Re-imparting Christianity through Transliterated Chinese Knowledge -- An Investigation of the Romanized Sacred Edit (1908)

• In Event: Trading Knowledge: Commerce, Science, and Networks across East Asian Ports in the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Overseas Christian missions had complicated the perceptions of knowledge popularization and reproduction in the process of localization on account of translingual practice and cultural adaptation. This paper analyses how a Romanized Sacred Edit (Shengyu guang xun, 1908), a sixteen-maxim principle originally promulgated by Emperor of Kangxi, and later reproduced in the 1900s of China, acted to re-educate British missionaries and native pastors through transcribing the southern Fujianese dialects (SFD). SFD served as a common language spoken over Zhangzhou, Quanzhou, Amoy, and Formosa. A cluster of Amoy missionaries invented a type of orthography (called Pe̍h-ōe-jī) for illiterate SFD speakers, including foreign Christian reverends and native non-script users resided in southern China and Formosa, and initiated them into Chinese knowledge. Based on investigated source materials from a sociocultural perspective, I argue that by dint of making the transcribed Edit required for passing priest examinations, the Missionary Council in Formosa not only made attempts to remake Chinese imperial didactic creeds but also adapted evangelism in SFD to locally recognized common practice.

Author

• Huang-Lan Su, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign