In 1807, under the auspices of the London Missionary Society (LMS), Robert Morrison (1782–1834) arrived in Guangzhou 廣州 as the first Protestant missionary to China. Throughout his missionary career, Morrison baptised only very few Chinese converts. Nevertheless, with the help of William Milne (1785–1822) and Chinese assistants, Morrison produced a number of pioneering works that would benefit those following in his footsteps. These works include a complete Chinese translation of the Bible, a Chinese-English/English-Chinese dictionary, a Chinese grammar in English, and several Christian tracts in Chinese. Moreover, Morrison and Milne established the Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca, which was intended to impart both Christian and secular knowledge to the Chinese, and to instruct missionaries and others in Chinese language and literature.
While there is no lack of secondary literature on Morrison's life and experiences, none of them examines in detail the missionary training received by Morrison and whether this exerted a profound influence over the development of his mission among the Chinese. Drawing on archival materials from libraries in London, Edinburgh, Hong Kong and Lampeter, Daily looked into this neglected aspect of studies on Morrison. His Robert Morrison and the Protestant Plan for China makes a strong case that whilst introducing Protestantism to China, Morrison faithfully implemented the mission strategy prescribed by his tutor at Gosport Academy, David Bogue (1750–1825), a Scottish dissenting minister who was among the founders of the LMS.
In the first chapter, Daily gave us concise background information about the birth of British evangelicalism and the formation of the LMS. He then explored the LMS's inaugural mission to the South Sea Islands, for which Thomas Haweis's (1733/1734–1820) “godly mechanic missionary strategy” (p. 25) was adopted. This strategy suggested that despite having only the basic rudiments of education, ‘godly mechanics’, who “excelled in the industrial arts” and “energetically felt the Word” (ibid), would be able to impress the islanders with their technological and mechanical skills and thus convert them to Protestantism. The strategy proved to be a disaster. Lacking the ability and willingness to engage with the local culture, the eighteen ‘godly mechanics’ who arrived in Tahiti in 1797 failed to record a single conversion; By 1809, they had either committed suicide, been excommunicated, resigned from the mission or abandoned their original posts. Similarly disappointing results came from a subsequent mission to South Africa, as the two English ‘godly mechanics’ sent there deserted their assignments by the end of 1799, the year when they arrived in South Africa.
After such failures, the LMS was forced to rethink its mission strategy. A product of eighteenth-century Scottish society, which was education-centred, Bogue appreciated the benefits of formal learning for vocational occupations and encouraged the LMS to “embrace schooling as a means of preparing and improving its missionaries” (p. 40). The LMS finally agreed that systematised training was necessary for missionaries and appointed Bogue to be the LMS's ‘Tutor to the Missionary Seminary’ in 1800 (see p. 46). In the second chapter, we are introduced to the missionary training provided at Bogue's Gosport Academy, which became the official seminary for LMS in 1800. At Gosport, LMS missionary candidates received training in “a wide multitude of scientific and humanistic disciplines, including but not limited to astronomy, theology, geography, philosophy, history, rhetoric, and linguistics” (p. 48). Also, a series of “special missionary instructions” were only given to LMS missionary candidates (p. 54). Through his training programme, “Bogue promoted a three-step mission strategy: his missionaries were to acquire the native languages; to translate the Scriptures and compose a dictionary, grammar, and a supply of evangelical texts; and to establish a seminary for converts” (p. 82).
Two arguments in the second chapter are worth highlighting. First, Daily argued that the philosophical school of Scottish Realism, founded by Thomas Reid (1710–1796), had an effect upon Bogue's mission strategy. According to Reid, “everyone shares the ability to identify reality and comprehend its natural offspring, knowledge”. Reid called this ability “the common sense of mankind” (p. 40). Influenced by Reid, Bogue believed that the ‘heathen’ also possessed that kind of common sense and would recognise the truths expressed in the Bible through reading it and convert to Protestantism. Such a belief was instilled in LMS missionary candidates through Bogue's missionary training curriculum (see pp. 65–66, 74), which highlighted the importance of providing the ‘heathen’ with the Bible and supplementary literature in their own tongues. This argument offers us a new understanding of why early Protestant missionaries in China placed emphasis on writing, translating and publishing, since such an emphasis has usually been attributed to missionaries’ limited ability to speak Chinese and the restrictions placed on foreigners’ presence in the Qing Empire before 1860.Footnote 1
Second, Daily asserted that Bogue's pedagogy facilitated the close adherence of LMS missionaries to his mission strategy. At Gosport, LMS missionary candidates were required to transcribe the outlines of the main points of Bogue's lectures and provided with a list of required readings. Then they “consulted the assigned resources, and filled in the details on their own” (p. 51). As every Gosport alumnus departed Britain with his own transcribed outline of Bogue's lectures in hand, LMS missionaries “could always recall Bogue's advice” (p. 82). This is a convincing reason why Morrison could follow Bogue's plan for a mission prescribed in his lecture notes almost to the letter when propagating Protestantism among the Chinese.
In the third, fourth and fifth chapters, Daily illustrated how Morrison executed Bogue's three-step mission strategy. Having completed the three-year training programme at Gosport “in just over fourteen months” (p. 48), Morrison, as depicted in the third chapter, started learning the Chinese language from Yong Samm Tak (Rong Sande 容三德) in London before leaving England for China. In addition, assisted by Yong, Morrison copied the manuscript of Jean Basset's (1662–1707) incomplete Chinese translation of the New Testament in the British Museum, so as to prepare for the task of translating the Bible into Chinese.
From the fourth chapter, we know that Morrison dedicated himself to learning the Chinese language after arriving in Guangzhou in 1807. Morrison later began translating the Bible into Chinese and Milne, who was a Gosport alumnus too, joined Morrison's mission in 1813 as his co-worker. Daily noted that many of the reference works consulted by Morrison for the task of Bible translation were British evangelical sources assigned by Bogue at Gosport for his lessons. This indicates “there is a correlation between the bibliography of Morrison's translation and the reading list from the Gosport lectures on the Old and New Testaments” (p. 147). As a historian of modern China with a particular interest in the history of Chinese Bible translation, I am grateful to Daily for listing the biblical commentaries consulted by Morrison which have not been mentioned in earlier studies on the missionary (see pp. 146–147). Daily could have further investigated the above-mentioned correlation by looking into these commentaries in detail, as they are important clues to Morrison's exegetical orientation and might have significantly impacted on his biblical translation. Unfortunately, Daily did not do so. Maybe such an investigation would go beyond the scope of his study and, in his words, “must be left for future research” (p. 147). However, this should not have prevented him from strengthening his argument by giving several textual examples to show how “these uniquely evangelical theological interpretations of the Bible” (ibid) studied at Gosport shaped Morrison's Chinese Bible.
In the same chapter, Daily demonstrated that besides the Chinese Bible, Morrison produced a Chinese dictionary, a Chinese grammar, and the types of Christian texts that Bogue recommended his students to compose on mission fields (see pp. 66, 149–150). Nonetheless, Daily's claim that Morrison composed these works in the order instructed by Bogue's mission strategy (see p. 131) seems to oversimplify the situation, as Morrison did not complete his works one by one. For example, Morrison worked on his Chinese translation of the Bible, the Chinese-English part of his Chinese dictionary, and his Chinese grammar simultaneously, as attested in Morrison's letter to the LMS dated 10 July 1808, which is cited on page 124. Moreover, Morrison published his Chinese tract on the doctrine of divine redemption, Shendao lun shujiu shi zongshuo zhenben 神道論贖救世總說真本, four years before the first volume of the first part of his Chinese-English/English-Chinese dictionary came out.Footnote 2
Daily's narrative in the fifth chapter revolves around the final part of Morrison's missionary assignment, i.e. “to establish a school where the missionaries could instil the Gosport programme upon locals” (p. 159). The school was the Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca, which, according to Daily, was “a Gosport-like academy with a Chinese flair” in Morrison and Milne's minds (p. 168). This is not an exaggerated description, given the similarity between the curricula, textbooks and library collections of the college and Gosport Academy. Milne, entrusted by Morrison to superintend the Anglo-Chinese College, translated Bogue's lecture notes into Chinese so as to provide a foundation for the college's curriculum (see pp. 144, 159). Its students were expected to learn Hebrew, Latin and Greek with the help of the Chinese version of the reference works used at Gosport (see pp. 159–160). The categories of the books which Milne asked the LMS to provide for the college “resembled the topics covered by Bogue throughout his Gosport curriculum” (p. 160). Morrison's list of English books that the college's library needed, with a few exceptions, “reads like an inventory of the Gosport Academy library's theological catalogue” (p. 183).
While the great strength of Daily's work lies in his careful examination of Bogue's missionary training curriculum and its significance for Morrison's mission, Daily's review of previous studies on Morrison is problematic. I agree with Daily that many studies on Morrison rely on Memoirs of the Life and Labours of Robert Morrison, D.D., which was compiled by Morrison's widow, Eliza Morrison (1795–1874), and understandably contains “a series of hagiographic touches” (p. 3). However, given the Chinese secondary sources on Morrison listed in the bibliography, Daily is assumed to have at least a reading knowledge of Chinese. I am thus very surprised that Daily entirely ignored Su Ching's (Su Jing 蘇精) Zhongguo, kaimen! Ma Lixun ji xiangguan renwu yanjiu 中國，開門！馬禮遜及相關人物研究, since Su was not an unknown to Daily, as he did refer to Su's English doctoral thesis on the LMS printing presses among the Chinese (see, for instance, p. 229 nn. 219 and 221; p. 231 nn. 35 and 38). Published in 2005, Su's Zhongguo, kaimen! is an archive-based study in Chinese that engages critically with Morrison's mission and the people related to it, including George Staunton (1781–1859), John Robert Morrison (1814–1843), Milne, and four Chinese converts baptised by Morrison. Su's work draws on materials from not only the LMS archive, but also the Papers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and the archives of the East India Company, the Public Record Office, the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine and the Religious Tract Society. The scholarly value of the 320-page Zhongguo, kaimen! is much higher than that of Barton Starr's four-page article published in 1998, which Daily commended as “perhaps one of the strongest pieces of archival work published to date on Morrison” (p. 201, n. 4).
Indeed, not a few archive-based discussions about Morrison's mission in Daily's book had already appeared in Su's Zhongguo, kaimen!. This makes Daily's assertion that “a critical study of this mission is overdue” (p. 2) questionable. For example, the difficult relationship between the LMS and Morrison during his final years (see pp. 4–6) is examined in the fourth chapter of Zhongguo, kaimen!.Footnote 3 Similarly, the controversy over the management and organisation of the Ultra Ganges Mission among the mission's younger missionaries, Milne and Morrison (see pp. 172–175) is discussed in the sixth chapter of the same book.Footnote 4 Hence, the originality of Daily's work does not really rest on his use of archival materials relevant to Morrison. What makes Daily's work original is his approach to assessing Morrison's mission by bringing primary sources about it into conversation with archival materials related to Gosport Academy, notably the extant transcriptions of Bogue's lecture notes deposited in Dr Williams's Library, the Congregational Library, New College of the University of Edinburgh, and the Roderic Bowen Library and Archives of the University of Wales Trinity Saint David.
Moreover, I am puzzled by the absence of Chinese characters in Daily's book. Daily would have helped readers to identify the Chinese converts who played a role in Morrison's mission, if he had included both the Pinyin form and Chinese characters of their names, such as ‘Qu Ang 屈昂’ for Keuh Agong (see p. 189). The same goes for the Chinese terms discussed in Morrison's journal, such as ‘Tianzhu 天主’ for Tien Chu and ‘Pusa 菩薩’ for Pu-Sa (see p. 132), and the titles of the Chinese tracts produced by Morrison, Milne and Liang A-fa (Liang Fa 梁發) (see p. 189).
Careless inconsistencies and editorial mistakes are found occasionally. The following are some examples: “Guangzhou” and “Canton” are used interchangeably for no specific reason (see pp. 1 and 4). While the London Missionary Society is abbreviated as “LMS” on page 1, the society's full name appears again on pages 33, 34 and 43. The letter dated 5 December 1821 from Malacca to the LMS is wrongly cited as the one dated “December 5, 1921” (p. 233 n. 73). The surname of Lee Chee Kong (Li Zhigang 李志剛) should be ‘Lee’ instead of “Kong” (p. 248). The phrase “Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press” appears as an individual bibliography entry instead of part of the publication data of Eighteenth-Century Studies (p. 250).
Despite the aforementioned shortcomings, Daily should be congratulated for his success in complicating the generally accepted notion of Morrison as “the ‘beginning’ of the Chinese Protestant religion” (p. 3), and giving Bogue well-deserved but long overdue credit for his contribution to the birth of Chinese Protestantism. Daily's book is recommended to anyone wishing to seriously study the history of Protestantism in China. It will also be of interest to those who want to understand the historical connections between missionary training and Protestant missions.
