书城外语ChristianityinChina
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第3章 Missionariescoming......(2)

Morrison wrote many missionary brochures, especially Bible-the New Testament translated in 1813 and Bible-the OldTestament translated in 1819 with the help of Milne. He entitledthese two translations Divine Heaven and Holy Book.

The first American missionary to China was E.C. Bridgman(1801-1861), who came on behalf of the CongregationalChurches. After he arrived in Guangzhou in 1830, he lived in theAmerican commercial residence and started to study Chinese withthe help of Morrison and Liang Fa. The work Bridgman did wasmainly concerned with translation, publication and education. Heestablished the English version of China Cong News, introducingChina"s politics, history, people and culture to the Western world.

He also translated books on history and geography like Recordsof the U.S.A., introducing Western culture and technology toChina. After the opium war, the U.S. government sent a specialenvoy to China and compelled the Qing government to sign theChina-U.S. Xiamen Treaty. Bridgman acted as the secretary andinterpreter for the U.S. delegation and attended the signing ofthis unequal treaty. After that, he moved to Shanghai and becamethe first president of the Shanghai Arts and Science Association,which set up a library and a museum in Shanghai with the librarybecoming well known throughout the Far East for its large bookcollection. In 1861, Bridgman died of diarrhea in Shanghai.

The German missionary K.F.A. Gutzlaff (or CharlesGutzlaff, 1803-1851) arrived in Java (now part of Indonesia) in1827. He studied the Minnan dialect (a local dialect used in FujianProvince, southeast China) and Cantonese from the local overseasChinese, and learned some medical knowledge when he preachedin hospitals. In 1829, he went to Malacca and assisted the LondonMissionary Society with its missionary work there. He went toGuangzhou in 1831 and acted as a translator for East Indiacompany. Gutzlaff translated some books of the Bible and somebrochures for preaching, and wrote books about the culture bothof east and west, for instance, A Brief Introduction on the Historyof China, An Open China, and History of the U.K., etc. His mostfamous work was a magazine entitled Eastern and Western OceansMonthly. In 1844, he sponsored an organization named Han Hui(or Fu Han Hui), which had more than one thousand members atits peak. Though he did much in spreading Christianity andculture, he was more interested in China"s political, economicand military affairs and had helped the colonialist aggression byspying on Chinese coastal cities via cargo ships or the East Indiacompany"s scouting vessels many times. The first such occasionwas in 1831. Disguised as a Chinese sailor, and carrying withhim charts, mapping equipment and preaching books, he boarded a cargo ship trafficking in opium and went north along the coast.

He passed through Xiamen, Taiwan, Ningbo and Shanghai andreached Tianjin in north China. In February 1832, he retraced hissteps and reached not only Korea and Japan, but also places likeWusong and Baoshan that are deep inside the Yangtze River. Afterhe returned, he wrote: "I have made everything clear, and onlyhope the merchants and missionaries could pay adequate attentionto these profitable places‘。 The third time that he went north wasin October 1832, when he went directly to Fengtian (a provinceat that time) in northeast China through a smuggling boat offeredby an opium trader. This time he did not return to Macao untilApril of the next year. Later, Gutzlaff published a book namedThe Three Voyages along China"s Coast from 1831 to 1833. Infact, his scouting activities along China"s coast numbered as manyas ten. He himself even joined the aggressive opium war in 1840 by acting as a translator and guide for the commander of the Britisharmy.

In this period, the missionaries coming to China also includedW. Milne, W.H. Medhurst and W. Lockhart from the LondonMissionary Society, S.W. Williams and Peter Parker from theAmerican Congregational Church, and W.J. Boone from theAmerican Anglican Churches, etc.