by Jennifer Lin
* * *
Through the spring of 1878, Chinese workers filed in and out of the temple grounds, hoisting timbers on their shoulders for the frame of a three-story building rising against a rock face. Using wheelbarrows, they lugged gray tiles for the roof. Carpenters blocked out forty-eight little rooms, seven and one-half feet square with shuttered windows. It was a top-heavy structure, the third floor wider than the second, which was wider than the first. The locals didn’t know what to make of it, but it was clear the feng shui left much to be desired.
Stewart was in charge of the project. The grandson of an earl, he and his wife came from wealthy Irish families who financially supported their endeavors in China. His pedigree was many notches above the modest background of his colleague Wolfe, the farmer’s son whose education was limited to a training college for missionaries. The twenty-eight-year-old Stewart, on the other hand, had studied law at the prestigious Trinity College in Dublin before joining the ministry. He arrived in Fuzhou in 1876 with a strong sense of purpose and the money to back it up.
As the school took shape, the Chinese scholars who had social clubs in the neighborhood didn’t like what they saw. They viewed the construction as another affront by the foreigners, who had no business living on the sacred mountain in the first place. The scholars argued that the Chinese priest who had rented them rooms in 1850 lacked the authority to do so.
To offend the educated elite was to court trouble. The elite had extraordinary influence in Chinese society. Some held government jobs, and some merely served as links between officials and ordinary people. They were the intellectual stewards of the Middle Kingdom, their power drawn from their knowledge of Confucian thought. And they were not about to have these hairy foreigners, yammering away about their God in an ugly, guttural language, ruin the feng shui of their temples.
In June, a Chinese official who dealt with foreign affairs relayed to the British consul the mounting complaints of the scholars. Charles Sinclair politely broached the subject with Stewart. Yes, the diplomat conceded, the college building was within the walls of the temple grounds. Yes, Stewart had sought and received permission from the consul to begin construction. And yes, the work was nearly complete. Even so, the intellectuals had raised questions about several of the new buildings and whether the missionaries had encroached on land they didn’t control. The head of the mission, Deacon Wolfe, was away at the time. The consul asked Stewart whether he could hold off on further construction until Wolfe returned and the matter could be sorted out with Chinese officials.
“I greatly regret I cannot comply,” Stewart responded, even at the risk of “incurring your displeasure.” The roof was finished, he noted, and all that remained was the detail work of fitting windows and doors.
Stewart had the callow self-confidence of a bright law student fresh from a lecture on treaty law. “The whole thing rises from two or three members of that most idle worthless class, the literati,” Stewart wrote to the CMS board. “And that they should try to throw us about like this with our Treaty—giving us equal rights with other nations—straight before their eyes seems to me, I must confess, most unfair.”
In an attempt to broker a compromise, Fuzhou officials offered the CMS mission a large piece of land in the Nantai foreign settlement on the other side of the Min River. They would throw in five thousand dollars in Mexican silver, too, to cover moving and construction costs. Consul Sinclair endorsed the settlement—not mentioning to the missionaries that the mandarins were also offering another piece of land for expatriate traders in order to build a track for racing their horses.
Stewart refused. He thought it would set a dangerous precedent to capitulate to the demands of the Chinese. “If I stopped work in this treaty port to please a few of the literati, who disliked foreigners and the spread of Christianity, all over the country the same thing would be tried,” the former law student reasoned. “It would be impossible to hold our ground.”
The Anglican missionaries offered a small concession: they would take the mandarins and neighborhood scholars on a tour of the compound so that they could see there were no violations. Chinese students had already moved into some of the forty-eight rooms of the college.
A date was set for August 30 at 11:00 a.m.
At the appointed hour, mandarins in formal silk robes arrived at the home of Stewart with an unexpected entourage of more than fifty men.
“Attendants,” mandarins insisted.
“Ruffians,” missionaries later charged.
In the drawing room, a missionary wife brought a tray with five cups of tea, sweetened with sugar, to serve the Chinese guests. Wolfe demanded that the officials throw out the hangers-on, including some of the literati who were temple directors. He accused one of them of being the ringleader and hiring thugs from the countryside to foment trouble.
“The greatest vagabond I have ever known!” Wolfe exclaimed.
The Chinese magistrates explained to the agitated Irishman that there was nothing they could do. Wolfe stormed out of the room, shut a hall door, and hurriedly called on house servants to lock an outer gate to stop others from coming into the compound. Impatient, he tried to push the crowd off the veranda himself, triggering a thunderbolt of raised voices. A messenger ran back into the parlor. In Chinese, he urged an interpreter for the officials to hurry. “Mr. Wolfe is pushing people about, attempting to clear them out of the house!”
Wolfe returned to the parlor, breathless and enraged. He claimed he had been punched in the chest and head and kicked in the stomach by “desperados.”
“If anything happens to the mission,” Wolfe shouted, “I will demand that an admiral send a dozen man-of-war ships into the port!”
As the missionaries tried to take the officials on the inspection tour of the school building, the situation spiraled out of control. Men began smashing rattan chairs on the Stewarts’ veranda. In the garden, they upended pots and pulled up shrubs. As the day passed, the mob grew. The British consul arrived, as well as several Chinese officials with forty unarmed troops.
At one point, local men and teens began picking up rocks. Someone lobbed the first stone. Others followed, launching a fusillade of debris at the structure. A man with a torch set the wooden structure ablaze.
Soldiers, sensing a license to loot, threw off their uniform jackets and joined the mayhem. All through the night, as Stewart and his students took cover inside his house, soldiers and marauders ransacked the compound. Old Lin and the house servants watched helplessly as the mob took plates and cooking utensils, hurled rocks through windows, and ripped off shutters. By dawn, the crowd had wrecked the cowshed and pulled up all the plants in the kitchen garden.
In twenty-four hours, the mission compound was ruined, the college nothing but a heap of smoldering embers.
Trial
The clash at Black Stone Hill was resolved in a most unexpected way. Not about to accept blame, four Chinese temple directors sought a Western-style solution to the dispute. They sued Wolfe in a British consulate court in Fuzhou, alleging that the mission had an illegal lease. To argue their case, the temple directors hired the best English lawyer in Hong Kong, a debonair barrister by the name of Thomas C. Hayllar. Arriving in Hong Kong from Bombay in 1867, Hayllar was a good friend of the colony’s governor, John Pope-Hennessy—and apparently also of his pretty young wife, Kitty. On the eve of the trial in Fuzhou, the governor had walked in on Hayllar and his wife in the bedroom of the governor’s summertime mountain retreat. Days later, on April 27, 1879, the men met by chance on the street, and the cuckolded governor lunged at the barrister with his umbrella, nipping his chin. Hayllar wrestled the umbrella from the governor. He later hung it over his mantel like a trophy.
Sporting a nasty cut, Hayllar arrived in the courtroom of the Fuzhou consulate on April 30 for Chow Chang Kung and others v. The Rev. John R. Wolfe. The trial dominated news from Hong Kong to Shanghai. The Iri
sh cleric did not come off well on the stand. In three days of questioning, Hayllar made Wolfe seem evasive, obfuscating, and untrustworthy. It was left to Hayllar, this cad who had a hard time abiding by the commandment “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife,” to encapsulate what the Black Stone Hill case was really all about.
The Hong Kong barrister noted that neither the government of the United Kingdom nor that of China had contemplated missionaries when five treaty ports were opened in 1844. Fuzhou, as Hayllar explained, was “a city of literates.”
“The Athens of China,” Chief Justice George French concurred from the bench.
On the rocks of Black Stone Hill, Hayllar went on, were inscriptions in many languages, including Sanskrit, dating back more than a thousand years. “The city is a place with a very strong literary element in it,” the barrister told the court, “and before 1850, so far as I can discover, the people knew nothing of that particular product of civilization, the Protestant missionary.”
Residents had shown admirable forbearance toward the expanding missionary presence, the barrister said. “The Chinese mind and the Chinese temper will bear a great deal before it is forced into active hostility against any foreigner, much less a missionary.” But between the new houses and relocated walls, the girls’ school and the training college, it was all too much. Hayllar disdainfully recounted his questioning of Stewart, who had ignored Chinese demands to stop building. His tone drenched with sarcasm, Hayllar addressed the judge: “This gentleman of 1876, who has been here two years, from Trinity College, Dublin, knows all about feng shui and the views of these people! And he says, ‘I am not going to stop my work, I am only doing them inside.’”
“Well,” Hayllar concluded, “the storm did break.”
Of the violence, he continued, “I don’t stand here to justify; it is a pity, but it is what everyone must have known would have happened.”
A fellow CMS medical missionary who was observing the trial, Birdwood van Someren Taylor, wrote to his colleagues in London, “There was quite enough to make us hide our faces.”
Chief Justice French issued a split decision. The missionaries, he concluded, had a valid lease to occupy the temple land. But that lease also allowed the owners to evict them with three months’ notice. And that is just what the temple directors did. They sent a notice to Wolfe that everyone had to vacate the premises by January 1, 1880, because the directors needed the property. When one of the missionaries protested that they had no place to go, the Chinese officials reminded him that there were 140 CMS chapels in the province.
Out of options, Wolfe was forced to relocate to the telegraph office site in Nantai, the same location that was offered to him before the mob attack. Old Lin and the house servants packed up the belongings of the British families. They loaded up baskets, carts, and wheelbarrows for the long walk to new homes in Nantai.
Old Lin was on the move again.
• 2 •
Doctor
Fujian Province, 1890
Anyone crossing the Bridge of Ten Thousand Ages in Fuzhou to the Nantai neighborhood could spot in an instant where foreigners lived and worked. Their homes and offices loomed tall and white on the south shore of the Min River, like flags staking a claim.
The stone bridge, an engineering marvel eight centuries old, two lanes wide, and a third of a mile long, pulsated with commerce at either end. En-glish merchants haggled through compradors to buy timber floated downstream from forests in the far interior. Coolies hauled bales of tea that had been picked in mountain plantations and then were pressed into brick-size blocks in warehouses and readied for shipment to Russia, Australia, Japan, Europe, and America. The powerful Hong Kong trading house of Jardine, Matheson & Co. kept a ship—the Mahamoodie—anchored nearby for receiving and unloading the most lucrative cargo of them all: opium, grown in India and shipped to China to be packed into the pipes of millions of addicts in Fujian and beyond.
The foreign community—mostly American, British, and Japanese traders with some French and Russian residents—was small, but its members felt compelled to re-create the worlds they left behind. They had tennis courts, a cricket pitch, and even a racecourse for play. The English had one cemetery; Americans another. Missionaries had opened schools, hospitals, and churches. A vicar from Sussex would feel quite at home in Nantai’s chapel for expatriates, tucked behind a wrought-iron fence and fashioned from granite, not brick.
To get to the walled compound of the Anglican mission, house servants like Old Lin had to climb steps from the waterfront to a ridge a half-hour away. Old Lin knew some of his countrymen looked down on him, deriding him as nothing more than an opportunist who accepted the religion of foreigners only to fill his bowl with food. Rice Christian, they sneered. But like any father, Old Lin wanted a better life for his son—status, wealth, good fortune. Fu, the Chinese called it. More than anything, he hoped to see his son wear the long silk tunic of a scholar rather than the baggy hemp-cloth shorts of a peasant. Old Lin knew the missionaries with their schools and books could help his son. They could mold him into a thinking man.
The cook enrolled his son, Lin Dao’an, in a mission school in Nantai. His classmates were the sons of local church workers as well as boys from remote villages in the interior of Fujian. Missionaries taught the Chinese classics and Christian scripture in the local dialect—as well as composition, mathematics, and science. Most graduates went on to jobs as teachers in mission schools in villages throughout the province. But Lin Dao’an was handpicked for a different assignment; he would become a doctor’s assistant. The CMS station in Fujian did not have a medical school, but it did have a new hospital in the walled city of Funing on the northern coast. It was started and run by a respected, energetic physician with the impossibly long name of Birdwood van Someren Taylor. He selected the cook’s son as a trainee, giving the cook’s family a hand up the social ladder.
Dr. Taylor
To reach Funing, a town of only ten thousand, Lin Dao’an sailed to the farthest end of Sansha Bay, passing waterfront villages like the one his father had left two decades earlier. Travelers getting their first glimpse of Funing were often disappointed. Set on a plain surrounded by mountains, the city appeared trapped in the claustrophobic embrace of a twenty-six-foot-high wall, built four hundred years earlier to keep out marauding Japanese pirates. Anglican missionaries described it as “the backwater of the backwater.”
But every three years, the sleepy city stirred to life. Funing was one of the host cities for imperial examinations. Thousands of scholars from surrounding counties passed through the city gates to endure long days of tests for official jobs and government appointments. It was the backwater’s saving grace; other than that, Funing was in a sorry state of slow decay. Even the cannons mounted on the fern-cloaked city wall were rusted and useless.
The town presented an enticing challenge for Dr. Taylor, one of the most effective Anglican missionaries in Fujian province. Born in India to missionary parents, he trained at the esteemed Edinburgh Medical School and arrived in China in 1879, shortly after the destruction of the mission compound on Black Stone Hill by anti-Christian agitators. In the wake of the hostilities, Deacon Wolfe thought it would help to repair relations in the neighborhood to have a doctor offering medical help. Locals may not have accepted the religion of the foreigners, but they could not deny the results of their medical methods. Taylor began seeing patients for a few hours a day in a makeshift dispensary in between language training with a tutor. The young doctor was soon overwhelmed. He had only one Chinese helper, who knew nothing of either English or medicine. Taylor suggested to Wolfe that he start training a few local young men as medical students.
The deacon immediately dismissed the idea.
“You have been sent out to do mission work, not to train medical students,” he said.
“Surely, this is mission work,” Taylor replied. “Do you not have boys�
�� schools, girls’ schools and colleges? Do you not regard education as a very important part of mission work?”
“Oh, yes,” the senior cleric said. “But it is not quite the same. We teach the Bible and train men to be catechists.”
“Do you not teach them a great deal more than the Bible?” the doctor asked. “You teach them geography, the knowledge of the earth made by God. I teach them anatomy, the knowledge of the body made by God.”
The doctor added: “You teach them two and two makes four. I teach them that the result of a good dose of quinine in ague relives them of fever and a good deal of misery.”
Taylor suggested that he recruit trainees from the CMS boys’ high school in Fuzhou.
Wolfe relented, begrudgingly. “Well, we might let you have a few boys,” he said, “but only the ones who are not fit to be catechists.”
In his first years in China, Taylor traveled by foot across the entire province, visiting towns and villages for weeks at a time to see patients and to scout for a place for a hospital. American missionaries had hospitals in Fuzhou and other towns across the province. The CMS decided to place Taylor in coastal Fu-ning, a small town with a handful of Christian followers and a Chinese catechist who worked for Wolfe but no hospital or dispensary.
Taylor brought the pragmatism of a scientist to his work as a missionary. He shared the same ardor for his faith as his fellow missionaries, but reason and respect guided his approach to the challenges of life in China. He knew, for instance, that the Chinese would not give up their belief in ancient remedies and herbal treatments. But he could clearly see the need for Western surgical techniques and standards of hygiene. In his travels, Taylor was aghast to see infected wounds that had been treated with putrid poultices or folk therapies such as raw chicken skin. Worst were the cases where people had taken medical matters into their own hands. He once had to repair the damage done by an old man who had trouble seeing and decided to cut away part of his eyelid with his knife.
