God's Chinese Son by Jonathan Spence Read Free Book Online

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