In Sartor Resartus (Reference Carlyle1831), Thomas Carlyle wrote that “the loss of his religious Belief was the loss of everything” (129; bk. 2, ch. 7). At the time, this statement was no exaggeration because, as the nineteenth century dawned, Christianity was inarguably perceived by many as one of the most definitive components of Britishness; as Jane Austen's Henry Tilney says: “Remember that we are English, that we are Christians” (172, vol. 2, ch. 9). The sense of being a Christian represents a fundamentally important ideal to the conceptualization of Victorian cultural identity in that it not only dictated to society an imaginary concept of identity after which the Victorian civilization tried to pattern itself, but also led to the manifestation of cultural ideologies such as the ambiguously defined Victorian virtue and work ethic. However, in order for the ideology of cultural identity to function, a specific set of institutional forms would be required to provide society with a firm foundation for the process of “cultural elaboration” to take place.Footnote ¹ Thus, alongside the early Victorians' belief in their self-professed faith, Orientalism represents another of the more important Victorian cultural institutional forms, which complemented the concept of Christianity to create a sense of moralistic connection, and in turn allowed the manifestation of Victorian cultural identity as a rigidly moralistic and virtuous entity that was perceived by many early Victorians as a true reflection of their society.Footnote ²

Indeed, for much of the nineteenth century, the two institutional forms of religion and Orientalism collaborated in a tightly-knit relationship to support and reaffirm the conventional perception of the “moralistic” Victorian cultural identity. In Orientalism, Edward Said summarizes the dialecticism of the reliance of Orientalism on Christianity to establish the image of an immoral East, and Christianity on Orientalism to supply it with the need to moralize the world, by stating that “the Orient accommodated to the moral exigencies of Western Christianity” (67). In other words, in order for such a cultural discourse to function, the prejudicial image of an irreligious and barbaric other – the Orient – is essential to the affirmation of the virtuous and civilized Victorian cultural identity. Therefore, under this discourse, in order to sustain such a conceptualization of Victorian cultural identity, elements such as morality, duty, and virtue, which Christianity and Orientalism both utilize, must by definition be unconditionally reserved for the West and kept away from their interpretation of the East. Moreover, the partnership between Christianity and Orientalism must remain together because if the East were suddenly to become a moral but non-Christian entity, or vice-versa, Victorian cultural identity as dictated by this conviction would cease to be functional.

However, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, as traffic between Britain and China became progressively more frequent, firsthand eyewitness accounts of China contributed to a slow but inevitable shift of the conventionally Victorian Orientalistic perspective. As imperialism spread to the Far East, Victorian missionaries in China occupied a precarious position between religion and Orientalism. This paper examines the inevitable discrepancy between conventional Victorian cultural identity, as based on the institutional forms of religion and Orientalism as practiced in England, and eyewitness accounts by missionaries in China. Through the analysis of these accounts, in which truth often peculiarly overlaps with prejudices, this paper seeks to understand these contradictory representations of Victorian China as a product of the interpreters’ own cultural complications, and to use the experience of these missionaries to demonstrate the importance of the institutional forms of Orientalism and Christianity in the conceptualization of Victorian cultural identity.

Early in the nineteenth century, when William Milne declared that “England knew, and cared little about China, beyond its commerce” (43), missionaries of the London Missionary Society seemingly heeded this as a higher calling and gathered in unprecedented numbers to attempt to study and Christianize China. The majority of these English-speaking missionaries, in particular, made it their sacred mission to broaden the nation's knowledge of China, and at times even indulged themselves in vanity because of their undeniable contribution to the development of sinology. Samuel Kidd, for example, was visibly elated when he learnt from Dr. Morrison that “he knew personally ten Catholic Missionaries in China – Italians, French, and Portuguese – who had resided at court, or on the frontier, from fourteen to thirty years, and only three of them could read Chinese” (China 391). Such a statement reflects the difference in approach towards China between these LMS missionaries and other groups, as they were, indeed, truly one of the first groups of Westerners to resist the conventional Western imperialistic view of themselves as a superior culture on a mission to educate, and to adopt the notion that they were learning about a “foreign,” instead of “lesser,” culture. Because of this, these Victorian missionaries’ devotion to the study of the language and culture of China was valued even in their own time. Their services as interpreters and translators were sought after by government officials and merchants, and many missionaries eventually retired to become sinologists in various institutions in Europe and America.

The relatively open-minded interpretation of China by these missionaries was first triggered by their dedication to learning the language. Prior to the twentieth century, Chinese children became literate via reading and studying Confucian texts. As a result, official textbooks did not exist, and foreigners who wished to learn Chinese had no choice but to do so via the same means. One such missionary, for example, complained that the Confucian Trimetrical Classic, “from beginning to end is quite unintelligible to all” (“Santsze” 111). His frustration was echoed by another who wrote that “I know of no book that is well adapted to the wants of a beginner” (“Study” 341). However, in spite of their apparent insufficiency in this regard, the Chinese classics afforded the missionaries a rare insight into the philosophy and history of China, which they otherwise would likely have missed. Because of this, many of them grew, over time, to become highly appreciative of the Confucian pedagogical system. Robert Morrison, for example, openly acknowledged the merit of the country where “Education is . . . made as general as possible, and moral instruction is ranked above physical” (Davis 118); Walter H. Medhurst applauded China as a nation of “learned people” (178). Such appreciation indicates the first sign of a discrepancy between the Victorians' conventional Orientalistic approach and the missionaries’ experience; and the fact that their admiration for China was so openly acknowledged at this time demonstrates the degree of alteration that the traditional belief of a holistically decadent and immoral China had gone through. While many were reluctant to accept this view in the beginning, most became convinced eventually. For example, as Fred Drake notes, before E. C. Bridgman came to China, he held the typical belief that the Chinese are “simple natives” who resemble “heathen idolaters who were backward and ignorant” (Barnett and Fairbank 92). However, in 1830, having been in the country for less than a year, this conviction of his “altered to a significant degree” and he became increasingly “aware of the antiquity and great accomplishments of Chinese civilization” (92). Although attitudes such as these were first endorsed only by these missionaries, they eventually spread to influence other Victorians' interpretation of China. For example, the diplomat Harry Parkes once described his impression of a Chinese official as having “a fine manly honest countenance, with pleasantness in his looks” (Lane-Poole 1: 42). The fact that his meeting with this official took place during the negotiation of the Treaty of Nanking, shortly after the First Opium War when Chinese decadence and vileness were purportedly magnified by the British press, shows just how far such firsthand experiences of China could displace the conventional doctrine of Orientalism.

However, while the experience of China had undeniably altered some missionaries’ reliance on Orientalism, it would be wrong to interpret this as a complete displacement of their conventional Victorian cultural identity. Instead, the experience of many of these missionaries simply represents a reconfiguration of the traditional bond between Orientalism and religion, which occurred due to their unique experience in China. As stated earlier, the presupposed dualism of religion and Orientalism, during the nineteenth century, served a specific and highly useful purpose in that it practically created an indisputable myth of Victorian cultural identity. However, when Westerners such as the LMS missionaries began to perceive more and more of the merits of China, a trend began to emerge in their writings in which the praise of China often was paired with denouncements of the religious faith of its population. For example, when George Smith visited a Buddhist monastery in the early 1840s, he showed obvious appreciation for the scenery and the reception which he enjoyed; but he also reported, to the horror of his readers, that he “was disturbed at an early hour by a priest groaning in the ante-room, and uttering doleful sounds, as he prostrated his body before the hideous idol” (“Buddhist Idolatry” 92). Similarly, a decade later, a “Special Correspondent of the ‘Times’ newspaper” reported witnessing a Chinese priest “moaning his ritual” in a temple, which led him to conclude that Buddhist “devotion can rise no higher than sensual ceremonies” (“Buddhism” 90, 91). On both occasions, the Buddhist priests were likely to have been simply chanting or reciting their scriptures, but the fact that they were derided in such unnecessarily debasing terms suggests a subconscious compulsion to deliberately attack China via its non-Christian religion. In other words, by deliberately linking their anti-Orientalistic appreciation of China to the mockery of its religion, the missionaries were able to maintain and satisfy the West's sense of cultural superiority, unhitching the seemingly natural relationship between the institutional forms of Orientalism and religion. These “attacks” on China's religion allowed the missionaries to retain their conventional sense of moralistic Victorian cultural identity and keep intact the perception of China as its immoral cultural “other,” which effectively negated the impact of a “good” China on their conventional interpretation of Victorian cultural identity.

It is in this context that I now propose to examine the writings of Rev. Samuel Kidd, in order to uncover possible cultural implications behind his peculiar interpretation of Victorian China. As had been noted previously, as both Westerners and religious workers, the missionaries were equally attuned to both the institutional forms of Orientalism and religion. Therefore, when problems of identity arose due to their positive experience of China, many of these missionaries soon realized that amplifying China's irreligiousness created a peculiar problem. On the one hand, it was necessary in pamphlets and journals, which generated public interest and financial backings for future missionary works. On the other hand, as Samuel Kidd realized, the admission of China's atheism in a scholarly text would signify a certain degree of failure in his missionary exertion. Therefore, his writings often contain a noticeable dilemma in navigating the discourse between Orientalism, religion, and Victorian cultural identity.

When Kidd was appointed the first professor of Chinese in University College, London, after years of missionary works in the Far East (where he learnt to speak and write Chinese), he immediately set out to publish an informative volume describing to an English audience the culture and people of China. In the book, the absence of the conventional Victorian Orientalistic perception is apparent because he not only freely gives his approval to the various ancient Chinese customs in which “Filial piety” is made “the first of moral obligations inculcated on Children” (China 190), but he also praises heartily the Chinese's pedagogical tradition in which “Knowledge, the property of every inquiring, diligent mind, is sufficient to purify the heart, rectify the principles, elevate the understanding, control the affections, and govern the conduct” (193). Although such claims are consistent with the similar experiences of other missionaries at the time, when pressed for an explanation for such remarkable achievements by a culture of “inferior creation” (4), Kidd curiously remarks that:

And that:

By adopting this unverifiable supposition that the Chinese are descended from the ancient Hebrews, Kidd was able to demonstrate his desire to remain truthful to his experience and describe the unmistakable virtues he was able to observe in the Chinese, and at the same time downplay its significance by rewarding its root to another culture.Footnote ³ This not only enables him to exhibit his unique insight on China, but also to retain his conventional position regarding Victorian cultural identity by making the Chinese remain inferior. Indeed, almost as soon as he mentions the alleged connection between the Chinese and Hebrews, Kidd promulgates it in order to bring out a highly conventional imperialistic view, which illustrates his design towards establishing such a connection in the first place:

Here, Kidd proposes the further cultural displacement of the merits of China. Aside from noticing Kidd's intention in crediting the Hebraic culture with having originally implemented these commendable customs, and thus stripping the Chinese of their merits, it is important to situate these passages within the Victorians' notion of Hebraism and discover Kidd's position. First, although the Hebraic tradition had always been regarded by the Victorians geographically as part of the Orient, it nonetheless enjoyed a unique role within the conceptualization of Victorian cultural identity, in that its secular root was historically used to validate the importance of Christianity (which Matthew Arnold would later elaborate on in Culture and Anarchy). Therefore, by attributing praises to Hebraism, the conceptualization of Victorian cultural identity via otherness doesn't necessarily become diminished in the process. Second, given the intimate yet not-too-intimate relationship between Britain and Egypt at the time (which Said goes so far as call a form of colonization), praising the Hebraic culture would have much less of a negative impact on the conceptualization of Victorian cultural identity than glorifying China would. Therefore, Kidd's unnecessary and unsubstantiated proposition of the relationship between the Chinese and Hebraic civilizations in a text that was intended to describe Chinese customs to Western readers seems capable of serving the author's conventional sense of identity by striping the Chinese of their discernable merits.

However, when Kidd and other missionaries translated and interpreted Chinese culture for an English audience, such artificial cultural displacement of Chinese merits could become a difficult task. Therefore, in order to satisfy the condition of conventional Victorian cultural identity, Kidd had to seek an alternative means to justify his moralistic discourse according to the principle of otherness. As Lauren Pfister points out, in early religious translation, it was common practice for the missionaries to knowingly mistranslate a text in order to smuggle into a supposedly Chinese concept a series of conventional Victorian “theological convictions and preconceptions to the point that the original intent is almost completely blurred” (38). This occurred frequently in translations both from and into the Chinese language. For example, Suzanne Wilson Barnett, points out that when Justus Doolittle wrote his Chinese version of the Christian tract “the Watchmaker,” he deliberately revised certain aspects of the original text for his Chinese audience. Whereas the Chinese tract emphasizes “the character of the man,” the importance of which Doolittle was attempting to convey to his subjects, the original English version tends to involve “more doctrinal complexity and analysis of alternatives” (112). It would, thus, seem probable that these Victorian missionaries not only realized and understood the manipulative power of the art of translation, but often utilized their linguistic faculty to achieve this end in order to deliver different messages to both their Chinese and English readers.

In China, or, Illustrations of the Symbols, Philosophy, Antiquities, Customs, Superstitions, Laws, Government, Education, and Literature (1841), Kidd demonstrates his grasp of this manipulative power of translation in his early-nineteenth-century interpretation of the Chinese culture, as he aims to lead his readers to certain conclusions. In the text, he includes a story concerning a character named Chin-seih-kew, and professes it to be a typical “story translated from a Chinese author” (328). But in reality, the story is more likely to have been included because it fits his peculiar interpretation of Chinese literature as unappealing and Chinese life as morally degenerate. In his “translation,” Kidd not only emphasizes certain unflattering aspects of the story and draws readers’ attention to them with his commentaries, but may also have altered various elements of the original story to fit his conclusion.

Although the original source of Kidd's story is unidentified, its fragmented and incongruous plot seems to suggest a multi-source origin rather than a single one. It begins with a young aristocrat named Chin-seih-kew, who, in typical Chinese fashion, has scholarly aspirations. However (without any explanation whatsoever), he suddenly changes his views “from the scholastic to the domestic life,” and meets “a young lady who was filially pious and modest” (328), to whom he proposes marriage. The lady's father opposes the marriage due to Chin's poverty. (Curiously, when the story begins, Chin is the “son of the most celebrated person in the city.” No explanation is given as to how he becomes poverty-stricken in the short span of one paragraph.) But in the end, love prevails. One day, the father of the young lady sends “an old domestic with a tray of provisions for his daughter” (328). For no reason, the old domestic and Chin's mother get into an argument, and Chin “seized the old woman by the hair, slapped her face, and kicked her out of doors” (328).

At this point, the story that has so far failed remarkably in addressing a number of important issues (such as the reason behind Chin's decision to abandon his scholarly ambition, his poverty, as well as the reason for the argument), suddenly and uncharacteristically begins to pay meticulous attention to a number of minor details, as readers are treated to an elaborate account of Chin's domestic “confusion and clamour” (329), which are mostly negative and decadent. The story then resumes its previous insouciant tone, with Chin's wife suddenly and enigmatically consenting to her father's request to divorce her husband and return home. Almost as inexplicably, news reaches Chin that “his father had been dead some time” in another province, so the obedient son immediately leaves home to search for his father's remains for a proper burial, at which point the story ends abruptly (329).

The story of Chin-seih-kew, assuming it has been properly translated, is a substandard piece of literature with a disjointed plot and dubious characterization which leaves one pondering why Kidd chose such a text to represent Chinese literature. After all, Kidd had plenty of other choices, such as Jin Gu Qi Guan, the authoritative collection of classic Chinese short stories, which most missionaries who knew Chinese would have heard of, if not read personally. Indeed, as Li Ping points out, since the beginning of the eighteenth century, with the appearance of the first English translation of Hao Qiu Zhuan (or Fortune Union), Chinese fictions had actually been enjoying a steady climb in exposure and popularity among European readers. Among the favorites were popular titles such as Ping Shan Leng Yan and Yu Jiao Li.Footnote ⁴ John Francis Davis, the governor of Hong Kong at the time, in spite of his ostentatiously Orientalistic views, admitted his admiration for Fortune Union: “[t]here are many remarkable points of resemblance between the ‘Fortune Union’ and our own novels and romances at the present day” (268). Thus, given the apparent Western awareness and appreciation of Chinese fictions, it would seem highly implausible for Kidd to have chosen the story of Chin-seih-kew out of pure ignorance or complete unawareness of other existing Chinese literature. This story, however, did enable Kidd to portray a particular version of Chinese life, one in which it is “no uncommon occurrence in domestic feuds for the females to come to blows” (330). Kidd also directs his reader's attention to points such as “it will be seen to what degrading treatment women are subjected” (331) and “[t]he husband's relatives, too, may increase her troubles and greatly annoy her” (331). In other words, while Kidd avoids any negative mention of the religious situation of China, in order to sustain the moral and cultural demand of conventional Victorian cultural identity, he seems inclined to either misrepresent the Chinese culture by giving false literary prominence to an undeserving piece of work, or simply to mis-translate in order to present Chinese society as a morally inferior other to its Victorian counterpart.

Although I have yet to be able to verify the authenticity of this story, by either locating Kidd's source for it, or dismissing altogether the possibility of the existence of one, the point remains that even if Kidd's translation of this story had been a faithful one, his selection of such an obscure story and his less-than-favorable interpretation of it afterwards suggest a deliberate aim to depart from the positive image of China which was popular among missionaries at the time. What this demonstrates is the reality of the manifested conflict between Kidd's desire to Christianize and civilize China, and his simultaneously persisting desire to regard them as the inferior cultural “other.”

This same sort of selective representation occurred elsewhere. Since the establishment of the Morrison Education Society in Guangdong (Canton) in 1835, annual examinations were held in order to test the Chinese students’ knowledge in English and Christian theology. In 1845, when its first class of students was about to graduate, the society published a selection of examination essays written by those students, and one of which contains the following interpretation of the Chinese folk hero – Bao Zheng:

To a Victorian reader who has little or no knowledge of Chinese folklore, the image of Bao, according to this passage, would have inevitably been a negative and superstitious one. However, to the Chinese, Bao represents a mythologized figure who exemplifies wisdom, justice, and the spirit of combating discrimination and corruption. To mention Bao without referring to his wisdom and rectitude, therefore, would have been the same as talking about Shakespeare without mentioning the fact that he was a playwright. This view is supported by Ding Shaoqin who, in her comprehensive survey of the presentation of Bao in popular Chinese culture from the Song Dynasty (960–1279) to Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), points out that:

Given the “cultural and social significance” of the stories of Bao, the Morrison Education Society student's essay is curiously silent about Bao's admirable deeds; indeed, it presents Bao in a strictly negative light and gives false prominence to obscure materials that are not acknowledged traits of the character.Footnote ⁵ The writer also misrepresents Chinese signs and symbols to his Western audience to solidify such a view. Bao's black face, for example, symbolizes in the Chinese culture an unyielding adherence to principles regarding law and order (from which one derives the Chinese proverb tie mian wu si – “the iron face that doesn't recognize the self”). This author, however, seems to be strangely unaware of this and interprets it as a feature of monstrosity. Similarly, although Bao's exaggerated ability to converse with both the gods and the devils refers to another popular aspect of his mythology – his knack for detecting even the most secretive crime because he is able to obtain information from both heaven and hell – the writer refers to Bao as the “king of the lower world,” and inexplicably (and most likely intentionally) fails to give equal consideration to his ability to visit heaven.

Although unlike Kidd, the writer of this essay is neither from the West nor a missionary, he was educated in an English school run by LMS missionaries, with the knowledge that his essay would be read and judged by those missionaries (his teachers). Thus, his misrepresentations suggest a calculated attempt to distort and demean the Chinese culture for a Western audience (the examiners of the Morrison Education Society). If nothing else, this implies the essay-writer's awareness of the way missionary-educators perceive and conceptualize China, and the perceived need to accommodate it. The missionaries’ dilemma concerning their cultural identity was not only an internalized issue, but discursively externalized and imposed by the education they provided. The missionaries’ selection and presentation of the essay to the Western readers also effectively display their anxiety towards the discrepancy between their experience in China and their belief in Orientalism.

In a rare testimony by Rev. Samuel Brown, the headmaster of the Morrison Education Society School, we can locate a possible connection between the missionaries’ preoccupation with cultural identity and their educational philosophy. Brown writes that:

Although Brown does not reveal directly his philosophy concerning the education of his Chinese students, his condescension towards what he refers to as Chinese “superstition” no doubt influenced the way he conducted his pedagogic practices. In his discussion of Brown, Stephen Evans notes, “Like other missionary-educators in nineteenth-century Hong Kong, Brown believed that the transmission of Western learning through the medium of English would liberate his students from the fetters of traditional Chinese values and modes of thought and open their minds to a new and better way of thinking” (23). Given Brown's prejudice towards China and its cultural associations, along with the deliberately deceptive rendition of the story of Bao Zheng by his Chinese student, the supposition of a system of education that encouraged this kind of interpretation does not seem to be out of the question. The missionaries’ internal dilemma between their awareness of the actual condition of China and their desire to suppress this knowledge is reflected both in the education policy of the missionary schools, as well as the missionaries’ writings that concern China. Conventional Orientalistic prejudice continued to exert its influence on the Victorians' perception of China throughout the nineteenth century.

As stated earlier, during the Victorian era, the notion of cultural identity was manifested through a number of different institutional forms, among which the perception of morality as based on Orientalism and Christianity happened to be most prominently recognized by society. When dealing with the period's perception and opinion of China, however, conventional scholarship tends to overlook this internal characteristic of Victorian society and simply attribute the prejudice towards China to the West's general ignorance of the East, as well as the political animosity that inevitably accompanied the entire opium trade. The many textual examples of the misrepresentation of China by some of the most prominent associates of the LMS, however, point out the deficiency of this view by illuminating the social implications of this aspect of conventional Victorian cultural identity. In spite of the authors’ recognition of the China's many merits and the desire of its Christianization, it would continue to shape and manipulate their (mis-)interpretation of China.