-Caveat Lector- an extract from: Prelude to Hong Kong Austin Coates ©1966 Austin Coates Routledge &Kegan Paul London First Edition -- 232 pages -- ----- IV: AMERICAN DOCTORS AND MISSIONARIES-OPIUM WITH HYMNS ON SUNDAYS And all the time the humanitarian advance was proceeding. The earliest attempts to introduce Western medicine to China had been spasmodic, due mainly to the constant changes of personnel among Company surgeons and the small number of surgeons available and willing to undertake such work. After Alexander Pearson's attempt to introduce vaccination nothing substantial was done till 1820, when Robert Morrison and the Company surgeon John Livingstone, one of Morrison's few personal friends, opened a clinic at Macao for the Chinese. An interesting feature of this was that with Morrison's assistance the beginnings of a proper study of Chinese herbalism were made and a herbalist was engaged to work with Livingstone at the clinic. This work came to an end when Livingstone left the coast, the next medical institution of its kind being a free ophthalmic clinic started by another Company surgeon, Thomas Colledge, at Macao in 1827. Jardine, keenly interested, helped to overcome the initial difficulty of persuading Chinese to submit to treatment by paying the first man operated on. Needless to say, this procedure had to be rapidly abandoned. The clinic anyway proved a success without it. Then in 1834 the medical side took a great step forward with the arrival from the United States of Dr. Peter Parker to open the first Western hospital in China. Subsequently known as the Canton Hospital, it operated in a house made available freely for the purpose by Howqua, and after a short time gained the confidence of large numbers of the poor of Canton. Parker, a man of outstanding ability as a doctor and as an observer of political events, later held the post of American Consul in Canton, and was for many years an on-the-spot adviser to the United States authorities on their policy in China. In his hospital the first Chinese surgeons and doctors in Western medicine were trained. The earliest of these, known in English as Kwan Ato, was a nephew of one of Chinnery's pupils, the Chinese artist Lamqua. Thus inconspicuously, and regardless of the mandarins, another inroad was made, surely the most important of all-the inroad of knowledge. On the missionary side of things Robert Morrison, after labouring alone for so many years, was joined in 1829 by the first two American missionaries, Elijah Bridgman and David Abeel, the former of whom, working in close collaboration with Morrison, started a new printing press in Canton publishing religious tracts in Chinese, and in 1832 founded an English periodical, The Chinese Repository, a valuable new medium for the spread of knowledge concerning Chinese history and customs, also running informed comment on the commercial and political situation. In the same year Bridgman in addition started teaching English to Chinese students in Canton. In 1830 one of the most extraordinary figures of the period arrived, the indefatigable Prussian, Charles Giitzlaff of the Netherlands Missionary Society, who developed an amazing command of the Chinese language, and with his vehement manner of speech and curiously Chinese appearance could always count on an audience in the mission field. Going up the coast even as far as Korea, Gutzlaff's main aim was to distribute Chinese Christian publications (the earliest ones were published by Milne in Malacca) as widely as possible, letting them thereafter do their own work. He has come to be remembered, however, as the person in whom the contradictions of humanitarianism and the opium traffic reached their most astonishing embroilment. In 1832 Jardine invited Giitzlaff to take the post of interpreter in one of his ships. It was one of those small masterstrokes by means of which Messrs. Jardine, Matheson and Company always managed to keep ahead of everyone else, and has that touch of intellectual daring which is so characteristic of the two great opium princes. Jardine's letter was cautious, worded with delicacy and care. Without precisely mentioning opium he made it plain that Gutzlaff, if he accepted, would be expected to interpret illicit opium deals. For some days the missionary hesitated, going through intense self-questioning. His own work demanded that he travel far up the coast to as many places as possible; Jardine's ships travelled further than any and to more places, besides which they were safe, fast and comfortable. Gutzlaff accepted, and was thereafter seen in many an unexpected spot on the China coast, preaching vigorously to wondering Chinese crowds, handing round pamphlets, and then hastening back to assure some merchant that the opium supplied by Jardine Matheson's was guaranteed the very highest quality. No better person could have been chosen by Jardine to assist in sending up sales of opium, and no man made a greater impact on more hundreds of Chinese people in the interests of Christianity. To Gutzlaff it was the latter that mattered. How does one assess this unique figure? The fact is that on the European side no one ever has, except by a gasp of astonishment tailing off into what must surely have been Jardine's own reaction—a perceptible twinkle in the eye. Next to join the missionaries, in October 1833, was a twenty-one-year-old American, Samuel Wells Williams, a person of unusual grace and balance of mind, who in the course of time became the United States' leading sinologue and first great authority on the Chinese people and their culture. In the crucial years that followed, this group of missionary sinologues—Gutzlaff, Elijah Bridgman and Wells Williams-performed, apart from their religious work, tasks of the greatest political importance as interpreters in the difficult negotiations that gradually drew China out of her lofty seclusion. The missionaries were disapproving onlookers of the enlarged opium trade, but whatever influence they tried to exert over the traders was ineffectual. One of the missionaries' peculiar difficulties was that with which we ourselves are still faced when discussing them: that a number of the opium pedlars could, if opium were discounted, be called in Christian terms good men. James Innes, for example, read a chapter of the Bible every day, even when aboard ship running the drug up the coast; Jardine contributed to medical treatment for the Chinese poor; Matheson, apart from interests in printing and music-he owned Canton's only piano-left with the Governor of Macao a substantial sum to be used on charities chosen by the government; and all the leading opium men, after the death of Robert Morrison, subscribed to found a Morrison Education Society as his memorial, providing Chinese youths with free education in English and Chinese. The rate of Chinese conversion to Christianity remained extremely low during these early years of the Protestant missions. In 1832 there were ten Chinese Protestants in China, one or two of them being from Malacca. Wells Williams later recorded that in his own mission he could not recall a single Chinese conversion prior to I 1850. But in other ways the impact made by the Protestants was plain for all to see. Protestant services were now conducted in a room in the Canton factories and in the chapel within the walls of the Protestant Cemetery at Macao. The congregations were made up of British and American traders and (at Macao only) their wives, officers of the Royal Navy, merchant captains and seamen. Occasionally the Bethel flag would be hoisted and lustily sung hymns would resound from the decks of the ships at Whampoa. In 1832 Robert Morrison, then in his fiftieth year and conscious of death's approach, could with justice sum up the Protestant achievement and his own part in it. 'There is now in Canton', he wrote, 'a state of society, in respect of Chinese, totally different from what I found it in 1807. Chinese scholars, Missionary students, English presses, and Chinese Scriptures, with public worship of God, have all grown up since that period. I have served my generation, and must-the Lord knows when-fall asleep.' 148-152 ------ Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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