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The 19th century was characterized by a global expansion of Protestant Christianity which coincided with Western political and economic expansion. Although their ideas about miracles varied, Western missionaries shared similar ideas about the social implications of the healing power of salvation from sin and the eternal life of Christ. They often emphasized Christianity's healing of social ills, whatever they thought about the miraculous cure of physical illness.

This chapter begins in the middle of the nineteenth century, a period of greater Western presence in China than ever before. Five treaty ports had been opened to Western trade and to Western diplomats following the first Opium War in 1842, and two more were ceded by 1860. For the first time in Chinese history, the empire was home to increasingly demanding foreign settlements, and by mid-century Western missionaries were allowed to travel anywhere throughout the country. By 1879, the Xi'an area had suffered even greater devastation and the brick enclosure was gone. The Chinese government took away the monument and placed it in their most important museum of stone tablets—an appropriate end, one might imagine. Scholarly study of the stone, both in the East and the West, had reached a new age of breadth and maturity, and it was only fringe voices that continued to raise any suspicions about authenticity.

This chapter discusses the way in which Western missionaries tried to find the traces of Christianity in China even before they had arrived there at the end of the sixteenth century. One day in 1625, a group of workers accidentally unearthed a large limestone stele in the ancient Chinese capital of Xi'an. An enormous black tablet about three meters high, one meter wide, and half a meter deep, the front and sides were exquisitely carved with a long inscription that included both Chinese and a Syriac script known as Estrangelo. Moreover, it shows the existence of something so apparently Western came to represent China in premodern Europe, and like the monument as a whole European readings of the cross had little to do with China as it really was. The Chinese were not seen to exist independently from Christian universal history, even if their documented past was much more ancient than that of the Christian West. It is then argued that as the stone actually became sinology, it is hardly surprising that the stele also quickly became much less important than the various answers that it seemed to provide—or not to provide.

This chapter shows how Chinese people were represented by Western missionaries as mindless and “body-ful”. It explains that this attitude of missionaries toward the foreign mind appears in various metaphors of mindlessness which pervade the earlier-nineteenth-century reportage on China. It mentions that the Chinese were also sometimes viewed as a dense homogenous mass of bodies, as unemotional and unimaginative and as liars with no higher moral conscience.

This chapter discusses the difference in the smell or body odor of the Chinese people and the Western missionaries and converts. It explains that higher meat and alcohol content in the Western diet was the cause of the difference in odor. It suggests that though the smell of Westerners is normally beyond the historiographic radar, smell surely conditioned social interactions in a number of ways.

This chapter examines Western missionaries' accounts of the Chinese language. It analyzes various aspects of missionaries' learning process, their views of the Chinese language, problems with translation and the alternative practice of Pidgin English. It explains that the missionaries considered the Chinese language as notoriously intractable for the process of translation and most of the English they heard spoken by the Chinese was grating or comical, but in any case incorrect.

This chapter explores how the foreignness of Western missionaries in China became embodied experiences. It discusses the body problems faces by missionaries and suggests that the most serious problems of inter-cultural interaction were bodily. The most intractable scandal of foreign bodies was the refusal of the missionaries and their converts to bow to the emperor. This chapter also highlights the tensions between the impulse toward the indigenization of the missionaries and their concern that the essential Gospel would be lost or corrupted through careless nativization.

This chapter focuses on the public visibility of Western missionaries in China. It discusses the situation of the missionaries when they were surrounded by Chinese giving them their full attention and when they tried to be invisible. It suggests that the crowd was probably one of the strongest formative experiences of missionaries who arrived in China for the first time. It contends that though the Chinese public gaze wore down some Western missionaries, the curiosity value of foreign bodies was not without its benefits.

This chapter comments on Western missionaries' accounts of China and its people. It explains that though individual Chinese were described in positive terms, especially if they were converted, China as a whole was considered relentlessly dark, wicked, and irrational. It provides evidence against missionaries' criticisms on the inability of the Chinese to verbally articulate any reasoning for their religious practice, idolatry, and kowtow.

This chapter focuses on the metaphor of the body used by Western missionaries to describe the Chinese people. It explains that missionary accounts of Chinese practicing their religion were described as crowds of materialists absorbed in the world of their bodily senses and even the vigor of Chinese religious practices was explained as sensual, materialistic, and herd-like. The Chinese were imagined by Westerners as captives of their senses, addicted to their sensuality, obsessed with their worldly desires.

This chapter addresses the emergence of clinical psychiatry as a discipline and the competing models of care under the Japanese colonial authorities and Western missionary doctors. In particular, it examines the transformation in the Japanese approach to patients, who were treated first as subjects of care and later as objects of study. As the custodial aspirations diminished, medical staff focused on solely on diagnosis (with the adoption of Kraepelinian nosology) and research with the creation of a university psychiatric clinic. It also examines how Christian missionaries sought to combine religion and medicine to treat mentally ill patients under their care, especially at the new Severance Hospital in Seoul.