The Protestant Mission and the Opium War

Abstract

IN THE SPRING OF 1834, at the moment when the East India Company had just lost its monopoly of the China trade, and the several score private English merchants at Canton were at last free to buy and sell as they pleased, the Protestant Mission in China consisted of exactly seven persons. There was Robert Morrison, who had come to China in 1807 for the London Missionary Society; E. Coleman Bridgman, who had arrived in 1829 for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions; Karl Gutzlaff, a German, once sponsored by the Netherlands Missionary Society, now on his own; Edwin Stevens, of the American Seaman's Friend Society; two more Americans, S. Wells Williams and Ira Tracy, sent out by the American Board; and a single Chinese, Liang Afa. These were the seven. Five years later, on the eve of the Opium War, when resident English, Parsee, and American merchants formed a community of well over two hundred, there were still only a dozen. A feeble band, one of the missionaries had early called it, ridiculous in the world's eye, going to convert China; and facing, one might add, difficulties so thick and insurmountable that nothing seemingly could cut a path through them save an act of God.1