Protestant Missionary Publications in Chinese to 1911

Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies presents Ryan Dunch as part of the Chinese Religions Seminar.

Speaker:
Ryan Dunch, University of Alberta

Missionaries to the Qing empire confronted an elaborate and culturally potent print culture. As a result, while missionaries in most settings were attempting to develop scripts for non-written languages in order to translate the Bible and convey religious concepts, in China the missionaries had both the potential and the necessity to address a much broader array of subject matter in their publications. Professor Dunch will first provide an overview of the thousands of printed works in Chinese published by the Protestant missions up to 1911. He will outline some research findings and further questions arising from them, around the general themes of form versus content, institutional context, and readership.

Ryan Dunch is an associate professor of history and chair of the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Alberta. He is the author of Fuzhou Protestants and the Making of a Modern China,1857-1927 (2001), as well as articles and book chapters related to the past and present of Christianity in Chinese society. His current research focus is missionary publishing in Chinese before 1911. He serves as one of the editors of H-ASIA, an international listserv for specialists in Asian history and studies.