Table Of ContentOur Ordered Lives Confess
H a r v a r d Studies in A m e r i c a n - E a s t Asian Relations 8
The Harvard Studies in American—East Asian Relations
are sponsored and edited by the Committee on American-
Far Eastern Policy of the Department of History
at Harvard University.
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Our Ordered Lives Confess
Three Nineteenth-Century
American Misionaries
in East Shantung
Irwin T. Hyatt, Jr.
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
and London, England
1976
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Copyright © 1976 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Hyatt, Irwin Τ 1 9 3 5 -
Our ordered lives confess: three nineteenth-century
American missionaries in East Shantung.
(Harvard studies in American-East Asian relations; 8)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Crawford, Tarleton Perry, 1821-1902. 2. Moon,
Charlotte, 1840-1912. 3. Mateer, Calvin Wilson, 1 8 3 6 -
1908. I. Title. II. Series
BV3427.A1H9 26'.092'2 [B] 76-7515
ISBN 0 - 6 7 4 - 6 4 7 3 5 - 1
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Europeans never understand anything of China
that does not resemble themselves.
•Andre Malraux
No two men, indeed, can find the same traits of
character in any country, because at bottom as
we look at the world, we find only ourselves.
George Kates
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Preface
This book is a study of the adjustments of three nineteenth-
century American Protestant missionaries to life in east Shantung
province. More generally the subject is international relations of
the person-to-person kind, based on living experience abroad, that
Americans like to think of as really getting to know another people.
Understanding other peoples is by common agreement nec-
essary for living in the same world with them. As a practical pro-
position understanding seems highly problematic, or at least differ-
ent people seem to come up with widely differing understandings.
Blame is typically placed on lack of appropriate information, on
prejudice, or on the crisis attention span that afflicts international
concern. Another difficulty is that people often do not even under-
stand themselves, let alone others.
This problem of understanding is what the present study tries
to examine, in a specific situation involving Americans and Chinese.
As Protestant missionaries the subjects represent the largest body
of Americans that has historically tried to get through to the
Chinese as people. Together with Protestant and Roman Catholic
evangelists from European nations, these Americans learned the
language, settled widely, and for more than a century were for
many Chinese the living face of a new international order. As
teachers, as publicists, and simply as privileged foreigners living
there, they contributed to the processes of modernization and
nationalistic self-discovery in that country. As objects of prayerful
concern and of money-raising efforts at home, and as indefatig-
able reporters on the Chinese scene, they also contributed to Ameri-
can opinion and policy regarding China.
The study's geographic setting is a city in northeast China
known in the nineteenth century as Tengchow. Known anciently
(and again today) as P'eng-lai, after its hsien or district name,
Tengchow'stood "on a rocky hill by the sea, facing Manchuria, on
the peninsula of Shantung province which reaches out into the Yel-
low Sea toward Korea."1 According to popular legend Tengchow's
history went back more than two thousand years to the reign,
depending on which story one stresses, of either Ch'in Shih Huang-
ti (221-210 B . c . ) or Han V u Ti ( 1 4 1 - 8 7 B . c . ) . 2 Each of those
great emperors reportedly made local visits in search of five "east-
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χ / Preface
ern isles" inhabited by immortal beings. Both were really seeking
immortality for themselves, and both were disappointed.
A city did grow from these royal visitations, and since its
earliest days "P'eng-lai" has been famous in Chinese folklore. Ch'in
Shih Huang-t i , for example, is said to have dispatched from the
site three thousand young men and women who became the pro-
genitors of the Japanese people. In the waters below the Temple
of the Blessed Isles, for a thousand years the city's clifftop land-
mark, magic dolphins have played; and in the offshore mists men
have glimpsed islands where "men and animals never die and where
the palaces are of gold and silver." The great poet Su Tung-p 'o saw
in these waters the Eight Immortals floating on lotus thrones and in
1085 wrote "Mirage at Sea" in commemoration. More recently, in
one of the memorable passages of modern Chinese fiction, a famous
traveler saw in the same waters a vision of the impending shipwreck
3
of China's traditional civilization.
By' mid-nineteenth century, when Christian missionaries ar-
rived with a new kind of immortality, magic P'eng-lai had indeed
fallen on hard times. As Tengchow it was still the civil, military,
and educational capital of a prefecture (also called Tengchow) that
included nine districts and one department (chou). This amounted
to an overall area of about 5700 square miles and 3,000,000 people,
mostly peasant farmers. The city itself was surrounded by a for ty-
foot wall that was three miles around and by repute one of the
oldest, thickest, and most masonically excellent in China. Within
the wall, however, was a population that seems to have been declin-
ing throughout the nineteenth century, to a total of just over
4
40,000 by the 1890s.
Economic depression was the problem most often cited. The
city's harbor had been ruined by natural causes, and its trading
importance was undercut by the development of Chefoo (Yen-
t 'a i )—a treaty port fifty-five miles to the east—and later of Tsing-
tao to the south. An American observed in the 1880s that Teng-
chow's many public buildings were all in various stages of collapse.
As for the common people, their "whole time and all their
thoughts" were occupied by the struggle simply to stay alive. In a
city "without commerce and with little local trade," most were
5
"poor and growing poorer every day."
Tengchow was in short a decaying, backwater place from the
time the Conventions of Peking opened it to missionary activity in
1860. Things continued downhill for the next fifty years, the
period covered in this book. The most punishing aspects of local
life to Western missionaries were Tengchow's loneliness, its stag-
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