Chapter 1: First Light in Canton

Robert Morrison and the Pioneers

The Voyage

Christianity had reached China before. A Nestorian monk named Alopen arrived at the court of the Tang emperor Taizong in 635, and for two centuries the Church of the East—known in Chinese as 景教, Jǐngjiào, the “Luminous Religion”—maintained monasteries and won converts across northern China, until the great persecution of 845 swept it away along with Buddhism and other foreign faiths. Seven centuries later, the Franciscan John of Montecorvino built a Catholic church in the Mongol capital of Khanbaliq (now Beijing) and baptized thousands, only for the mission to vanish when the Yuan dynasty fell to the Ming in 1368. Then came the Jesuits, the most formidable of all: Matteo Ricci, who dressed as a Confucian scholar, mastered classical Chinese, and won the patronage of the Wanli Emperor in 1601; Martino Martini, whose Novus Atlas Sinensis of 1655 gave Europe its first accurate maps of China’s provinces; Johann Adam Schall von Bell, who served the early Qing court as an astronomer. The Jesuits left a deeper mark than any of their predecessors—translations, maps, astronomical instruments, and a small but educated Catholic community that persists in China to this day. But the Chinese Rites Controversy of the early eighteenth century, in which Rome condemned the Jesuits’ accommodations to Confucian practice, provoked the Kangxi Emperor to restrict and eventually ban missionary work. By 1800, the Catholic mission in China was diminished, its priests operating in the margins, its era of imperial favor long past.

It was into this aftermath that Protestant Christianity arrived—not through the court, not through scholarship, not through the patronage of emperors, but through the cramped waterfront factories¹ of Canton, carried by men of a very different kind.

On a January morning in 1807, a young man of twenty-five left the London docks aboard the ship Remittance, bound for China by way of the United States. Robert Morrison carried with him a modest trunk, a working knowledge of astronomy and medicine acquired in hurried preparation, and an appointment from the London Missionary Society² to serve as its first missionary to the Chinese Empire. He had been born in the village of Buller’s Green, near Morpeth in Northumberland, the youngest son in a family of eight, his father a Scottish last maker³. He had educated himself by candlelight while apprenticed to his father’s trade, reading through the Bible before he was fifteen, learning Latin, Hebrew, Greek and theology—despite his mother’s wish that he would not go abroad. He had no connections, no fortune, and no patron beyond the small nonconformist society that had commissioned him. What he had was a conviction—shared by a small but growing number of British and American Protestants—that the Gospel must be carried to every nation on earth, and that among those nations, the vast empire of China represented the greatest single challenge and the greatest potential harvest.

In 1792 a Baptist cobbler from Northamptonshire named William Carey had published An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, arguing that the Great Commission bound every Christian alive, and that the duty was immediate. The next summer he sailed for Bengal. Societies sprang up in his wake: the Baptist Missionary Society the year of the Enquiry, the London Missionary Society in 1795, the Church Missionary Society—founded by the evangelical Anglicans of the Clapham Sect, William Wilberforce among them—in 1799, the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1804. The LMS would commission Morrison twelve years later.

The East India Company, which held a monopoly on British trade with China, had refused him passage. The Company’s directors understood that missionaries were bad for business. The Qing court had confined the foreign traders to a small quarter in Canton and tolerated them there because they kept to commerce and left Chinese customs, beliefs, and governance alone. A missionary—especially a Protestant missionary, lacking even the institutional cover that Jesuit scholars had once enjoyed at the imperial court—would be a provocation. The Company wanted no part of it.

Morrison was therefore obliged to travel via New York, where he might find an American vessel willing to carry him to Canton. The detour would prove symbolically apt: it was American ships, American money, and eventually American missionaries who would transform what Morrison had begun as a solitary British enterprise into a vast transatlantic project. In New York, while arranging his passage, Morrison called on the offices of a ship owner. The encounter produced what became, in missionary lore, one of the most quoted exchanges of the nineteenth century. The ship owner, regarding this slight, earnest young man with what we may imagine was a mixture of amusement and incredulity, asked: “And so, Mr. Morrison, you really expect that you will make an impression on the idolatry of the great Chinese Empire?”

Morrison replied: “No, sir, I expect God will.”

The anecdote was repeated in missionary sermons, fundraising appeals, and devotional literature for the next hundred years. It had the qualities that such stories require: modesty, confidence, and the implicit suggestion that divine purpose was at work in human history. Whether the exchange occurred precisely as reported is impossible to verify—the earliest source is the memoir published by Morrison’s second wife, Eliza, five years after his death. What is certain is that Morrison sailed from New York on May 12, 1807, aboard the American vessel Trident, and arrived in Macao on September 4, reaching Canton three days later. He was the first Protestant missionary to set foot in China. He would not be the last.

The Impossible Task

The Canton that Morrison entered in the autumn of 1807 was not a city that welcomed foreigners—or rather, it was a city that had devised an elaborate system to profit from them while keeping them at arm’s length.

The Qing dynasty’s system of managed trade—the Canton system, in force since 1757—confined all foreign commerce to a narrow strip of waterfront outside the city walls known as the Thirteen Factories. The factories were not industrial buildings but trading houses and residences, strung along the northern bank of the Pearl River in a district of roughly twenty-two acres. Foreign merchants were permitted to reside here during the trading season, roughly October to March, and were required to leave when business concluded. They could not bring their wives or families. They could not enter the walled city of Canton itself. They could not travel into the interior. They conducted all business through a small number of licensed Chinese merchants, the cohong, who served as intermediaries and guarantors. Old China Street, New China Street, and Hog Lane divided the factories from one another, lined with shops selling silk, tea, porcelain, and carved ivory to the foreigners who strolled them in the evenings—a bazaar designed to extract Western silver while conceding nothing of Chinese sovereignty. The system was, from the Qing perspective, an elegant solution: it harvested the economic benefits of foreign trade while minimizing foreign contamination of Chinese society. It worked.

For a missionary, the restrictions were almost insuperable. Morrison’s task was not to trade in tea and silk but to learn the Chinese language, translate the Christian scriptures, and—if the opportunity ever arose—preach the Gospel to Chinese people. Every element of this program was either prohibited or functionally impossible under the Canton system. The Qing government had made it a capital offense for any Chinese subject to teach the Chinese language to a foreigner. The rationale was strategic as much as cultural: linguistic knowledge was a form of intelligence, and the court had no intention of granting barbarians access to the written culture that undergirded the empire’s administration. Morrison would need to find tutors willing to risk their lives.

He found them. The details are murky—Morrison was deliberately vague in his correspondence, understanding that specifics could endanger his teachers—but within months of his arrival he had engaged Chinese assistants who taught him in secret, sometimes meeting at night, sometimes working behind locked doors in his cramped quarters in the American factory. His early diary entries betray the grinding loneliness of the work: the heat and damp of a Cantonese summer, the isolation among merchants who regarded him as an eccentric nuisance, the constant fear that his tutors would be discovered and punished. He ate Chinese food, wore Chinese dress when it served to reduce his visibility, and spent his days hunched over manuscripts in a room that smelled of ink and river water.

The work was not merely difficult; it was a confrontation with an entirely different architecture of thought. Chinese, with its tonal system, its logographic script, and its vast literary tradition, presented challenges of a different order from any European language. There were no textbooks designed for English speakers, no grammars, no precedent to follow. Morrison was building the road as he walked it. The nine tones of Cantonese⁴ could turn a single syllable into several different words; a misplaced inflection could transform a greeting into an insult, or a prayer into nonsense. The written language, with its thousands of characters each carrying layers of classical allusion, bore no relation to anything in Morrison’s prior education. He had arrived equipped with Hebrew, Latin, and Greek—languages of the Book—and found himself before a civilization whose written tradition was older, vaster, and organized on entirely different principles.

In 1809, Morrison married Mary Morton, the daughter of an East India Company surgeon in Macao. The marriage brought companionship to a life that had been achingly solitary, but Mary’s health was fragile, and the climate punished her. For long stretches, she was restricted to Macao while Morrison worked in Canton, the two separated by the sixty miles of estuary between them. She bore him two children. She suffered. On June 10, 1821, she died of cholera, and Morrison’s grief was, by his own account, nearly annihilating. “My dear Mary,” he wrote, “is no more.” He would remarry in 1824—Eliza Armstrong, who would later write his biography—but the years between Mary’s death and his own were colored by an exhaustion that went beyond the physical.

Through all of it, the language mastered. The translation continued, not by might nor by strength, but by his perseverance. For sixteen years, Morrison worked on what became the first complete rendering of the Bible into Chinese, a project he finished in 1823 with the assistance of William Milne⁵, a fellow LMS missionary stationed in Malacca. The two men divided the Old Testament between them and worked in parallel, one planting and the other watering across a thousand miles of sea. Milne did not live to see the completed Bible in print; he died in 1822, a year before the full text was published.

The translation was imperfect. Later Chinese Christians would find Morrison’s prose stiff and foreign-sounding—the cadences of King James rendered into characters that a native reader could parse but never mistake for natural Chinese. Subsequent versions would supersede it. But its significance was not primarily literary. It was infrastructure. Morrison had created the foundational text upon which all subsequent Protestant engagement with China would be built. Every missionary who followed him, every tract distributed, every sermon preached, every convert baptized, stood on the linguistic groundwork that Morrison had laid in those years of clandestine study. The road he had built as he walked it was now a road that others could walk too.

The Dictionary as Diplomatic Instrument

Morrison’s other great projects were linguistic. The Serampore Mission Press in Bengal printed his Grammar of the Chinese Language in 1815, a 280-page description of Chinese syntax in English, following by a year the same press’s issue of Joshua Marshman’s Clavis Sinica. That summer the first volume of Morrison’s Dictionary of the Chinese Language appeared in Macao; the work would grow across the next eight years into three parts and six quarto volumes. The scale of the dictionary beggars summary: 4,595 pages, 47,035 head characters drawn from the Kangxi Dictionary of 1716, compiled largely by one man working without the institutional support that a university or government bureau might have provided. The East India Company, recognizing that the dictionary would benefit its own translators and commercial agents, agreed to fund the printing⁶—a cost that placed the work in institutional libraries rather than on the shelves of ordinary readers. But its influence radiated outward from those libraries. Morrison’s dictionary gave English-speaking merchants, diplomats, and missionaries their first systematic access to the Chinese language. It was, in a sense, the key to a locked room.

The dictionary was a tool of comprehension, and comprehension was a form of power. Before Morrison, the European understanding of Chinese was fragmentary, dependent on the work of Catholic missionaries—the Jesuits above all—whose scholarship, however impressive, had been conducted in the service of a different theological and institutional tradition and was not widely available in Protestant circles. Morrison’s dictionary changed this. It was the Protestant world’s Rosetta Stone for China, and its publication marked the moment when the Anglo-American engagement with the Chinese language ceased to be the private struggle of a solitary genius and became an institutional resource.

The East India Company recognized this before anyone else. The same directors who had refused Morrison passage in 1807 employed him as their official translator by 1809—two years after his arrival, before the dictionary was even begun. The Company’s ambivalence was characteristic of a tension that would recur throughout the history of Western engagement with China: missionaries were ideologically inconvenient but practically indispensable. They learned the languages that merchants and diplomats could not be bothered to learn. They lived where traders only visited. They accumulated the cultural knowledge—the understanding of customs, hierarchies, sensitivities, and local conditions—that no commercial intelligence could match. The Company needed Morrison’s tongue even as it deplored his mission.

In 1818 the two men co-founded the Anglo-Chinese College at Malacca, where Milne could teach openly under British colonial law. Its charter named the school’s purpose as “the cultivation of English and Chinese literature in order to the spread of the Gospel”. Milne served as first principal until his death in 1822; Morrison, held in Canton by his Company duties, sustained the school from a distance with funds and counsel. Enrolments rarely passed a dozen, yet it was the first Western institution of higher learning established for Chinese students. It outlived both founders: after the Treaty of Nanjing brought Hong Kong under British sovereignty, the College relocated there in 1843 as one of the new colony’s first schools.

By 1834, Morrison had spent twenty-seven years in China. He had baptized, by most accounts, exactly ten Chinese converts. By any conventional measure of missionary success—souls saved, churches planted, communities transformed—his career was a failure.

But he had never understood his work in those terms alone. He had built something more durable than a congregation: the linguistic and institutional infrastructure without which no subsequent missionary work in China would have been possible. The Bible, the dictionary, the grammar, the small circle of trained Chinese assistants who had risked their lives to help him—these were foundations. On them, an empire of faith would be constructed. He had laid the first stone. He could not have imagined the edifice.

The Tract

Among the small circle was a Cantonese block printer named Liang Fa⁷. He had come to Canton as a young man from the villages north of the city, apprenticed to a wood-carver, and set to the ordinary work of cutting Confucian classics and almanacs into the pear-wood blocks from which Chinese books were printed. What distinguished his apprenticeship from thousands like it was Morrison’s commission: the Chinese New Testament, chapter by chapter, printed from blocks Liang cut by hand. He worked slowly, by lamplight when the days ran short. The text went by in front of him character by character, and by the second year of the work the paragraphs he was cutting had begun to make their own argument in his mind.

He traveled to Malacca with Milne in 1815, was baptized there on November 3, 1816, and returned to China a Protestant. Morrison ordained him in 1827—the first Chinese Protestant minister in history, thirty-eight years old, and under Qing law a criminal by profession for having accepted a foreign creed. He had been arrested in 1819, when Canton magistrates discovered the tracts he was printing at a back-alley press—beaten, fined, his blocks burned. The missionaries paid the fine. He went back to his types.

His most important work, Good Words to Admonish the Age (勸世良言, Quànshì Liángyán), appeared in 1832—nine slim volumes of sermons, quoted scriptures, and exhortations rendered in a Cantonese vernacular cadence that a village schoolmaster could read aloud to men who could not themselves read. It was the first sustained Christian literature written by a Chinese hand for a Chinese audience. Liang knew his readers. He knew that the villages of Guangdong were full of men who had been studying for the imperial examinations since boyhood and would sit them again this year as they had last year; he knew that among those men were some who had already failed and were returning to fail again; he knew, from his own pre-conversion years, what it was to be a literate Chinese man with nothing yet to show for a decade of study.

Twice a year the examinations were held in the walled compound of the provincial examination hall in Canton. Ten thousand candidates would file in at the start of the three-day session; as many relatives, servants, and food-sellers would wait outside the gates. Liang and the small band of Chinese Christians he had gathered around him would take up positions along the narrow streets the candidates had to pass. The tracts were small, four or six leaves, sewn at the spine, cheap to print. He pressed them into the hands of men who would not refuse paper. Most of the seed, he understood, would fall on stone. Some would be read on the way home. A very few would be carried back into the villages of Guangdong and Guangxi.

One of the candidates who had walked past Liang’s distributors in 1836 was a twenty-two-year-old Hakka from Hua County named Hong Xiuquan⁸. He carried the tracts home to his village, set them on a shelf, and failed the examination again. The following spring he came home shaking with fever and took to his bed; his family brought in a coffin. In the delirium he dreamed of a bearded old man who gave him a sword and ordered him to purge the earth of demons. He recovered. For six years he did not open the tracts. In 1843, a fourth failure sent him back to the shelf, and by lamplight he read Liang Fa’s pages and found the man from his dream. What he found he read by his own light. He concluded that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, sent to complete what the old man had assigned him. Years later, writing as Heavenly King, he would set down the theology in his Yuándào Juéshì Xùn (原道覺世訓): “Only the Sovereign God is the true Emperor. The Savior Jesus, Crown Prince of the Sovereign God, is himself called only ‘Lord.’ In Heaven, on earth, and among men, who is greater than Jesus?”

The American Arrival

The Americans came next, and they came with the organizational resources that Morrison had lacked.

Elijah Coleman Bridgman⁹ arrived in Canton on February 19, 1830, aboard the Roman, a vessel belonging to the firm of Olyphant & Company—one of the few American trading houses that refused to deal in opium, a scruple that earned it the nickname “Zion’s Corner” among the less fastidious merchants of the Canton waterfront. Bridgman was the first American Protestant missionary to China, sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions—the ABCFM¹⁰, the oldest and most prestigious of the American missionary societies, founded in 1810 and headquartered in Boston.

Bridgman’s most consequential act was not evangelical but editorial. In May 1832, he founded the Chinese Repository, a monthly journal published in Canton that would continue, under various editors, until 1851. Before the Repository, Americans who wished to learn about China had almost nowhere to turn. There were travelers’ accounts, most of them superficial or fantastical. There were the reports of merchants, which concerned themselves with tea prices, tariff schedules, and shipping routes. There was Morrison’s dictionary, which was a reference work, not a narrative. The Repository offered something different: regular, detailed, and reasonably informed reporting on Chinese history, culture, law, religion, language, and current affairs, written by men who lived in the country and had at least some command of its language. Its pages carried translations of imperial edicts, analyses of Chinese legal codes, descriptions of religious practices, and dispatches from the interior that reached American readers nowhere else. It was, in effect, America’s first China expertise—and it was produced entirely by missionaries.

Three years after Bridgman, in 1833, Samuel Wells Williams¹¹ arrived in Canton. Williams had been sent by the ABCFM as a printer—the mission needed someone to operate the press that produced Chinese-language tracts and scriptures—but his talents far exceeded the job description. He was twenty-one years old. Over the next four decades, Williams would become one of the most important American interpreters of China, serving successively as printer, scholar, editor, diplomat, and author. His Middle Kingdom, published in 1848 and revised in 1883, was for decades the standard English-language reference work on China¹², written with a mixture of genuine admiration for Chinese civilization and frank frustration at what Williams, in the language of his era, called its “heathenism.” The book that educated Americans consulted when they wished to understand the civilization across the Pacific was written by a man who had gone to China to convert it. His career traced an arc—from missionary printer to scholar to diplomat—that would become a pattern, a pipeline through which religious vocation led by quiet steps to political influence.

The ABCFM’s China mission grew slowly in these early years. Converts were few; the restrictions of the Canton system remained in force until the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, which ended the First Opium War and opened four additional treaty ports to foreign residence and trade. But the mission’s importance lay less in its evangelical results than in its informational monopoly. In an era before foreign correspondents, before diplomatic staffs of any size, before academic departments devoted to the study of Asia, missionaries were America’s primary source of knowledge about China. Their letters home—reprinted from the Missionary Herald in denominational newspapers from Boston to St. Louis—shaped the mental image of China that ordinary Americans carried in their heads.

Missionaries as Interpreters of China

The first American treaty with China—the Treaty of Wanghia¹³, signed on July 3, 1844, in a temple near Macao—was negotiated by Caleb Cushing¹⁴, a Massachusetts congressman who spoke no Chinese and had never visited Asia. His interpreters were Peter Parker, the medical missionary whose Canton hospital had become the most consequential American institution on Chinese soil, and E. C. Bridgman, the founder of the Chinese Repository. Cushing could not read the documents he was negotiating, could not speak to his Chinese counterparts, could not assess the nuances of what was being offered or withheld. The missionaries could. And they used that position to embed their interests in the text.

Article 17 of the treaty explicitly guaranteed the right of Americans to build churches and hospitals in the five treaty ports¹⁵. The provision was not demanded by the Chinese; it was inserted by the Americans, at the urging of the missionaries who served as their translators. The clause was modest in its wording—a single sentence among dozens of articles governing tariffs, consular rights, and dispute resolution—but its implications were vast. For the first time, the legal relationship between the United States and China included a formal guarantee of missionary access. The Gospel had been written into the treaty. From the very first document that defined the official relationship between the two nations, the missionary interest was embedded in the text.

This was the infrastructure that Robert Morrison had made possible. He had not lived to see it—he died ten years before the Treaty of Wanghia—but the dictionary he compiled, the language skills he demonstrated, and the precedent he established had created the conditions for everything that followed. One man, working alone in a hostile environment, with no resources beyond his own determination and a modest society’s modest funding, had set in motion a process that would, within a generation, produce an institutional network of translators, scholars, editors, physicians, and diplomats whose influence on American perceptions of China would persist for more than a century.

Morrison died on August 1, 1834, in Canton, and was buried four days later in the Old Protestant Cemetery at Macau, beside his first wife and their infant son. His grave is still there—a flat stone on the hillside above the harbor, shaded by frangipani, visited occasionally by seminary students from Hong Kong and by Chinese tourists who read the inscription and move on. The dictionary he had spent half his life compiling would sit on the desk of every American consul, every missionary translator, and every naval officer posted to the China coast for the next fifty years.

A young American physician, sailing for Canton eight weeks before his death, would consult the dictionary. What the thousands who followed built on Morrison’s foundations—the hospitals, the universities, the treaties, the assumptions—was not yet visible. The grief was not yet imaginable.

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1. The English word “factory” here derives from the Portuguese feitoria, meaning a trading post, not a place of manufacture. The name persisted even after the original thirteen establishments had been consolidated and rebuilt many times.

2. Founded in London in September 1795 as “The Missionary Society” (renamed “London Missionary Society” in 1818), it drew Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and evangelical Anglicans into a single body on the premise that the obligation to preach abroad belonged to the whole church and to no denomination in particular. Its first expedition sailed for Tahiti aboard the Duff in August 1796; Morrison was its first missionary to China, and David Livingstone its best-known to Africa.

3. A last maker fabricated the wooden foot-shaped forms—“lasts”—around which shoemakers shaped leather. It was skilled artisanal work, but humble.

4. Cantonese has six phonemic tones (nine in traditional Chinese phonology, which counts three additional “checked” tones on syllables ending in stop consonants). Mandarin has four, or five counting the neutral tone.

5. William Milne (1785–1822), son of an Aberdeenshire farming family, lost his father when he was six years old, ordained by the LMS at Gosport in 1812. He reached Macao on July 4, 1813, was expelled by the Portuguese authorities, and after a brief stay in Canton surveyed the region for a base before settling at Malacca in the spring of 1815. There he established the LMS press that printed Chinese scriptures and tracts beyond the reach of Qing censorship, and launched Chinese Monthly Magazine (察世俗每月統記傳, Cháshìsú Měiyuè Tǒngjìzhuàn) in August, 1815, the first modern Chinese-language periodical. He died of consumption at Malacca on June 2, 1822, aged thirty-seven.

6. The Company underwrote a print run of 750 copies at a total cost of over £10,000, a sum that reflected both the ambition of the project and the expense of typesetting thousands of Chinese characters in an era before mechanized printing. Each copy sold for twenty guineas.

7. 梁發 (Liáng Fā, 1789–1855), a Guangdong woodblock printer who had apprenticed in Canton before his conversion. He originated the practice—carried on by Chinese Protestants for the next century—of distributing tracts at the provincial examination halls, a tactic that dispersed Christian literature widely among the literate class and that Qing officials periodically suppressed.

8. 洪秀全 (Hóng Xiùquán, 1814–1864), a Hakka schoolteacher from Hua County (花縣, Huāxiàn) in Guangdong who had failed the provincial examinations four times. He founded the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (太平天國, Tàipíng Tiānguó) in 1851.

9. Elijah Coleman Bridgman (1801–1861), the first American Protestant missionary to China. An Amherst graduate and Andover seminarian, he remained in China for over thirty years and also served as translator during the Treaty of Wanghia negotiations.

10. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, founded in 1810, was the first American organization to send missionaries abroad. It grew out of the “haystack prayer meeting” of 1806 at Williams College, where five students took shelter from a thunderstorm and resolved to devote their lives to foreign missions. Their widely circulated periodical, the Missionary Herald, remains a primary source for the study of nineteenth-century American missions.

11. Samuel Wells Williams (1812–1884). He also served as interpreter for Commodore Perry’s expedition to Japan in 1853–54 and as Secretary and chargé d’affaires of the American legation in Beijing.

12. Two thick volumes surveying geography, government, education, social life, arts, and religion.

13. 望廈條約 (Wàngxià Tiáoyuē), also known as the Treaty of Wangxia, was the first formal treaty between the United States and Qing China. It was modeled on the British Treaty of Nanjing (1842) but included additional provisions favorable to American interests—and to missionary interests in particular.

14. Caleb Cushing (1800–1879), congressman from Newburyport, Massachusetts, appointed by President John Tyler as the first American envoy to China. A Harvard graduate and member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, he had no prior experience with Asia.

15. The five treaty ports opened to foreign residence and trade after the First Opium War were Canton (Guangzhou), Amoy (Xiamen), Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai.