LIKE OTHER WESTERN concessions and colonies in China, the short-lived German concession in Tsingtau (Qingdao) was fitted out with churches and missionaries along with its hospitals and police stations. Missionary societies treated colonization as a form of “cultural endeavor” that, like the study of geography and ethnography, facilitated missions work. The vast majority of missionaries saw it as their job to make converts of Chinese people: in other words, to accomplish a transfer of Christian doctrine from Europe to China. But like any translation, the export of belief systems carries a subtle reverse current, whereby the European beliefs acquire a Chinese context and become in some ways other to themselves. In the case I examine, the agent of that reverse current was himself a Lutheran missionary to China, Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930), who eventually became a sinologist and prominent translator of the Chinese classics into German.Richard Wilhelm was born in Stuttgart in 1873, studied theology at the Tübinger Stift, and was then hired by a missions society called the Allgemeiner Evangelisch-Protestantischer Missionsverein (generally known as the Weimar Mission) as a pastor for the new German concession in Tsingtau in China. He began to publish translations from the Chinese in 1902. He was prolific and worked on both Confucian and Daoist texts.1 After the war, Germany lost its colonial possessions, including the concession in Tsingtau, which was conquered by the Japanese in 1914. Wilhelm eventually returned to Germany and became a sinologist. He died in 1930. His translations—particularly of difficult, esoteric texts such as the classic divination text Yijing 易經—remain widely read to the present day.Wilhelm’s attitude toward conversion, while grounded in his theological position, differed nonetheless from that of other missionaries who shared his Lutheran faith. Several aspects of Wilhelm’s views come through in his translations, including his interest in communal rather than individual experiences of conversion, his emphasis on the individual’s sincerity in changing his behavior, such that the inward experience of conversion corresponds with an outward reform, and the context of encounter within which conversion takes place. In the first part of this article, I discuss three examples of Wilhelm’s use of the word Bekehrung (conversion) in his translations, each of which instantiates one aspect of Wilhelm’s own view of conversion. On the surface of things, it might look as if Wilhelm has fallen into a known translator’s trap, that of finding what one hopes to see in the text without regard to what’s already there. But a closer look at these cases shows that by uncovering Bekehrung in the context of Chinese classical texts, Wilhelm’s translations undermine the exceptionalist valence of the word’s Christian use. Whereas the missionary enterprise generally propounded an exclusively Christian mode of conversion, Wilhelm’s approach accords with the Weimar Mission’s project to find Chinese Wahrheitselemente (elements of truth) in suggesting that Bekehrung can also be effected by influences other than the Christian gospel.2 His translation broadens the meaning of the term Bekehrung, portraying it not only as an individual, inward process—as other Lutheran missionaries would have it—but also as a communal experience grounded in human encounter.In the second part of this article, I reread scholarly suggestions that Wilhelm himself was eventually converted to a Chinese worldview, situating them in relation to his own conception of what such a Bekehrung might entail. While isolated passages in Wilhelm’s late writings do support this claim, I show that his writings as a whole are characterized more by an attempt to bring Chinese and Western systems of thought into conversation than by a confessional statement of conversion to a particular set of beliefs. I argue that these essays can productively be read in the context of the Chinese texts he translated, and I demonstrate their affinities with the rhetorical strategies used in those texts.Aside from being a translator, Richard Wilhelm is perhaps best known for being a missionary who refused to baptize a single convert. His purported rationale, to which he alludes in the 1926 China memoir Die Seele Chinas, has less to do with honoring the existing beliefs of Chinese people than with protecting the nascent church: In einem Land wie China wird es dem Europäer selten gelingen, die moralische Höhenlage eines Christen, den er taufen soll, vollkommen zu durchschauen. Dennoch übernimmt die Kirche die Verantwortung für ihre Mitglieder, und nichts schadet dem Christentum in China mehr als ein zweifelhafter Lebenswandel seiner Bekenner. . . . So habe ich denn niemand in China getauft . . . und ich habe nie Konflikte gehabt wegen eines Anhangs unerwünschter Konvertiten. (Seele 32)In a country such as China, the European will seldom be able to get a full read of the moral character of a Christian he is expected to baptize. The church remains, however, responsible for [the conduct of] its members, and nothing hurts Christianity in China more than the disreputable conduct of a professed Christian. . . . I hence baptized no one in China . . . and never found myself in any conflict as a result of undesirable converts attaching themselves [to the German mission].3Whereas a public declaration of faith in the form of baptism was encouraged by other missionaries, Wilhelm viewed the public nature of baptism as a liability. He valued the prestige and reputation of the church, which he viewed in ecumenical rather than denominational terms, as implied when he used it interchangeably with the designation “Christianity in China.” An early letter to his supervisor at the Missionsverein expresses Wilhelm’s reservations regarding what he saw as other missionaries’ over-eagerness in performing baptisms: “dass Missionserfolg und Taufstatistik in keiner Weise miteinander etwas zu tun haben, das beweist die Mission Berlin I, die eifrig tauft und unter ihren Christen notorisch berüchtigte Subjekte hat, die in keiner Weise ihr Wesen geändert haben” (BaDW Nachlass Wilhelm II/75; Richard Wilhelm to Dr. Th. Arndt, February 13, 1903; The fact that success in missions has nothing to do with baptism statistics is demonstrated by the Berliner Mission I, which performs baptisms zealously and counts several notorious figures among its Christians, who have not undergone any change of character whatsoever). Wilhelm does not use the word Bekehrung here, but the import of his complaint is clear: the baptismal rite could not be taken as a guarantee of inward change or conversion, and Wilhelm hence saw it as a detriment to the missionary cause.The word Bekehrung epitomized the Pietist approach to evangelism that characterized most German Protestant missions work; apart from the Weimar Mission, all major German missionary societies had roots in the Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft (German Christendom Society), which “sought to unify the German-speaking lands through a revival of Pietistic teachings” (Wu, Christ 28). Catholic missionaries doubted the reliability of first-generation converts: until the Boxer Uprising, the Societas Verbi Divini had a long-standing policy that first-generation converts could not be ordained, and the Taiping Rebellion was dramatic proof that orthodox Christian doctrine could easily be appropriated by an unorthodox thinker like the rebel leader Hong Xiuquan 洪秀全 (1814–64). By contrast, Pietists emphasized that a person could only become Christian through his or her personal choice, not by inheriting a religion from parents or even by growing up in a Christian society. As missionary society publications showed, Einzelbekehrung (the conversion of individuals) was the highly desirable mark of success in missionary work, a step on the way to converting China “one soul at a time” (Wu, Christ 33). Individual instances of conversion were reported to the societies’ financial supporters at home: for instance, the journal for the German branch of the China Inland Mission reported in 1902 that “Die Zahl der getauften Christen beläuft sich auf hunderte, und es sind sehr viele Bekehrte, die noch nicht getauft sind” (Taylor 84; Hundreds have been baptized, and many more converts have not yet been baptized). Converts were celebrated and counted even as the authenticity of their conversions was heavily scrutinized. Wilhelm’s position on the baptism of converts thus asserted his dissent from his peers’ understanding of the missionary enterprise and its central goal.It is clear from Wilhelm’s letters and memoir that he did not reject the possibility of genuine conversion—in fact, the letter quoted above refers to it as a change in one’s character or being, Wesen. Rather, his writings suggest that a definition of Bekehrung focusing on its inward, private qualities poses problems for an institution-building endeavor such as starting a church. The difficulty he identifies is that conversion to the Christian religion and the moral reformation it entails can neither be effected nor be definitively proved by a ceremony such as baptism, which nonetheless makes the convert a member of the Christian church in the eyes of society. The German word bekehren, a calque for the Latin convertere, denotes an inward and not outward movement of turning away or returning to a different mode of being. Such an inward change of heart is implied in the Luther translation’s use of the word Bekehrung, in Psalms 51:15; Isaiah 10:21; Acts 9:35, 11:21, 15:19 (Die Bibel); and elsewhere, for the Greek and Hebrew words that mean, roughly, to return or to turn toward. These include the Greek epistrepho, for which convertere is itself a calque, which carries the sense of repentance. In Wilhelm’s translations, inward change is confirmed by an outward change in behavior—precisely the tangible proof that Wilhelm, the missionary, complained was difficult to come by. His translations play up the aspects of Bekehrung that were significant for him, such as the possibility of communal Bekehrung. Wilhelm conceives of Bekehrung as taking place within the context of an encounter, a mode of thinking that echoes that of his intellectual hero Kierkegaard.In one anecdote about ritually appropriate forms of mourning, Wilhelm uses the word Bekehrung to emphasize the protagonist’s agency and sincerity in changing his behavior, an inward shift that corresponds with his outward reform. The anecdote is found in chapter 41 of the Kongzi Jiayu 孔子家語, a purported collection of Confucius’s sayings supplementary to the Analects that Wilhelm translates as the Schulgespräche (School Sayings, 1961).4 It tells the story of a virtuous Ji Zha reproving Sun Wenzi for allowing music to be played after his father’s death, before the funeral had taken place: 延陵季子適晉,過戚,聞之,曰:「異哉!夫子之在此,猶燕子巢于幕也,懼猶未也,又何樂焉?君又在殯,可乎?」文子於是終身不聽琴瑟。孔子聞之,曰:「季子能以義正人,文子能克己服義,可謂善改矣」(Kongzi Jiayu 41.4).Ji Zha of Yanling . . . heard the music and said: “This is strange indeed. Here you are in the position of a swallow that has built its nest on a screen. Your fears have not come to an end, so why this music? To say nothing of the fact that your father lies unburied—is that permitted?” As a result, Wenzi listened to no string instruments for the rest of his life. When Confucius heard of this, he said: “Ji Zha was able to use what is right to correct someone, and Wenzi could restrain himself and submit to what is right. He was good at changing.”5Wilhelm translates the last two lines of the passage as follows: Als Freiherr Sun Wen diese Worte hörte, da mochte er sein Leben lang kein Saitenspiel mehr hören. Meister Kung hörte davon und sprach: “Gi Dscha verstand es, die Leute durch Hinweis auf ihre Pflicht zurechtzubringen. Der Freiherr Wen brachte es über sich, sich zu verleugnen und der Pflicht zu unterwerfen. Das ist eine gute Bekehrung (Schulgespräche 162; emphasis added).Wenzi’s encounter with Ji Zha directs him to both his civic duty, as a person from Wei in the precarious position of seeking protection from Jin, and his filial duty to his unburied father, both of which should keep him from frivolous pleasures such as listening to music. Wenzi’s change of heart is emphasized in the text by the phrase keji 克己, to restrain oneself. The word gai 改, which Wilhelm translates as Bekehrung, simply suggests a change or correction. It can indicate a mere change in behavior; in other contexts, Wilhelm often translates it as a variant of sich verbessern.6 But since the allusion to self-restraint suggests an inward change, Wilhelm uses the word Bekehrung, denoting a mode of ethical reform that consists not in correcting an isolated mistake but in an overall reform comparable to a Christian notion of religious conversion, befitting the lifelong change in Sun Wenzi’s conduct. Many didactic anecdotes in the Chinese classics conclude with a description of the protagonist’s reformed ways: by introducing the word Bekehrung, Wilhelm underlines the analogy between traditional mores and the Christian ethos.7Translated by Wilhelm as Tao Te King: Das Buch des Alten vom Sinn und Leben (1911), the Daodejing 道德經 is traditionally attributed to the fifth-century BC philosopher known as Laozi 老子. In the following passage from Daodejing 58, Wilhelm identifies a key doctrine regarding the relationship between virtue and government with a form of collective Bekehrung. Translating the Chinese shunhua 順化, he titles the passage “Schmiegsame Bekehrung,” or “Accommodating [Ways of Producing] Conversion”: 其政悶悶,其民淳淳;其政察察,其民缺缺。 . . .是以聖人方而不割,廉而不劌,直而不肆,光而不燿. (Daodejing 58)Wilhelm translates the passage as follows: Ist man beim Herrschen zurückhaltend und zögernd,so ist das Volk ehrlich und einfach.Will man beim Herrschen alles untersuchen und aufspüren,so zeigt das Volk nur Mängel und Fehler. . . .Also auch der Berufene:Er ist Vorbild, ohne zu beschneiden,er ist gewissenhaft, ohne zu verletzen,er ist echt, ohne Willkürlichkeiten,er ist licht, ohne zu blenden. (Tao Te King 63)In English, his translation reads: If he who governs holds back and hesitates,that makes for an honest, simple people.But if he who governs wishes to investigate and root things out,that makes for a people that is lacking and errant.Such is the one called:He himself is a model, without lacerating,he is conscientious without hurting,he is genuine without being erratic,he is light without blinding.This passage embodies the Daoist and later Confucian notion that the ruler’s conduct influences his subjects’ virtue; the general principle holds constant in both traditions even though what Confucians would consider excellent government is precisely what Daoists would blame for producing perverse effects. Daoism works by contraries: holding back, hesitating, and practicing nonaction in rule produces good results by inducing the people to be honest and artless. In fact, the passage itself rhetorically enacts a form of turning or Kehre in the contrast between nonaction and the positive result that Wilhelm designates Bekehrung. Like fellow missionary-translator James Legge’s (1815–1897) version of shunhua, “Transformation According to Circumstances,” Wilhelm’s heading draws attention to the Daodejing’s emphasis on being flexible and responsive—though in comparison to “transformation,” a more straightforward equivalent for hua, Bekehrung foregrounds the psychological effect of the ruler’s conduct (Legge 150).In fact, Wilhelm’s title, “Schmiegsame Bekehrung,” expresses the hope that an entire population or Volk can undergo Bekehrung. This accords with his own position on the preferability of collective conversion, another point on which he differed with the more Pietist-aligned Protestant missionary societies. In a 1901 letter, he writes: “Es handelt sich für uns um das Volk, nicht um einzelne abgesonderte Kreise, die sich eventuell herbeilassen, fremden Brauch und fremder Lehre sich anzubequemen. . . . Es ist ein grosses Bewegen im Volk” (BaDW Nachlass Wilhelm II/75; Wilhelm to Dr. Th. Arndt, November 15, 1901; We’re concerned with the people and not with isolated groups that deign to adjust to foreign ways and doctrines. . . . There is a great movement among the people). Wilhelm’s opposition to starting another church in Tsingtau for locals appears to have stemmed in part from his desire to see conversion on a communal rather than an individual level. His letter suggests that he felt communal conversion was more likely to bring lasting and genuine change within society, and that it would allow Christianity to attract a broader range of more socially prominent converts rather than appealing only to “isolated groups.” Wilhelm’s use of the word Bekehrung here uncovers a parallel ideal of communal change in the ancient text. In both of these translations, Wilhelm relativizes the cultural reference of the term Bekehrung, showing that Chinese texts can lead to Bekehrung too.Central to Wilhelm’s view of conversion was the dimension of encounter. In his memoir, Die Seele Chinas, he offers a biting critique of missionary activity in China, describing mismanagement, abuses of power, and countless instances of missionaries failing to truly encounter or connect with Chinese people. Wilhelm’s heroes are those whom he considers to have achieved a solid understanding of Chinese culture, as well as an ability to offer practical help to locals and win friends among them, such as Ernst Faber (1839–99), his predecessor, as well as the German missionary Rudolf Lechler (1824–1908) and the Welsh missionary Timothy Richard (1845–1919).8 Since a theological emphasis on the relational aspect of Christian conversion has many precedents, I focus here on Søren Kierkegaard, one of the few writers Wilhelm reports being able to “positiver . . . auffas[sen]” (BaDW Nachlass Wilhelm II/75; “Lebenslauf”; grasp in a more positive way). I also consider Martin Buber’s account of the I-Thou encounter, perhaps the most prominent post-Kierkegaardian reading of divine encounter contemporary to Wilhelm, which was influenced by Buber’s strong interest in Daoism, and which parallels Wilhelm’s privileging of encounter in its emphasis that “all actual life is encounter” (Buber, I and Thou 62). It goes without saying that Buber was one of the most prominent religious thinkers of the time; despite his interest in the Zhuangzi, his and Wilhelm’s paths would not cross until after Wilhelm’s return from China, when Buber was making frequent visits to the University of Frankfurt from his home in Heppenheim and Wilhelm moved there to take up a professorship in Sinology (Eber 448).Kierkegaard defines conversion as the ultimate use of freedom, as in the following excerpt from his journal: “Freedom really is freedom only when in the same moment, the same second, it is (freedom of choice), it rushes with infinite speed to bind itself unconditionally by the choice of attachment, the choice whose truth is that there is no question of choice” (qtd. in Davis 148). Here, conversion consists in the genuine exercise of freedom that “rushes . . . to bind itself unconditionally” to a chosen and yet paradoxically inevitable outcome. In the Philosophical Crumbs (1844), Kierkegaard as the pseudonymous Johannes Climacus contrasts conversion, which requires a certain receptivity and orientation away from oneself, with Socratic learning, in which the learner rediscovers the ideas he knew before birth through recollection. In his account of conversion, the learner has to turn outward and accept the “condition” from the teacher, whereas in (Climacus’s summary of) the Socratic account, the learner must turn inward: the teacher’s role is to remind the learner that he is in error. For Climacus, conversion can only be enabled by, and is impossible apart from, an encounter with the god: “To the extent that [the disciple] was in error, he was constantly moving away from the truth; but in having received the condition in the moment . . . he was turned around. Let us call this change conversion [omvendelse in Danish]” (Kierkegaard, Crumbs 227). It is hence figured as something that befalls the disciple, not a willed choice that can be made at any time. This makes it a “decisively significant” specific moment, a definition Climacus illustrates with the story of a mercenary recruited by armies on both sides of a conflict: his decision as to which side to join is “decisively significant,” since if he were to join the losing side and be captured, he would no longer be able to offer his services to his captors on the same terms that they were originally proposing, but would inevitably be turned down (224n). After the moment has passed, his decision cannot be reversed, an emphasis on the temporal dimension that echoes the “infinite speed” of conversion as described in Kierkegaard’s journal. Conversion, like the mercenary’s choice, is a “decisively significant” moment depending on a singular encounter.This emphasis on conversion as encounter is taken up in Martin Buber’s account of the I-Thou encounter. Buber does not frame the divine encounter of I and Thou in Christian terms, but an early letter to Franz Werfel explores a possible Christian iteration of his thought: Our teaching is: It is not a question of whether He has elected me, but that I have elected Him. Whereas the teaching that calls itself Christian hinders men, by referring them to divine grace, from making that decision which Jesus proclaimed, that metanoeite. . . . Therefore I mean to and will fight for Jesus and against Christianity (Buber, Letters 214).Buber’s declared struggle against Christendom echoes the stance of Kierkegaard’s Attack upon Christendom, the 1855 diatribe against the established Danish church in which he charged the church with so distorting Christianity that it was no longer recognizable; it in turn resonates with Wilhelm’s misgivings regarding the established church. Written in 1917, not long before he began what would become Ich und Du (I and Thou, published 1923), the letter frames the experience of “inward changing” (metanoia) analogous to Christian conversion as an encounter in which God already awaits and “expects everything of” the individual, but in which it is nonetheless necessary for the individual to make a positive decision.Just as Climacus posits that the learner must turn outward in the “decisively significant moment,” Buber emphasizes the importance of being receptive to the Thou, being willing to be shaped, changed, and educated by it: “Relation is reciprocity. My You acts on me as I act on it. Our students teach us, our works form us” (I and Thou 67). Readiness to meet the divine is an existential openness that requires one’s whole being. The inward shift of conversion is not a solipsistic experience, since it takes place in the context of encounter with the divine.In light of Wilhelm’s interest in Kierkegaard, it is worth noting Wilhelm’s stress on the context of the encounter that leads to Bekehrung in his account of Sun Wenzi’s conversion. As mentioned above, Wilhelm identifies Sun Wenzi’s change of heart as a Bekehrung. He also translates two words that serve primarily as a conjunction, yushi 於是 (for which I give the rough equivalent “as a result”), as “Als Freiherr Sun Wen diese Worte hörte” (When Sun Wenzi heard these words), thereby dramatizing the encounter between Sun Wenzi and Ji Zha by figuring Sun Wenzi as an agent of aural reception in a way that the original text leaves implicit. Wilhelm’s translation heightens the Kierkegaardian “moment” of the translation. It also recalls the famous moment of conversion in the Confessions, in which Augustine hears a child’s voice chanting “take up and read,” thus echoing one of Lutheranism’s most important patristic sources in its incorporation of an emphasis on the “hearing of the word” and the consequent change in one’s life.The final instance of Bekehrung I consider here is a Bekehrung-producing encounter from Wilhelm’s translation of the Zhuangzi (Dschuang Dsi: Das wahre Buch vom südlichen Blütenland, 1912), in which Wilhelm includes editorial headings that reveal what he thought to be the central message of a given passage or considered noteworthy about it.9 By introducing the first passage of the chapter “In the World of Men” under the editorial heading “Bekehrungsversuche” (attempts at conversion), Wilhelm points out that the passage juxtaposes two attempts at persuasion: Yan Hui is seeking office in Wei in order to make what might be called a Bekehrungsversuch, an attempt to reform the autocratic ruler of Wei, but the Zhuangzi’s Confucius instead induces a form of Bekehrung in Yan Hui himself by dissuading him from pursuing political office (Dschuang Dsi 25–26).10In asserting that the state of Wei will be saved if its ruler is converted, Yan Hui draws on the Confucian doctrine that good governance can be instituted only by a virtuous ruler, and that the ruler’s moral conversion is essential to peaceful rule. Mencius explains the concept as follows: “君仁,莫不仁;君義,莫不義;君正,莫不正。一正君而國定矣” (Mencius 4A20; “When the prince is benevolent, everyone else is benevolent; when the prince is dutiful, everyone else is dutiful; when the prince is correct, everyone else is correct. Simply by rectifying the prince one can put the state on a firm basis,” Lau 85–86). But Confucius counters this Bekehrungversuch with his own attempt to convert Yan Hui to a way of living that doesn’t involve offering unsolicited advice to wicked rulers. He argues that Yan Hui’s attempt to convert the ruler of Wei is doomed because a subordinate will always end up capitulating to the pressures of his environment. Having cast doubt on Yan Hui’s proposed mission, Confucius attempts to convert Yan Hui to a way of life centered on xinzhai 心齋, the “fasting of the mind.” “无聽之以耳而聽之以心,” he tells Yan Hui (Zhuangzi 4; “Come to hear with the mind rather than with the ears,” Ziporyn 26). Confucius exhorts Yan Hui not to abandon one school of thought for another, but to put aside one way of life and its aims in favor of another way of life, an intervention that Romain Graziani identifies as a therapeutic one.11Unexpectedly, in their final exchange, Confucius counters his own earlier objection to being externally adaptable by redefining it as a form of responsiveness rather than vulnerability. “若能入遊其樊而無感其名,入則鳴,不入則止。一宅而寓於不得已,則幾矣,” Confucius advises (Zhuangzi 4; “You may go and play in [the ruler’s] bird cage, but never be moved by fame. If he listens, then sing; if not, keep still. . . . Make oneness your house and live with what cannot be avoided. Then you will be close to success,” Ziporyn 26). So while the dialogue began with Confucius insisting on the impossibility of living “in the human world” without being endangered by it, it ends with Confucius reassuring Yan Hui that there is a way to survive in political office without endangering oneself in the fight for supremacy. In that sense, Confucius’s advice, while framed by Wilhelm as a conversion attempt, is much more flexible in its goals and undogmatic in its prescriptions than, say, the Pietist missionary’s aim to convert. His open-ended Bekehrungsversuch offers more than one possible course of action: taking up political office but keeping one’s own counsel, or disengaging from it to pursue the fasting of the mind. It hence expands the Zhuangzi’s conception of the Way by pointing to the possibility of a Zhuangzi-ist way of being Confucian; by designating it as a conversion attempt, Wilhelm similarly expands the notion of what a Bekehrung might look like.In Wilhelm’s translation and his use of the word Bekehrungsversuch, the Zhuangzi’s suspicion of persuasion also takes on a political dimension with contemporary ramifications. By associating the Zhuangzi’s doubts regarding the possibility of successful persuasion with the project of Bekehrung, Wilhelm implies that Confucius’s misgivings regarding the efficacy of persuasion might be directed at more Yan Hui-like versions of the missionary attempt to convert Chinese people. While he distanced himself from the missionaries’ eagerness to make conversions or Bekehrungseifer, Wilhelm would have had ample opportunity to observe failed Bekehrungsversuche on the part of his peers. Missionaries in China were confronted with an audience that remained committed to its traditions despite the rapidly changing political landscape. As Albert Wu points out, missionaries themselves often felt that the missionary enterprise had failed, and a missionary such as Ernst Faber, Wilhelm’s Weimar Mission predecessor, complained that “maybe only one person in a thousand” would convert to Christianity (“Ernst Faber” 12).Wilhelm himself preferred to establish channels of dialogue with Confucian literati instead of working among the rural poor to secure individual converts. The Weimar Mission’s methods echoed the accommodationist strategies practiced centuries beforehand by the Jesuits: Matteo Ricci and others who entered China in the late sixteenth century tacitly accepted traditional rituals in their attempts to forge links with the urban elite. Neither the Jesuits nor the Weimar missionaries held back from making converts when the opportunity arose, and Wilhelm might have discerned an echo of their strategy in Confucius’s advice to Yan Hui: “If he listens, then sing; if not, keep still” (Ziporyn 26).Perhaps Wilhelm even saw in Yan Hui a shadow of his own Chinese interlocutors, many of whom were reformers who had attempted to incorporate foreign know-how and techniques into Qing imperial policies, but who ultimately failed in making dynastic rule sustainable. Wilhelm’s close collaborator, Lao Nai-hsuan 勞乃宣 (1843–1921), was a neo-Confucian reformer involved in the efforts to establish a constitutional monarchy; Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 (1868–1940), to whom he dedicated his China memoir, was an early member of the revolutio