The first significant cultural encounter between China and Europe began in the late sixteenth century when Portuguese merchants and Catholic missionaries arrived in the South China Sea. Throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, missionaries and their early converts took the initiative to introduce Christianity to the Chinese mainland. Chinese imperial rulers became fearful of Catholic influence, however, and banned Christianity from 1724 to 1860.(2) No longer allowed to travel and preach freely inside the country, Catholic and, later, Protestant missionaries concentrated their efforts on other Southeast Asian countries such as Siam (now Thailand) and Burma while waiting for China to reopen to foreigners. In addition to the native citizenry, they also proselytized among Chinese immigrant communities.
Most of these "Overseas Chinese," as they were called by their compatriots in China, had left their families to find work, planning to return to China upon retirement. Siam had attracted a large number of Overseas Chinese since the eighteenth century, including many from the Chaozhou-speaking region of northeastern Guangdong province on the South China coast (see map 1). Though the Chaozhou people were scattered across different countries in Southeast Asia, they maintained dose contacts with their home villages through strong kinship and native place ties, which provided an effective network of support. The native place networks included a large number of merchant guilds, temple organizations, and philanthropic associations to provide social services, notably funeral services for those who died abroad.(3)
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Beginning in the 1830s, American Baptist missionaries who preached among Overseas Chinese in Siam found in the process a way to reintroduce Christianity to the Chinese mainland. Material and social opportunities as well as religious fervor encouraged Overseas Chinese converts to help spread their new faith through native place networks abroad in Siam and, later, through kinship networks after they returned home. Because these networks were outside Chinese official control, they provided a stable and effective channel of religious transmission to facilitate Baptist expansion from Southeast Asia to China proper.
By studying the transmission of Christianity among Overseas Chinese, this paper builds on recent studies of Christian movement by Robert Entenmann, Jessie and Rolland Lutz, and others who have shown Chinese Christians to have enjoyed a great deal of autonomy in missionary work during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.(4) An examination of the contributions to the early American Baptist missionary movement by several Overseas Chinese Christians reveals that they were far more than mere assistants to western missionaries; rather, because they had access to Chinese social networks and to the Chinese mainland, forbidden to western missionaries, they necessarily operated quite independently. In addition, this paper will highlight the importance of established Chinese maritime routes from Siam to Hong Kong to Chaozhou in missionary efforts to bring Christianity to the Chinese mainland. Christianity was thus not simply a foreign imposition but spread through specifically Chinese venues.
The Baptist missionary movement among the Overseas Chinese communities in Siam began with Karl Gutzlaff (1803-51), a Prussian Lutheran missionary who in 1826 was sent by the Netherlands Missionary Society to work among the Overseas Chinese in the Dutch East Indies. Highly independent and eccentric, in 1828 Gutzlaff abandoned his original assignment and worked with Jacob Tomlin of the London Missionary Society and three Chinese assistant workers in Singapore and Siam. From 1828 to 1831, Gutzlaff proselytized among the Chaozhou emigrants, the largest Chinese dialect-speaking group in Siam. The Chaozhou Chinese settled in most urban towns and rural areas along the southern coast of Siam. In addition to engaging in prosperous trade with China, they raised commercial crops such as sugar cane, pepper, and tobacco.(5)
In Bangkok, Gutzlaff instructed several religious inquirers and baptized a Chaozhou emigrant, Boon Tee. Upon his conversion, Boon Tee worked for Gutzlaff as an evangelist, preaching to his fellow emigrants.(6) Although little is known of Boon Tee's background and preaching methods, he likely began with his family members and friends in Bangkok and used his native place networks to convert other Chinese. These networks provided Boon Tee with strong social linkages to recruit converts.
Boon Tee was apparently an outstanding evangelist, and his ability to work independently convinced Gutzlaff that given sufficient support and instruction, Overseas Chinese Christians could preach the Gospel among their own people. The Chaozhou communities in Bangkok were therefore a promising mission field. Boon Tee's success probably inspired Gutzlaff to set up the Chinese Union in 1844, an evangelistic organization based on the principle that Chinese Christians should evangelize other Chinese, with foreign missionaries serving as supervisors.(7) Chaozhou Christians played a key role in most of the Chinese Union's evangelistic activities during the 1840s, and one of them, Ming, served as president of the Union in 1847.(8)
In early 1831, complaining of lack of support from Protestant churches in Europe, Gutzlaff appealed to churches in the United States for more missionaries and resources.(9) The American Baptist Missionary Union responded by transferring John Taylor Jones from Burma to Bangkok in 1832 and sending William Dean in 1835.(10) Shortly after Jones's arrival, Gutzlaff left Bangkok for missions work in Macao, the Portuguese colony on the South China coast. In October 1832, he traveled with English merchants and took service as an interpreter on the Sylph, an opium ship belonging to the firm of Jardine Matheson. Opium was the main product shipped from Hong Kong to Chaozhou during the early nineteenth century, and between 1832 and the outbreak of the Opium War between China and Great Britain in 1839, Gutzlaff made a number of voyages to the Chinese coast as an interpreter on opium ships. Financially pressed, he worked for the English expeditionary force as an interpreter and information officer during the three-year war, playing an active role in the Anglo-Chinese negotiations at Nanjing in the summer of 1842.(11) Under the Treaty of Nanjing, which ended the war, five ports along the China coast opened to foreign trade and residence: Canton, Shanghai, Ningbo, Xiamen, and Fuzhou (see map 2). The island of Hong Kong also became a British colony. Gutzlaff saw the British victory in the Opium War as an opportunity for evangelistic inroads in China, but his association with the British army left time for missions work only on weekends. Gutzlaff's example suggests that some early Protestant missionary enterprises simply followed the opium trade route from Southeast Asia to China. That was also true for the American Baptist mission.
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Back in Bangkok, the arrival of John Taylor Jones and William Dean marked the beginning of the American Baptist evangelistic work among the Chaozhou communities in Siam. Jones built on Boon Tee's success, founding a Chinese Baptist church in Bangkok in 1835. Because of the Baptist doctrinal emphasis on total immersion in water as the only valid form of baptism, Jones rebaptized Boon Tee before admitting him into the church, after which he assigned Boon Tee to minister to Chinese church members and religious inquirers.(12) This immediate assignment suggests that Boon Tee had received substantial pastoral training from Gutzlaff and was capable of administering the local church. He continued to work for the American Baptist mission until September 1836, when he left because of personal conflicts with Dean, his superior. Boon Tee returned to the church for only a short time after Dean's departure in 1843.(13) As Boon Tee's career illustrates, in cases of intra-mission disputes, Chinese assistants with few independent resources usually were at the mercy of their missionary employers.