Religion in Taiwan and China: Locality and Transmission by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781625036025
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: EHanism-Global Corp
Published: 2017-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Edkins Family at Home

In September 1859, 20 year old Mrs. Jane Edkins arrived in Shanghai with her husband the Rev. Joseph Edkins of the London Mission. They had been married in February and sailed for China in June. Joseph, who was 36 years old, had already been a missionary in China for eleven years. Jane was the daughter of the United Presbyterian Minister of Stromness in Orkney off the northern coast of mainland Scotland, one of six surviving children (four had died before her). Theirs was a deeply religious household: two of Jane’s brothers also became ministers.

Jane enthusiastically supported Joseph’s missionary activities in Shanghai until they took the opportunity to move north to Yantai in Shandong in October 1860, and then to Tianjin in May 1861. She died of illness in August 1861 on board ship off Dagu. It is to her early death that we probably owe the survival of her letters home. She was an assiduous letter writer – to her mother, her father, her brothers Simon and John, her sister Maggie and Joseph’s mother and sister. After she died, her father collected and transcribed a selection of Jane’s letters and wrote a record of his daughter’s short life. He himself died before they could be published; in the Preface, her brother Simon recommends her “vivid impressions of China” but “more valuable…than sketches of scenery and people, is the ripe Christian character in one so young that they incidentally unfold.”

Chinese Scenes and People, with Notices of Christian Missions and Missionary Life in a Series of Letters from Various Parts of China was published by James Nisbet & Co. of London, a successful publisher of largely Christian books, in 1863 (Edkins 1863). This collection is valuable not primarily for its illustration of Jane’s piety, nor so much for its “sketches of scenery and people”, but rather for the insight it gives into the details of missionary life in the British Settlement at Shanghai just before the Second Opium War. The way she describes their life, and in incidental remarks its material conditions, contribute to an understanding of the everyday existence of some of the missionary members of the expatriate community. These minutiae are otherwise extremely difficult to obtain, being regarded at the time as too obvious or inconsequential – perhaps more accurately, too domestic – to be recorded in official letters, reports, or articles. It is just these details that can give an insight into the nature of the British settlement as it was experienced at the time.

One very good example of the value of the letters is information we can glean about missionaries’ living conditions that are hard to find elsewhere. We know, for example, from passing references, that the Edkins’s house in the London Mission compound – presumably relatively newly built – was two-storied with a “very large and wide” lobby in which it was possible to hold a small baptism service– for a Chinese couple – with chairs arranged on either side. This was clearly a semi-public space.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.