[ { "id": 212297, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1990", "page_number": 239, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "216\n\nculture, which would make Chinese culture all the more accessible to the influences of Christianization. Secondly, it explains why other missionaries who considered Chinese culture to be simply pagan refused to have anything to do with a fusion of Confucianism and Christianity. In their minds, such a combination would hinder the advance of Christian civilization, obstruct the work of the Spirit of God, and ultimately be destructive of God's plan to establish the Kingdom of God on earth. Legge's claim that God had left a trace in Chinese culture threatened their view of the desperate losiness of the Chinese people. In fact, Legge himself would agree with them in general on the issue of the need for salvation, but he disagreed with the missiological strategy which refused to look for any point of support for missionary activity within Chinese culture. Those who opposed Legge were in effect supporting a basic assumption: God would not employ the pagan Chinese culture for the purpose of establishing His spiritual Kingdom. This explained, from their point of view, why He did not send them any special revelation of Himself. It was precisely this latter claim that Legge vehemently denied: to overlook the Shangdi traditions in the Chinese Classics was to deny historical facts related to the destiny of the Chinese peoples.\n\nSee Confucianism in Relation to Christianity, op. cit. See for details of the comparison \"Some New Dimensions in the Study of the Works of James Legge (1815-1897); Part II\", op. cit., pp. 43ff.\n\n1\n\n57 James Legge, Christianity and Confucianism Compared in Their Teaching on the Whole Duty Of Man (London: Religious Tract Society, 1883).\n\nSH\n\nJames Legge, Christianity in China: A Rendering of the Nestorian Tablet at Si-an-fu to Commemorate Christianity (London: Trübner & Co., 1888).\n\nSV\n\nThe original twenty-four-page manuscript, entitled \"Sketch of Ho Tsun Sheen\", was written by Legge in March 19, 1872, and is kept in the South China letters of the London Missionary Society archives. It was later published as an article in a volume called Gleanings From The Mission Field (London: 1873?).\n\nMI\n\nSee The Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle (January 1833), p. 34; (March 1853), pp. 121-129; (December 1853), pp. 697-707; (supplement), pp. 757-764.\n\nA\n\nThe Taoist priest Legge mentions was one who restricted his study to Laozi's Daode jing, rather than the more esoteric doctrines passed down in esoteric Taoist training. Legge found him \"more prepared than the Confucian literati to receive the message of the Gospel\". The elderly woman convert, at whose deathbed Legge sought a final testimony of trust in Christ, had been \"a professor among her country-women of Taoist superstitions\", but after becoming a Christian she had been a faithful and effective witness for Christ. See James Legge, The Religions of China, op. cit., pp. 275-276, 296-297.\n\nIn Alexander Wylie's Memorials of Protestant Missionaries (Shanghae: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1867), pp. 119-121, eighteen manuscripts, pamphlets, and books are cited as prepared by Legge in Chinese. At least one of these was done with his Chinese colleague, Ho Jinshan. See Shengjing Zhengju (Proofs of the Bible) (Fuzhou: Taiping Street Gospel Hall Press, 1870). Among these texts are two pamphlets in story-telling form on the lives of Joseph and Abraham which are of particular interest. I have seen a copy of the former in the Bodleian Library, and discovered that it was written in Cantonese dialect; I suspect that the latter is done in a similar fashion, but no copy of it has yet been found.\n\nIn the context of this passage, Dr. Legge found it necessary to emphasize that he had spent as much time with Chinese people as he did with their books. Every day he claimed to spend several hours in visiting them, not only in their homes, but also in their shops. In the same recollection, he also mentions regular ministry in the Chinese prison as part of his vocation. Later on in this passage, Legge's wit also comes through:", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215954, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-2002", "page_number": 253, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "187\n\nTHE PROTO-MARTYR OF CHINESE PROTESTANTS: RECONSTRUCTING THE STORY\n\nOF\n\nCH’ÜA KAM-KWONG\n\nLAUREN PFISTER\n\nAs much as the writings of a person extrapolate and delimit their public presence after they die, so the deaths experienced around a person - perhaps we could call them the \"public absences\" they experience - these \"public absences\" often give form to that person's private world of meanings and influence the directions of their life's later years. Regularly, though probably not always, the public realm of writings and the private sphere of felt deaths intersect. In the life of a Scottish Victorian missionary-sinologist and pastor, these two dimensions often collided in scribbled correspondence, mission reports, literary reflections, and the biographical sketches others made from these sources about those public absences.\n\nJames Legge\n\nAcross the eight decades of James Legge's (1815-1897) active life it is not hard to identify the power and presence of this sphere of public absences, especially during his hyphenated missionary-scholar experience in Hong Kong from 1843 to 1873. He was indeed a \"pastor\" in the full sense of the Dissenter traditions he represented, not seldom found describing, in linguistic forms stereotyped across the Victorian era's professional clergy from many denominations, the deathbed scenes of missionary colleagues, their family members, and elderly members of the Chinese congregation he co-pastored with Ho Tsun-sheen (1817-1871). Colonial life led him also to the soldiers' barracks for occasional worship services, and to the jails, where death was calculated into the normal conditions of life far more frequently than among \"normal\" social settings. But the more personally felt deaths can also be numbered - there were fourteen which shook his consciousness with varying degrees of starkness, most coming from his large and extended family ties. Among the four", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215958, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-2002", "page_number": 257, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "191\n\n11\n\n12\n\ncapable apprentice Hóng Réngan (1828-1864) who later died as the Shield King among the Taiping insurgents, and Legge's co-pastor of the Chinese congregation at Union Chapel (later Union Church) for twenty-five years, the first modern Chinese theologian, Ho Tsun-sheen (P. Hé Jinshan, known in the 20th century by his sobriquet among Chinese Christians, \"Ho Fuk-tong,\" 1817-1871). Among the many forgotten persons whom Legge knew in his role as a missionary-pastor is a Cantonese resident more than 20 years Legge's elder, Ch'ëa Kam-Kwong (P. Che Jinguang, c. 1800-1861). In the Hong Kong newspapers of the early 1860s it was Ch'ea's life and fate which catapulted Legge into the status of a folk hero among the expatriate and Chinese Christian communities. Yet Ch'ëa's own unusual conversion, his subsequent career as a self-determined missionary, and his tragic murder years later by a local Chinese vigilante squad have been almost completely overlooked in English and Chinese sources. To Legge's credit Ch'ea was the subject of many letters and reflections in various places, so that it became one of three post-mortem memorials for notable Christians associated with his missionary career. Consequently, it is largely on account of the Scottish missionary's writings that Ch'ëa's name and story can be rescued from the dustbins of forgotten Chinese history.\n\n14\n\n13\n\n## PART TWO: Walking through shadowlands: Ch’ea's transition across major traditions\n\nThe town of Poklo (P. Bóluó) was the leading city in a district of the same name, about 40 miles east of the capital city of Canton (Guǎngzhōu) and about 20 miles southeast of the impressive mountains of Lo-fow (or Laufu, P. Liúfú or Luófú) range. Those mountains were already made famous after the end of the Han dynasty (4th century A.D.) by Gé Hóng (283-363), a famous Daoist priest who made his retreat on the slopes of Mount Lo-fow when in search of special materials for an immortality elixir. Four or five temples of both Daoist and Buddhist traditions were well established on its slopes in the 19th century, and were visited by Legge and his younger Scottish colleague, John", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215967, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-2002", "page_number": 266, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "44\n\n18th centuries. It is well documented now that the Manchurian despots who militarily overcame the weakened and corrupt Ming court were adamant in their efforts to rewrite the history of their forefathers in “angelic\" terms. Perhaps more than in any other previous dynasty, the Manchurian emperors destroyed pro-Ming and pro-Hàn culture books and documents, burning also any books which stood against their Manchurian ancestors, and censoring portions of books which touched on these topics.** In numerous cases the contemporary relatives of earlier authors were themselves detained, tortured, and given death sentences. Sometimes the penalties were completely inordinate, causing not only racial tension among the Hàn elite (between those supporting and those fearing this Manchurian method of \"intellectual cleansing\") but also a deep seated resentment among the common people. Understanding the harshness, breadth, and persistence of this long-term policy of the Qing government, the Tàiping Insurgents' anti-Manchu ideology appears to be a long submerged political whiplash against a racist regime.\" Yet it remained another facet of Qing social life during this chaotic period that \"the people become willing partners in their own subjection,\" very much in order to save their own lives as well as those who support them.46\n\nCh'ea's armoury against these tremendous cultural pressures and political dangers was his newly obtained Christian library and the inherent attractions of his alternative form of life. No precise details about what he brought back with him to Poklo in 1856 are available, but later records suggest that he and others had access to at least Ho Tsun-sheen's Introduction to a Comprehensive Commentary to the New Testament (Yīnyuē quánshū jiěshì xù), the Christian version of the Three Character Classic (Sānzì jing), and a translation of the first volume of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, rendered by another Scottish missionary of note, William C. Burns (using the family name Bào, 1815-1868).47 This third work was given the Chinese title Tianlu lìchéng (lit., The Course along the Heavenly Road),48 and was probably read with a great amount of empathetic understanding by Ch'ea as he faced these daunting forces in opposition to his Christian associations and beliefs.\n\n200", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215969, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-2002", "page_number": 268, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "202\n\nPART FOUR: From the golden light within: Ch'ëa's creative embodiment of a Chinese Christian way\n\nIn spite of the political risks in continuing his connections with the Hong Kong Chinese Christians and their foreign missionary associates, Ch'ëa returned to Hong Kong with a convert responding to his own preaching in May, 1857. To claim that Ch'ëa's arrival was unexpected is a facile understatement. Hostilities had forced many Chinese to leave Hong Kong because of Qing official threats of punishment hanging over the heads of their relatives in Guangdong and elsewhere. In addition, earlier that year in January an attempt at poisoning the expatriate community in Hong Kong through seasoning the daily bread with arsenic had been attempted, failing only because the amount of arsenic was too much, causing vomiting rather than fatalities.2 These political and terrorist realities put the colony on a state of high alert. Somehow Ch'ea and Kot A-Yuk, the new convert, passed through the opposing military lines without being stopped. And this was not the only time Ch'ea returned. Each year in the following three years he returned at least once, carrying reports that his \"apostolic ministry\" was influencing a larger and larger number of self-conscious converts in the district of Poklo. Adopting a pattern of “itinerant ministry” in various parts of the district, preaching and teaching from the materials he had been given in Hong Kong and sharing with his contacts in Poklo and neighbourhood villages what he had experienced in Hong Kong among Chinese Christians there, Ch'ea initiated what Legge and others considered to be a \"spontaneous Christian agency,\" \"as genuine as it is unique.\"\n\n›,53\n\nSometime in late 1859, after Legge had returned from a brief furlough in England and Scotland with his new wife, Hannah Mary (1821-1882),54 and their children (two daughters from the widower James Legge's first marriage and a step-daughter from his new wife's first marriage), the Chinese congregation at Union Chapel agreed to support Ch'ea for three months as their travelling evangelist in the area. In April, 1860, John Chalmers and Ho Tsun-sheen made a missionary tour in the Poklo district, baptizing 44 converts prepared by Ch'ea and others who had become active in\n\n55", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215987, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-2002", "page_number": 286, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "220\n\ndynasty, shattering any sense that forceful treaties could ever provide a lasting spiritual peace between the former combatants.\n\nPART SEVEN: After the golden light has shined...\n\nIt is only right to return to the Chinese Christians in Poklo once more and ask what, if anything, ever transpired in their tragic situation. In fact, there is much to say. Sometime in 1867 the house in Poklo and its keys were once more handed over to the London Missionary Society, and the former colporteur, Leung Man-shing, equipped with some lengthy experience as a hospital apprentice, entered the town both as a part-time physician and evangelist. By the beginning of the 1870s, another missionary under the London Mission Society, E. J. Eitel (1838-1908), took up residence in the area and, along with Chinese Christian help and support, soon had five functioning churches in the district. It should also be noted that, back in Hong Kong, the \"son of the martyr of Poklo\" was registered in the late 1860s as one of the baptized members of the Chinese congregation of Union Chapel under the pastoral leadership of Ho Tsun-sheen.97 The Qing dynasty finally fell in 1911, and in the rest of the 20th century there were changes of such devastating power that most of this past Chinese Protestant history in Bóluó has been completely lost and forgotten. In the most recent gazette for the Bóluó district published in 1988 there is information about some late 19th and 20th century activities and five churches maintained by German-speaking Lutherans from the Basel Mission Society in the region, but the editors humbly admit nothing else is known. Personal visits to the area and to pastors of the Three-Self congregation in Huizhōu in 1994 verified that no knowledge of these 19th century events remains even among the clergy now working in the region. Outside of the official congregation in Huìzhōu, only one or two acceptable meeting points currently exist for Christians in the two districts of Bóluó and Huizhōu.\n\n98\n\nClearly, this essay offers much new light on these things from the not-so-distant past, allowing the \"Golden Light\" once more to shine within the thoughts and memories of Chinese Christians and others in that region, also for the sake of Christian missiological", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215991, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-2002", "page_number": 290, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "224 \n\n(Sevenoaks: Hodder and Stoughton, 1981), the first volume subtitled Barbarians At The Gates, pp. 143-147, 174-175, 224-225.\n\n11. Both Hong Réngan and He Jinshan have been discussed in detail in Pfister's Striving for \"The Whole Duty of Man\", especially chapters 4-6. A more thorough study of He Jinshan's contribution to Chinese Christian history by Lauren Pfister is an essay entitled \"A Transmitter but not a Creator: The Creative Transmission of Protestant Biblical Traditions by Ho Tsun-Sheen (1817-1871)” in Irene Eber, et. al., eds., Bible in Modern China: The Literary and Intellectual Impact (Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1999), pp. 165-197.\n\n12. The name of Ch'ëa Kam-Kwong is constituted by particular Chinese characters Legge described as the \"Golden Light Chariot,\" a way of expressing in English what the common meaning of each character is. Unfortunately, two misspellings have predominated in other literature, one in English and one in Chinese. In English, we surmise that Helen Edith Legge put together the typescript entitled \"Che'a Kin-KWáng,\" horribly mixing up the transliteration with something like the proper name in Hoklo dialect, but the given name in Mandarin. Legge never uses these transliterations in his own writings. In Chinese, Wáng Tão wrote the wrong characters for the name in his personal diary for 1862 when he had first come to Hong Kong, showing also his struggle in understanding Cantonese pronunciations, making his given name \"Embroidered River\" (M. Jinjiang, C. Gam-gong) presumably by guessing from the sounds he heard from other Hong Kong Chinese Christians who referred to him. Consult Fang Xing and Tăng Zhijūn, eds., Wáng Tão rìjì (Wáng Tāo ’s Diary) (Beijing: Zhōnghuá Book Store, 1987), pp. 196-197, record for the date of the 10th month and 15th day of the lunar calendar (or a day in September, 1862).\n\n13. There is no study of Ch'ea Kam-Kwong in Chinese language sources as far as I know, and very little published about him in English after the 1860s. Part of the reason, as will be argued below, is that his murder became an embarrassment to both the British embassy and the Qing dynasty at the time.\n\n14. Legge wrote memorials for his elder brother, an important Congregational minister in Great Britain, George Legge (1802-1860), and his co-pastor, Hé Jinshan, published in 1863 and 1872 respectively. See the typescript on the \"Sketch of the Life of Ho Tsun-sheen\" in SOAS/CWM/South China/Personal/Legge/Box 7, the original manuscript on Ch'a being held in the Bodleian Library (the second item in MS Eng. misc. c. 865, fol. 1-19). Consult the long introduction written for George Legge's Lectures on Theology, Science and Revelation already mentioned above. The text of \"Che'a Kin-KWáng” is a compilation done most likely by his daughter, Helen Edith Legge. It uses many original and secondary sources citing her father's and other missionaries' writings, but also includes some perspectives and interpretations which may not portray the full story.\n\n15. The story of their visit to Daoist and Buddhist sites on Mount Lo-fow is described in Legge's \"Journey of a Missionary Tour along the 'East River' of Canton Province,\" China Mail, Supplement to #853 (June 20, 1861), p.4 (covering events of May 22-23, 1861). This is the full text from which extracts were and published in EMMC/MM, No.304 (New Series, No. 21) for September 2, 1861, pp. 249-260.\n\nmade", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216002, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-2002", "page_number": 301, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "235\n\nEdith Legge, James Legge: Missionary and Scholar, p. 120.\n\n89. Legge's letter to Arthur Tidman, Secretary of the London Missionary Society, dated October 31, 1861, also printed in the EMMC/MM 26 (1862), pp. 18-19.\n\n90. The first and second volumes comprising Legge's translations and commentaries to the Four Books had been completed in February and November that year,\n\n91. The essay, Che'a Kin Kwáng, must be a pastiche prepared by Helen Edith Legge in preparation for her larger book on her father, James Legge: Missionary and Scholar. It is particularly evident in the last few pages, when letters from Chalmers and others are quoted (without notes or details, typical of her style in the book as well). A comparison of the typescript and the chapter in Helen Edith Legge's book on \"Che'a\" (notice the same error in transmitting the name of the martyr, pp.102-121) show that she was using the typescript liberally, the last pages of both documents being exactly the same except in one final addition within the book. That addition is a final, short paragraph, hagiographic to the extreme, summarizing how Ch'ea had received the \"salvation and strength and the kingdom of our God and the power of His Christ\" so that he \"loved not his life unto the death\". Though its sentiment could be shared by all sympathetic Christians, Helen Legge's writing also had other purposes in mind.\n\nA careful reading of the chapter in her book on Ch'ea reveals numerous factual errors -- wrong timing, mixing up place and person names, confusing original situations -- but also contains some new material from her mother's letters (Hannah Mary) received from her father that provide little cameos of other dimensions of the situation. Unfortunately, she used these sources only selectively, and then apparently destroyed the originals. It is quite significant, therefore, that it is only in the typescript mentioned above and in her chapter in the book that a defence of her father's leaving Poklo in the early morning before the vigilantes attacked the city is presented. (She may, however, be referring to the content of a letter by her father to her mother, or to the later portions of the Reminiscences which I could not check.)\n\n92. See a historical description of the development of this very important institution, one which continued on for forty years as the major bureau for foreign affairs in China, provided by Masataka Banno, China and the West, 1858-1861: The Origins of the Tsungli Yamen (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1964).\n\n93. See his Appendix I, “Incidents Mentioned in Text, 1861-1870\" in Paul A. Cohen, China and Christianity, pp. 275-276. In spite of the title of the table, it seems that the summary is supposed to include all major incidents among the religious affairs documents within the files of the Zongli yámén. Another important gap in the record is the burning of the newly built chapel in Buddha Hill City (Fat-shan, M. Fóshan) in September 1870, a malevolent act perpetrated by crowds who opposed the erection of the building and threatened all those who were there with severe bruisings. Ho Tsun-sheen was one of the Christian officials present at the meeting, escaping through a rear window and finding his way back to Hong Kong independently. The event was so traumatic for him, that within six", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 } ]