missionaries, adopted Gesenius’s identification and embedded it in the text that Chinese Christians would read for the next century. The interpretation thus became self-confirming: the Chinese Bible said China was in the Bible.
The identification has sunk so deep that the Hebrew language itself has absorbed it. In modern Hebrew, סִינִים—Sinim—is simply the word for “Chinese people”, the plural of סִינִי, Sini. The ancient hapax legomenon, whose meaning scholars debated for centuries, has been resolved not by philology but by popular usage. Whatever Isaiah meant, Hebrew speakers today take “China” from the verse, whether they read it at home or hear it chanted at a synagogue. The ambiguity15 has been paved over by assumption.
The irony is considerable. A German professor’s educated guess, advanced tentatively in a reference work, was adopted by an American commentator, propagated through the machinery of popular biblical education, carried across the Pacific by missionaries, and finally inscribed into the scripture of the very people it claimed to describe. By the time the Dead Sea Scrolls showed that Isaiah had meant Egypt and not China, the interpretation had already done its work. It had helped to build a movement, fund an enterprise, and shape the assumptions of a nation.
What the Dream Became
This book is about the consequences of that assumption—not the narrow textual question of what Isaiah meant, but the far larger question of what happened when millions of Americans believed that China occupied a special place in God’s plan for the world, and acted on that belief for more than a century.
The conviction has proved remarkably durable, though the language has not. The vocabulary shifted with each generation; the grammar remained. Beneath every iteration lay a single, unexamined premise: that China was a project, an object of American effort that would, given time and investment, yield to American expectations. Each generation gave that premise a new name and proceeded as though it were a new idea.
That premise originated in the Protestant missionary movement of the nineteenth century. It was institutionalized through an extraordinary infrastructure of hospitals, universities, and religious organizations. It survived the trauma of Communist revolution and the cynicism of Nixonian realpolitik. It was secularized into the bipartisan “engagement” consensus of the post–Cold War era. It persists today even amid its apparent collapse. The current hostility—tariff wars, technology restrictions, military posturing, bipartisan rhetoric about a “new Cold War”—has a rational core: a rising power, a shifting balance, the ordinary friction of a challenged hegemon. But it burns at a temperature the strategic ledger cannot explain—the heat not of a calculation revised but of a faith shattered.
Even now, with the bipartisan consensus officially buried, the present configuration resists easy reading. A papal encyclical proposes the universal destination of patents, algorithms, data, and platforms. An AI lab co-founder stands at the Vatican asking for moral voices the incentives cannot bend, eleven days after his company has published a strategy for technological containment. A transactional president meets the man who, nine months before he took power, flew back to the Iowa town that had taken him in as a young official, sat again with his old hosts, and told them, “to me, you are America”—then ruled by closing door after door that sentence had held open. Whether the missionary grammar is reasserting itself, mutating, or finally exhausting itself is a question this book asks without pretending to answer.
This is not how nations typically relate to one another. The United States does not expect India to become more American. It does not feel betrayed when Brazil fails to adopt American political norms. It competed with the Soviet Union for decades without the peculiar emotional register—the sense of personal disappointment, of promises broken, of love unrequited—that characterizes American discourse about China. The intensity is specific to this relationship, and its origins are specific as well. They lie in the missionary movement that sent more than twelve hundred young Americans to China in the decades before the First World War, that built half the hospitals in China by 1931, that established thirteen universities, and that created an institutional network linking churches in Ohio to clinics in Fujian to policy offices in Washington. That network has been secularized, but its assumptions have not been fully examined.
That hostility sounds less like strategic competition than like the rage of a rejected suitor. A pipeline ran from seminary to mission field to diplomatic post to think tank, and at every junction the vocabulary was translated: salvation became modernization, modernization became democratization, democratization became liberalization—and perhaps liberalization is becoming universalization. Each translation preserved the structure while disguising the origin. Today no one in Washington frames the relationship as a project of conversion.16 But the emotional architecture remains that of a missionary enterprise confronting the apostasy of its most important convert.
A claim of this size should state its terms. The missionary inheritance, as this book traces it, is a recurring structure of expectation: a grammar that coexists with power and interest and does not replace them. Strategy, commerce, and security drove the relationship at every stage; what the missionary enterprise supplied was the framework through which those drives were articulated, justified, and emotionally underwritten, and the framework outlived every vocabulary that carried it.17 One boundary should be marked as well. This is a history of an American idea about China, not a history of China. Chinese men and women appear throughout as agents rather than objects—their refusals, conversions, and counter-projects drawn from Chinese-language sources wherever the record allows—but the subject under examination is the dream, not the dreamed-of.18
The Shape of the Story
It begins with Robert Morrison, alone in Canton in 1807, and a dictionary that consumed a quarter-century of his life. It moves through Peter Parker’s hospital on Green Pea Street, where the lancet opened doors the Bible could not, and the Student Volunteer Movement that sent the best of a generation to the field under the conviction that their work would hasten the Second Coming. The Boxer Summer of 1900 gave the mission boards their martyrs; the indemnity that followed turned punitive silver into the founding of Tsinghua. A Methodist generalissimo married into the Soong dynasty, and Henry Luce, Pearl Buck, and Walter Judd built an emotional infrastructure so sturdy that when China fell behind an atheist curtain, it felt less like a strategic reversal than a death in the family. Mao wrote “Farewell, Leighton Stuart!” and expelled the missionaries. McCarthy destroyed the experts. Nixon engaged China expecting a change of conduct, not of soul—almost alone among presidents in that distinction—and the reprieve was brief. The missionary thesis survived by shedding its theology. Tiananmen was forgiven. WTO accession was celebrated. And then the man who was hosted in Muscatine dismantled the framework from within. What remains is the question the book cannot avoid: whether the paradigm is escapable at all.
I write this from a particular vantage point. I grew up in a Three-Self Patriotic Movement church in China—the very institution the Communist Party created in the 1950s to replace foreign missionary Christianity. My mother is a retired evangelist who preached in registered and unregistered churches alike during the relatively open years of the early 2000s, before the constraints later closed in. I now live in Japan, where I have seen aging Japanese congregations struggling to attend services, Mandarin sermons in Chinese-speaking churches delivered by Korean pastors, and the growth of American-led international churches in Tokyo’s expatriate neighborhoods. The three outcomes of the missionary impulse that this book traces—the Korean success, the Japanese resistance, the Chinese persistence—are not abstractions to me. They are the landscape of my Sundays. This proximity is a liability as well as a responsibility, and I have tried throughout to let the evidence advance the argument rather than the other way around.
The scholarly consensus is that Isaiah meant Syene, not Sinim—Aswan, not China. A misreading that shaped history, built on something deeper than any text. The error was corrected long ago. The hope it authorized has proven more durable.
In the church in Ohio, if it still stands, the congregation has thinned. The missionary map on the wall has faded. But China remains—unconverted, unconquered, unread. And the dream of Sinim persists, transformed, redirected, but not yet discarded.
The scene is composite, but it has a representative figure. Hampden Coit DuBose (1845–1910), a Southern Presbyterian missionary based in Suzhou for thirty-eight years, titled his handbook for China missionaries Preaching in Sinim (1893), in which he quotes Isaiah 49:12 as “a special promise” given to the church “in her arduous labors in China”—taking Sinim’s identity with China not as a claim to be argued but as settled fact. In 1891—the year of this scene—he was elected Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, U.S., and toured American churches on furlough.↩︎
The early translations diverge further. The Septuagint (3rd–2nd c. BCE) renders the word as Περσῶν, “Persians”—suggesting the Greek translators either read a different Hebrew text or understood the referent differently. Jerome’s Vulgate gives de terra australi, “from the southern land”—neither transliterating nor identifying a specific place, but interpreting the word as a direction.↩︎
Childs (2001), Isaiah, p. 380: the Syene/Aswan emendation “has received support from 1QIsa, which reads swnyym.” Blenkinsopp (2002), Isaiah 40–55, p. 312, names Syene explicitly among the southern points of Isaiah’s diaspora geography. Goldingay (2001), Isaiah, p. 285, reads vv. 12–13 within the same southern-Egyptian diaspora frame.↩︎
A notable dissent: Raanan Eichler of Bar-Ilan University argues, on phonetic, contextual, text-critical, and internal-lexical grounds, that Gesenius was right and the modern consensus wrong. The internal-lexical move reads יָם (yām, “sea”) in Psalm 107:3—the only other biblical pairing of “north” with יָם—as “south” rather than “west”, which places the north-and-south axis of Isaiah 49:12 already inside the verse and leaves Sinim to lie east. See Eichler, “China Is in the Bible”, Vetus Testamentum 74, no. 1 (2024), pp. 60–77, doi:10.1163/15685330-bja10124.↩︎
Gesenius (1812), Hebräisches und chaldäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament, vol. 2, p. 788. The German original: “im Osten Sina, welches wenigstens nicht so unpassend ist, als mehrere Ausleger annehmen.”↩︎
Fürst (1861), Hebräisches und chaldäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament, vol. 2, p. 79. The German original: “unter welchem Lande man gew. richtig Sina od. China versteht, aber die jüd. Tradition (Trg. Hieron. Sa’adja) hat darunter das Südland Aegyptens, Pelusium, verstanden, was weniger für den Zus.hang passt.” The parenthetical names the three authorities Fürst overruled.↩︎
Eichler (2024), §3 (“China”), traces this earlier history. Dei Rossi (1511/1513–1578) is the first known proposer; Benito Arias Montano followed in 1599, with Cornelius à Lapide and Menasseh ben Israel carrying it through the seventeenth century. Gesenius systematized rather than invented the reading.↩︎
Imrei Binah (the third part of Meʾor Einayim), ch. 11, in a digression on whether the ancients and the Sages knew the earth’s true shape. Dei Rossi maps the inhabited world as a single quarter of the globe, running 180 degrees of longitude from the land of Sinim in the east to the Fortunate Islands in the west, and 42 degrees of latitude from the tropic of Cancer to the far north, divided into seven climes. Cited from Isaac Benjacob’s edition, vol. 1 (Vilna, 1863), p. 152.↩︎
The Hebrew: מקצה מזרח המתחיל בקרוב מארץ סינים עד קצה המערב מקום האיים פורטונ״אטי או קאנא״ריאי. The western anchor: “Fortunate” renders Insulae Fortunatae (Greek αἱ τῶν Μακάρων νῆσοι, “the Islands of the Blessed”), the Atlantic islands off northwest Africa identified with the Canaries and Madeira. Pliny catalogues them from Juba II (Natural History 6.37); Ptolemy drew the prime meridian of his Geography through the group. The eastern anchor: Ptolemy had two Chinas. In I.12.10 the known world’s longitude runs to Sera, city of the Seres (the overland silk route), at 177°15’. In I.14.8 he extends it to the metropolis of the Sinae (the maritime route), at a round 180°, noting that all agree the Sinae lie further east than Cattigara. Dei Rossi’s 180° matches the Sinae figure, not the Seres, and his “land of Sinim” shares its root with Ptolemy’s Sinae more closely than with Seres. The western anchor unchanged, the eastern edge given Isaiah’s name.↩︎
The Jewish-learning apparatus Azariah marshals: Isaac Israeli of Toledo’s Yesod Olam (1310); the Psalm 24 commentaries of Abraham ibn Ezra (d. 1167) and David Kimchi (Radak, d. 1235); Maimonides on the inhabited diameter of the earth in Guide of the Perplexed I.73; and—for the image of “the world is a ball and the sea a basin”—the saying of the fourth-century Palestinian amora R. Yonah, that when Alexander of Macedon rose high enough above the earth he saw the world as a ball and the sea as a dish, preserved in Numbers Rabbah 13:14 and the Palestinian Talmud’s tractate Avodah Zarah (3:1, 42c).↩︎
Barnes (1855), Notes on Isaiah, vol. 2, pp. 216–217. The revised view appeared in editions from the 1840s onward; Barnes’s own framing on the change: “I have on a re-examination come to this opinion, though a different view was given in the first edition of these Notes.”↩︎
Strong (1890), Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, “Hebrew and Chaldean Dictionary”, p. 82: “Plural of an otherwise unknown name; Sinim, a distant Oriental region.”↩︎
Young (1879; 1910 ed.), Analytical Concordance to the Bible, p. 893: “A people in the far east; the Chinese.”↩︎
The CUV text carries a marginal note on 秦: “原文是希尼” (“The original text reads ‘Sinim’”).↩︎
The two traditions read the same verse with different subjects. In the Judaic tradition, Isaiah 49:12 prophesies the ingathering of the diaspora—Jewish exiles returning to Israel from distant lands, including, to the modern Hebrew ear, those scattered as far as China. In the Protestant missionary tradition, the verse became a prophecy of the conversion of the Chinese people.↩︎
The religious vocabulary that survives in Washington is defensive, a catalogue of persecutions rather than a promise of salvation. The older grammar still surfaces whenever the history is invoked: Vice President Mike Pence’s Hudson Institute address of October 4, 2018, opened with the American missionaries who “brought the good news to China’s shores” and “founded some of China’s first and finest universities”, then arrived at the present in the register of disappointed hope: “we assumed that a free China was inevitable”; “that hope has gone unfulfilled”.↩︎
The scholarly terrain: Michael H. Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914 (1983), on the ideology binding America to China; Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream (1982), on the “promotional state”; Akira Iriye, Across the Pacific (1967), on the power of mutual images; Frank Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas (1981), on culture as an instrument of diplomacy; Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith (2012), on religion in American statecraft; David A. Hollinger, Protestants Abroad (2017), on the missionary cosmopolitans themselves. This book stands on their work while drawing one continuous line across their territories.↩︎
The methodological debt is to Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China (1984), which indicted Western-centered “impact-response” history. A book about the American projection cannot be China-centered in Cohen’s sense—its subject is the projection—but it can refuse to mistake the projection for China itself, and it names the mediation wherever a Chinese voice reaches the page only through missionary or diplomatic archives.↩︎