The Romantic Past and Change
in West China
Throughout their public
writings, members of the West China Border Research Society reminisced on the
glamour of their early days in the field.
These missionaries, researchers and explorers routinely used the word “romance”
to describe the beginning of their interactions with West China, and tended to
contrast this period with the diminished excitement of later experience in the
area. Men like J.H. Edgar and J. Beech
felt a sense of romance upon discovering the immense possibilities of West
China, a potential that they found more thrilling before its actualization than afterwards; in addition, the
encroachment of progress and the outside world upon the Society’s far-flung
playground lessened the romance of work in West China by destroying the
exclusivity of their relationship with the people of the Borderlands and
imposing intellectual competition on their work.
Evidence suggests that what Society
members found romantic was not West China or its people, but the great
potentiality of the region. In his 1934
article "University Beginnings," on the founding of the West China
Union University, J. Beech provided a juxtaposition that reveals much about the
way members perceived West China.
"A quarter of a century ago," he began, "when everything
here had its touch of glamour and romance and when the thought of a Christian
union university was pure romance, I recall being jammed among crowds as a long
line of horrors pushed its serpentine way through one of Chengtu's
streets." (p. 91) In one breath, he could reminisce on the
romance of West China twenty-five years earlier, and in the very next describe
a ghastly ritual parade of "devils and suffering victims" along the
city streets. Beech spoke of the event,
called the "Eastern Hell," with considerable disdain, seeming an
abrupt shift from the nostalgia of a moment earlier.
Beech's purpose becomes clearer in
the next paragraph, when he introduced the "Western Heaven": the West
China Union University. Unlike the
ghoulish scene of folk devils the author recalled from an earlier Chengtu, the
University is a picturesque landscape "where lovers walk its shady roads
and path border with many Western and Chinese flowering plants, a veritable
Garden of Eden." It was Beech's
present, not his past, that he gave the rose tint, yet he began by saying
"Everything here had its touch of glamour" in the bygone days of the
Eastern Hell. It was the frightful past
that was full of romance, not the lovingly described present of the University.
The reason for this disjunct lies in
the fascination of potentiality. The
Chengtu past, into which Beech, D.C. Graham and others went, was rich with
possibility. True, the whole landscape
may have had "its touch of glamour," but it was the thought of a
university that Beech called "pure romance"
[emphasis added]. Chengtu did not have
to be beautiful or good, so long as the outsiders of the WCBRS could make it beautiful and good. The natives' backward and crude state was not romantic, but it was
the degraded condition exemplified in the "Eastern Hell" spectacle
that made possible the exhilirating and romantic thought of all the
missionaries could do for them. In that
sense, their savagery was
romantic. For the crooked to be
straightened, it had to be crooked in the first place, and these missionaries
and researchers felt the thrill of that challenge. "What has transformed the hundreds of zig-zag paddy fields
that existed when that procession forced its way through the city crowds,"
Beech pondered, "into the present city of learning that visitors have
called the 'Western Heaven'?" For Beech, the romantic
Chengtu was a disordered landscape that waited to be "transformed" by
the able hands of visionary Westerners. (p. 91)
Moreover, Beech asserted that the
transformation went far beyond what repulsed and starry-eyed arrivals like
himself could have wrought alone. He
attributed the great achievements in Chengtu partly to the hand of God,
suggesting that the line between divine and human efforts was a little
blurry. Some of the key events in
developing the University, he said, were apparently random and some were
providential. "Others were
carefully planned," he added, "but doubtless no less divine for
that." (p. 93) Thus, part of the
thrill of beginning work in West China was the opportunity to open a stage for
genuine acts of God.
Throughout
his account, J. Beech described administrative turning points in spiritual
terms. On May 5th, 1905, for instance,
Beech and Dr. Omar L. Kilborn went before the West China Advisory Board, which
represented all the area's mission groups, to advocate a united effort for a
Christian university in West China.
Kilborn and Beech were successful in their efforts, as the Board voted
"(1) To establish a union educational board and (2) To promote the
organization of a union university."
(p. 101) Beech quoted from the
Secretary's Report on the meeting to depict this occasion: "The passing of this resolution
impressed the Board with the feeling that God was in their midst and that some
great reviving spirit blessing was on the eve of being poured out upon his servants
in West China." (p. 101) Beech even paralleled the beginning of the
West China Union University with the opening scenes of the Book of
Genesis. Chengtu, then, was like the
void in Genesis -- empty, but full of possibility for God's work. In early moments like this, Beech and his
associates felt the thrill of all that could be. What they created may have been beautiful -- as his affectionate
portrait of the University indicates -- but the moment before Creation was
inevitably more exciting than the moment after.
The potential for good works was not
all that made West China romantic and exciting to these missionaries, researchers,
educators, and explorers, however.
Exclusivity also marked the beginning of their work in the region. In the early years of the 20th Century,
missionary "pioneers" had the remote areas of Szechwan, Tibet, and
the borderlands much to themselves. (p.
8 Vol 10) As the Society observed in
its 1938 Journal, "For too long, we, the more or less permanent residents
of these western regions, have thought that we had a lifetime and more in which
to gradually explore our world.
Nanking, Peiping, and other cultural centers were far away." (p. 7
Vol 10) Travel to the region was too
time-consuming and expensive for many outsiders to visit, so missionaries like
D.C. Graham had ample time to establish relationships with local people,
explore, translate, collect and research, with little pressure from any
competing interests. (p. 7)
Those outside interests -- economic,
intellectual, military, and political -- increasingly penetrated West China as
the 20th Century progressed, and the circle of intellectuals based in the West
China Border Research Society acknowledged/yielded
ground to them
with some reluctance. In the 1938
edition of their Journal, the Society observed, "For some years this shift
of China's cultural center towards the west has been obvious, but the present
situation has greatly accelerated its pace." By this time, the Japanese assault on China had been driving
large parts of the population into the interior. Many of the country's best scholars flowed into Kweichow,
Szechwan, and Yunnan as whole universities and other institutions were forced
to migrate. These once isolated and
remote provinces suddenly filled with Chinese people whom the Society members
-- "the more or less permanent residents" of West China -- partly
regarded as outsiders. Technological
and structural improvements had also been opening up West China to
outsiders. No longer was it necessary
to hazard a journey by foot to distant Tatisenlu -- cars were becoming
available. Airplanes could bring
"the progressive merchant" and "the inquisitive scholar"
into areas where missionaries had long enjoyed a sort of monopoly on the local
scene. (p. 7)
The Society felt the pinch as more
professional, efficient academics streamed into their field of study. Foreign scholars from the West provided most
of the anxiety. The Society expressed
skepticism for those visiting intellectuals who would rush into West China,
collect some specimens, write some notes, and rush right out. The "high pressure expert" would
not establish a relationship with the people, yet he could "accomplish in
a few months what the pioneer missionary spent a lifetime... doing." (p. 8)
Governments and private organizations could equip great numbers of
researchers with the latest technologies and outstrip the Society's
capabilities. This awareness of
competition usually took a largely wistful, melancholy tone, though it also
manifested as plain rivarly at times.
For instance, in his 1938 Report of the Executive Committee, Secretary
D.C. Graham noted the plans of another academic organization with a degree of
incredulity: "Dr. Cressy pointed out that the North-China Branch of the
Royal Asiatic Society has undertaken a program that is financially almost
impossible by undertaking to build up a large museum and to erect a large and
expensive building in Shanghai." (p. 247, vol 10).
To his credit, Graham dealt
favorably with another source of competition: native Chinese scholarship. In the same issue, he reviewed a new journal
entitled The Southwest Borderland and
gave it positive marks. At the end of
the review, Graham made a telling observation: "We have now arrived at a
time when articles and books that concern the Chinese or aborigines of West
China will need to reach a high scientific standard, for otherwise their
mistakes and weaknesses will be discerned and exposed by Chinese
scholars." Graham's remarks imply
that the Society had not closely monitored itself in the past, before so much
intellectual competition entered the region.
In many ways, the outside world was
closing in on the West China Border Research Society. "The leisurely day of the pioneer is rapidly passing,"
the Journal's editors observed, in the Foreword to Volume Ten. (p.8) Foreign intellectuals could come into West
China, take what they wanted and leave, without setting down roots in the areas
as Graham, Beech, and others had done.
Chinese intellectuals were asserting themselves, edging in on the
Society's academic territory and holding them to task for the knowledge they
produce. The Japanese war was forcing
population of all kinds into the western regions. Communist groups broke into the areas where Society members
evangelized and researched, obstructing their activities. The West China of the 1930's and 1940's was
not the same romantic scene of 1910, when the West China Union University was
founded, or 1922, when the Society first came into existence. The vast field of possibilities that a Beech
or Graham had seen upon arrival had been whittled down into a reality, and the
outside world had gradually pushed its way in.
What the Society referred to as "our western paradise" was
changed forever, and the members often looked back with nostalgia to the early,
lonely, leisurely days of potential.