Shanghai Faithful

by Jennifer Lin

  Opium had been officially banned in China in 1729. But the United Kingdom saw profit in the addictive drug derived from poppies that grew in Indian provinces controlled, conveniently, by the United Kingdom. For a century, usage spread as the British East India Company built a thriving business. This helped balance a trade deficit. Middle-class Britons craved all things Chinese: fine silk for their wardrobes, porcelain dishes for their dinner tables, and tea for their teacups. The Chinese had little interest in British cotton or pottery. But opium—now there was a product in demand, with an ever-growing customer base (fed, too, by American traders).

  By 1839, Emperor Daoguang had had enough. He dispatched a scholar-statesman from Fuzhou, Lin Zexu, to the port of Canton to suppress the opium trade. British traders flouted the ban, and when Commissioner Lin discovered twenty-two ships carrying one thousand cases of opium each, he had his men seize the cargo and destroy it by digging trenches and using water, salt, and lime to dissolve the raw opium. Britain struck back, setting off a series of military clashes along the coast in the name of capitalism, open markets, and free trade. After three years of fighting, the humiliated emperor signed the Treaty of Nanjing, the first of several unequal treaties with other nations, and agreed to open four more ports to unfettered trade and foreign residents. Along with Canton, the emperor had to allow foreign ships to dock in Shanghai, Xiamen, Ningbo, and Fuzhou while ceding control of the island of Hong Kong to Britain.

  Missionaries seized the moment. They looked upon these cities with great expectation requiring great effort. The evangelical movements in the British Isles and the United States were reaching outward, insinuating themselves into distant countries to plant their message. In Fuzhou, Protestant missionaries began preaching in the streets, handing out pamphlets in Chinese with Bible stories and Christian teachings, and opening small “chapels” in storefronts.

  But Fuzhou, a center of learning, was hard ground. Every year, tens of thousands of scholars came to the city to sit for grueling imperial examinations that tested their knowledge in the Confucian classics. A successful scholar might join the emperor’s government as a bureaucrat while gaining great status in society. To this class of scholar-bureaucrats, foreign missionaries were the ones who needed enlightenment. The barbarians had much to learn from the Middle Kingdom, not the other way around.

  Above it all loomed opium. In the eyes of many Chinese, there was no distinction between missionary and merchant; both were foreigners, and foreigners brought opium. How many addicts did they supply? No one kept precise figures, but since a pipe could hold one mace—a Chinese measurement equal to about four grams—the number was thought to be in the tens of millions. At the peak of the drug trade in 1879, foreign captains delivered more than thirteen million pounds of opium. An Anglican missionary, John R. Wolfe (who would become known as the “Moses of Fujian”), lamented that he often faced the scornful remark: “You destroy us with your opium, and now you insult us with your offer of peace and salvation.”

  Inside the ancient walls of Fuzhou, the Christian message failed to take root. “I preach and preach and preach, but no one seems to regard my words,” wrote one exasperated Anglican missionary to his London home office. After a decade in Fuzhou, the CMS missionaries had converted not one person to Christianity. The bishop in Hong Kong, who oversaw the Fuzhou mission, wanted to abandon the effort. But finally, in 1861, he had reason to celebrate: he traveled to Fuzhou to baptize the first convert.

  When Wolfe arrived in Fuzhou the following year, he proposed a new tack. Fuzhou, he declared, was an “obdurate city,” and it made little sense to waste time on the educated elite and worldly city dwellers. He wanted to look beyond the walled city and focus his energy on the multitude in the countryside. Wolfe knew what it was like to be poor. The son of tenant farmers from hardscrabble County Cork in Ireland, he felt he understood farmers and fishermen struggling from one day to the next. Obdurate himself, he set off for the far corners of the province, traveling for months on end into the mountainous interior or following the tortuous coastline.

  In 1866, Wolfe headed north to the city of Ningde, a four-day walk from Fuzhou. Traveling on foot or carried by porters in a sedan chair, Wolfe was awestruck the first time he crossed Snow Mountain into Ningde. The sea seemed to run right up to the walls of the city, Wolfe wrote, bringing trading boats to its very gates. “The city in the valley, the mountains rising high on every side, the sea stretching off in the distance, and the boats spreading their sails before the breeze . . . it was grand beyond description.”

  In Ningde, he set up a CMS station and recruited a pair of Chinese helpers to assist him. They soon headed out to neighboring fishing villages, including the hamlet of Erdu on Sansha Bay.

  The sight of a foreigner coming over the mountains by sedan chair was enough to bring life to a halt in a place like Erdu.

  Wolfe was tall and pale with a bushy, dark beard. He wore leather boots, slim-fitting pants, and a wool coat. Farmers with shaven foreheads, long queues, and hairless faces dropped their rakes in the field to get a closer look at the stranger. Wives put down their water buckets. Startled children took off, squealing. Word spread of the “foreign ghost”—yang guizi—with his craggy, white skin. They wanted to touch his sharp nose, peer into his pale eyes, feel the metal buttons on his coat, hear the ticking of his watch.

  Wolfe didn’t mind; he knew he could cast a spell over villagers. In a letter home, he described how he would “quietly submit to the unpleasant results of their excited curiosity” and “the torture of being the most popular creature in these regions.”

  Wolfe talked to them about his “Lord on high,” his shangdi. He told villagers to put away their idols and kitchen gods. His God could help them and save them from their sins. But what was sin, villagers were left to wonder. Confucius, whose moral teachings guided the country, never spoke of sin-stained souls. The great sage described neither heaven, nor hell, nor any path toward immortality.

  The missionary laid out the essentials: Know right from wrong, follow these ten commandments, honor our God, and you will find eternal bliss. He told stories that came from his holy book and spent days patiently explaining the meaning to villagers. His Chinese assistant, in contrast, tailored the Christian lessons for the villagers. Once, speaking to a group about giving up their worship of idols, the catechist asked, “You say there is a spirit inside the idol. Well, are there not very often rats living inside the idol?”

  “Yes, yes,” the people responded. “Of course.”

  “Now, if I die, the spirit leaves my body and living things soon swarm inside. That is proof there is no spirit in me?”

  Everyone nodded.

  “Well, then, the rats in the idol show there is no spirit within it either!”

  His point was that wooden idols were just that: wood. Some villagers looked at Wolfe and his helpers with suspicion and anger; their ideas were blasphemy. Renounce idols? Refuse to bow before ancestors? A man could lose his right to ancestral land for that.

  Many turned away from the strangers. But others stayed to hear more.

  One of the men to come back again and again whenever a Christian preacher came to town was a fisherman named Lin Yongbiao.

  Old Lin

  By this time, Lin Yongbiao was an old man. His first wife died and he married another, but still he had no son. It weighed heavily on him. Without a son, a man had only a past and no future.

  Old Lin was not educated. He knew little of Confucius. He fished in the morning and farmed in the afternoon. The landscape that Wolfe found so breathtaking also made it brutally hard for peasants like Old Lin to survive. Mud flats in Sansha Bay yielded rich harvests of oysters, shrimp, and eels, but the mountains were stingy and left little room for farmers and their crops. Hunger was constant, death always near.

  The message brought by missionaries that their God had something better in store for everyone would have so
othed someone like Old Lin. It was not something he heard from the Buddhist monks or Daoist priests. He was intrigued by the story of this Christ, who could free him from the drudgery of his earthly life. But he could not let go of everything. Straddling two worlds—one traditional, one Christian—he clung to some old ways. How could he not pay homage to his ancestors?

  In the year that Old Lin turned fifty, his second wife delivered the son he had been waiting for. In the Lin Ancestral Hall, a two-story courtyard building guarded by a pair of stone lions in the center of Erdu, the time and date of the birth of the boy were later logged in a genealogical record of the clan’s family tree, a jiapu, which was stored in a big wooden box and opened only once a year. According to the lunar calendar, the child was born just after 5:00 a.m. on the twenty-first day of the twelfth month in the ninth year of the Tongzhi reign—or, in the Western calendar, on February 10, 1871.

  Records for the author’s branch of the Lin family are stored in this ancestral hall in the bayside village of Erdu in Fujian Province. A genealogical book called a jiapu holds information on the first convert in the family, Lin Yongbiao, and his son and grandsons. Courtesy of Jennifer Lin.

  Old Lin finally had an heir who would walk the same stone paths, plant the same fields, and fish the same waters as all who had come before him for more than three centuries. His life was complete. But only months after his son was born, Old Lin watched his world go mad.

  Up and down the coast of South China, villages and towns were seized with a fast-moving rumor that foreigners were out to poison everyone. Posters went up by the thousands, accusing God-talking missionaries of peddling “magical powder” that would kill unsuspecting victims. Placards warned of these “barbarians” with their “hideous faces” masterminding the plot. One read: Whenever any of these persons, whether male or female, enters any village, reject their poisonous medicine. They should be treated like vagabonds. Don’t by any means spare them!

  It was all a hoax, probably concocted by critics among the educated elite in the city trying to undermine the work of the missionaries. But it worked, and the panic was real. Throughout Fujian, mobs destroyed chapels and attacked the homes of Christian converts. A terrified Anglican missionary in Fuzhou wrote a frantic letter to his colleagues in London warning that the entire region was “on the brink of a volcano which was ready to open and send forth death and destruction all around us.”

  In his village, Old Lin could feel the eyes of his neighbors on him. Everyone knew he was one of them. He was a Christian.

  Old Lin had waited a lifetime for the arrival of this son. Now, with the frenzy brought on by the poison scare, he worried about the safety of his family. He had heard that the missionaries in Fuzhou needed helpers. Maybe he could find work with them? It might be better to leave.

  One morning, Old Lin and his wife loaded a basket with provisions. In another, he placed their baby boy. He attached the baskets on the ends of a bamboo pole and swung it over his back. Together, the couple took off over the mountains and away from home.

  Road to Fuzhou

  Wealthy men could pay porters to carry them in palanquins for the slow trip to the city so that their black felt slippers need never touch the ground. Old Lin and his wife would walk in sandals made of straw. The road to Fuzhou started as a path wide enough only to put one foot in front of the other. Ahead, rugged mountains ran into the diamond waters of the bay, resurfacing on the horizon as small islands. He labored up steep steps, keeping his eyes focused straight ahead. A false step could send him plunging into a ravine with his precious cargo.

  The footpath turned into a mosaic of stones, smooth and gleaming from generations of wear. Old Lin and his wife passed through dark bamboo groves and over hills with ruffles of wild red azaleas and pink roses. On the fourth day, the land opened into a valley with rice paddies spread before them like bolts of green velvet.

  They were approaching Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian Province, which was the size of England. On the busy Min River, British captains picked up cargo of bales of black tea grown in the hills—and unloaded shipments of opium from India. A long, low bridge linked the old city with a newer settlement for foreigners on Nantai Island.

  In the final miles to Fuzhou, travelers jammed a road that now was as wide as a pair of fat oxen. Old Lin turned his bamboo pole sideways to maneuver past coolies with sedan chairs. Men cleared the way by calling out the cargo of porters blocking their path.

  “Slop buckets, out of the way!”

  “Turnips, to one side!”

  “Opium chests, give us the road!”

  Shops with names like Perpetual Longevity or Myriad Profits lined both sides of the road. Proprietors burned incense to the gods of their trades outside oval doors shaped that way to keep out evil spirits. In the span of a few feet, Old Lin (if he’d had the money) could have bought a bolt of red silk from a dry-goods store or mackerel and cuttlefish for dinner from the smelly fishmonger’s stall next door. Aching tooth? A sidewalk dentist wearing a necklace of molars knew just what to do: cover the spot with a corroding powder until the gum became soft, and yank out the offending tooth.

  For Old Lin, who had spent his life in a fishing village, the city would be an adjustment. But for missionaries who were fresh off the boat from San Francisco or London, walking through the tight, smelly, crowded streets was a shock to the senses. More than one missionary—exhausted from the ocean crossing, overwhelmed by the crush of people, sweating from the heat, ignorant of the language, repulsed by leper beggars—privately wondered, What am I doing here?

  Many a foreign lady, teetering in rigid leather shoes, twisted her ankle in the ruts and holes of the stone paving. Housewives threw kitchen waste on the street. Sewage stagnated in puddles. The streetscape had no comparison to anything back home. A missionary from New Jersey was aghast at the Chinese-style justice he saw on display in the city. He wrote home about a scene at a teahouse. Refined men on stools sipped from porcelain cups and nibbled rice cakes, while just at their elbows, a criminal stood in a tight iron cage with only his head free and his feet barely brushing the ground. The man had been charged with kidnapping. His sentence: starvation in full view of the languor and luxury of the teahouse.

  Old Lin entered the walled city of Fuzhou from the South Gate. To the left was Black Stone Hill, the highest spot in the walled city. He followed the zigzag of alleys and crossed Bird’s Tongue Bridge. At a walled temple, he pounded on a wooden gate.

  The volcano did not blow, as the frightened missionary had warned in his letter home in 1871. Officials in Fuzhou refuted the poison claims and threatened to punish anyone who continued to spread false rumors. But for the nascent Christian community, the poison scare became part of a larger pattern of building up and tearing down. The antagonism between missionaries and some among the educated gentry, part of the legacy of opium, only grew more virulent.

  When Old Lin arrived in Fuzhou, he went to work for the Anglican missionaries as a cook. Most of them lived in a compound on Black Stone Hill, the most prominent spot inside the walls of the city and a sacred place, with many Daoist temples. There wasn’t just one hall, but many temples where different groups would gather with priests to perform ceremonies and rites set forth by Laozi, the sixth-century BCE philosopher and poet. When the first British diplomats arrived in Fuzhou, they were able to secure rooms in one of the temples. Anglican missionaries who came later followed their countrymen to Black Stone Hill and leased a small temple from a Daoist priest. They began making changes to fit their needs. They built a tall wall around the compound to keep out beggars. After a fire, they replaced a traditional Chinese wooden dwelling with a taller colonial-style stucco home. They built another Western dwelling when a new family arrived. They also opened a small school for girls on the temple grounds, further irritating the educated elite. These literati, who had social clubs nearby, saw no value in the education of girls.


  The kitchen staff, including Old Lin, tended a garden inside the compound. House servants planted vegetables and flowers—from seeds arriving by mail to missionary wives from sisters and mothers back home. They cared for a buffalo kept in a shed. Foreigners needed milk for their tea and butter for their bread, two culinary oddities that perplexed the house staff. Old Lin learned how to prepare bland Western meals like boiled celery and potatoes.

  Black Stone Hill, with its elegant temples, rose high above the tiled roofs of the cramped city. Locals believed it had ideal feng shui, the ancient belief that the harmony flowing from nature required the proper placement of buildings. From its highest reaches, a resident like Old Lin could peer over the jumble below like a sailor scanning the sea from the mast of a ship.

  In the temples on Black Stone Hill, scholars and students gathered in courtyards for discussion and contemplation. During a special festival each autumn, thousands climbed with torches to the Altar of Heaven and Earth to burn incense in an iron cauldron at the top of the hill. From evening until daybreak, a long line of worshippers snaked up and down the hillside steps. Writing to London in 1878, a recently arrived CMS missionary, the Reverend Robert W. Stewart, described the procession: “We watched it from our windows last year and it seemed as if the whole city had turned out.”

  It was on this hallowed mountain that British missionaries decided in 1878 to build a school to train Chinese helpers. Wolfe needed more assistants to work in the field. At the time, the mission employed eighty catechists, plus five native clerics, to tend to more than two thousand followers scattered throughout the province. On an unused slip of land on the grounds of the Daoist temple where they lived, the clerics began erecting a three-story center from which they would advance their Christian agenda.