Eric Reinders
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520241718
- eISBN:
- 9780520931084
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520241718.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity
To the Victorians, the Chinese were invariably “inscrutable”. The meaning and provenance of this impression—and, most importantly, its workings in nineteenth-century Protestant missionary encounters ...
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To the Victorians, the Chinese were invariably “inscrutable”. The meaning and provenance of this impression—and, most importantly, its workings in nineteenth-century Protestant missionary encounters with Chinese religion—are at the center of this book, which looks at how missionaries' religious identity, experience, and physical foreignness produced certain representations of China between 1807 and 1937. The book first introduces the imaginative world of Victorian missionaries and outlines their application of mind-body dualism to the dualism of self and other. It then explores Western views of the Chinese language, especially ritual language, and Chinese ritual, particularly the kowtow. This work offers surprising and valuable insight into the visceral nature of the Victorian response to the Chinese—and, more generally, into the nineteenth-century Western representation of China.Less
To the Victorians, the Chinese were invariably “inscrutable”. The meaning and provenance of this impression—and, most importantly, its workings in nineteenth-century Protestant missionary encounters with Chinese religion—are at the center of this book, which looks at how missionaries' religious identity, experience, and physical foreignness produced certain representations of China between 1807 and 1937. The book first introduces the imaginative world of Victorian missionaries and outlines their application of mind-body dualism to the dualism of self and other. It then explores Western views of the Chinese language, especially ritual language, and Chinese ritual, particularly the kowtow. This work offers surprising and valuable insight into the visceral nature of the Victorian response to the Chinese—and, more generally, into the nineteenth-century Western representation of China.
Eric Reinders
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520241718
- eISBN:
- 9780520931084
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520241718.003.0014
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
