Epilogue

Abstract

This chapter traverses the later twentieth-century afterlives of missionary photographs and films. It looks at their shifting historical existences after the end of the mission enterprise in China. These images vanished, resurfaced, and were reimagined in the vagaries of the global Cold War, the Cultural Revolution, and US engagements with China after the Mao era. This seventy-year period contains episodes of material loss and recovery (alongside changing popular views of American contacts with modern China) and ends with the new circulation of missionary images in a digital world, their increasing visibility in present-day Sino-US cultural and religious relations, and their twenty-first-century return to the Chinese communities of their creation. The chapter then jumps to discuss the momentary bridging of a single photograph, a single life, and an afterlife.