Ch 5-1: Learning the Chinese Language
Johns' Language Teacher with His Family
Missionaries' language teachers were usually Confucian scholars who had studied the Classics and were held in high esteem.
Prior to the founding of the Missionary Training School (MTS) in Chengdu in 1912, newly arriving missionaries experienced diverse methods of learning the Chinese language. Whereas there is only one set of Chinese written characters (although there are innumerable different calligraphy styles, including now simplified characters), the spoken dialects are unique. Sichuanese dialect is often unintelligible to speakers of the official Mandarin and Cantonese dialects, as well as to those who speak the vernacular dialects of other regions. Sichuanese language teachers were typically Chinese men who had studied the Chinese Confucian Classics according to the course of study for the imperial civic exams, even after the Qing government ended those exams in 1905.
Given the need for language instruction in the Sichuanese dialect, many early missionaries started their instruction after they arrived in Sichuan. When YMCA missionaries Grace and Bob Service arrived in China in 1906, they had no language instruction until they were settled in Chengdu. Once there, they had their own private language instructor who even accompanied them to their Mt. Emei summer resort (Service 1989, 48).
Language Teacher Aboard a Houseboat, 1910
The Jolliffe's language teacher accompanied them on their first voyage up the Yangtze River.
For other missionaries, their first engagement with language instruction began in Shanghai and continued even while traveling. After their arrival in Shanghai in 1910, Alfred and Myrtle Johns of the CMM had a Sichuanese language instructor accompany them on their journey up the Yangtze River. Myrtle (n/d “First Trip to China”) recalled:
On this journey [up the Yangtze River] the missionaries were accompanied by a cook and a teacher sent from Szeshuan so that they could start learning to speak Chinese. The cook would go ashore every night to buy vegetables and meat and that is how the Canadians learned their first words in Chinese. The cook would come back on board the houseboat with the food and name it in Chinese and the “students” would thus learn to say it and also the price of it. The teacher would sit with them all day, helping with the language so that by the time they got to Chengdu, they knew the names in Chinese for many articles and also could keep their accounts.
After the MTS opened in 1912, new missionaries typically spent their first year in full time language study in Chengdu. About four months after their arrival in Chengdu in 1921, Kay Willmott wrote home in February that their cohort were just starting Kilborn’s lessons:
We are starting on Dr. Kilborn’s [language] book now (our first book), telling us how to hire a cook, train a coolie, and other equally important affairs in Chinese. We have had just 250 characters — half of what we are to have during the year. You have to invent all kinds of ways to remember them. For instance, Earl remembers [the character for] “to want” because it is made up of [the characters for] “west” and “woman”. He says a Western woman wants everything! Anyway, [the combined characters for] “woman” and “under one roof” mean “peace” — and I think that’s a pretty good one.
When Jean Stewart arrived in Sichuan in 1936, she was assigned to full time language study in Chengdu while staying in the Women’s Missionary Society’s home in the Canadian compound on Sichengci Street in Chengdu. Jean’s course also used Kilborn’s textbook, which first introduced students to the kind of conversations they would need to hire and manage servants.
During wartime, language study continued full time, but instead of posting missionaries at the Japanese bomb target of Chengdu, mission boards sent their missionaries out to outstations for language study using mail order materials from the MTS. When John and Isabelle Stinson arrived in 1938, they were posted to Tzeliutsing (Zigong, Sichuan) where they had their own private Confucian scholar language teacher.
Some of the first photographs that missionaries took were of their teachers. In Gordon Jones’ scrapbook, a picture of himself with his teacher in 1911 is titled “our hero at work the British Museum would be doubtless glad to have this remarkable picture!” The image is clearly composed for the camera, and Edwin Meuser, a missionary slightly senior to Jones, is identified as the photographer (Meuser can be seen in the reflection of the mirror in the picture). The caption on the scrapbook also notes that the teacher has cut his hair in the new western fashion, without a queue, locating him in the flow of “modernization” in China.
Some missionaries took extra measures to seek out language training. The Union Language School in Shanghai offered summer “crash” courses. When American Baptist C.L. Bromley arrived in Shanghai in October of 1911, just two weeks after the fall of the dynasty, he and his wife proceeded to their assignment in Shaoshing (Shaoxing, Zhejiang) where they began language study. In February of 1912, they returned to Shanghai for a one-month course at the Union Language School. They found the instruction given by Prof. Cummings and Mr. Keen very helpful and returned to their language study “with new zeal and enthusiasm.”
David and Alicia Graham Studying Chinese Language
The Grahams first learned the dialect in Shaoxing, Zhejiang, which might have inspired David to dig deeper into Chinese languages throughout his time in China.
Rochester Theological Seminary classmates and fellow Baptists, David Crockett and Alicia Graham also attended the “first Union Language School” with Bromley in Shanghai. The Grahams accompanied the Bromleys to Shaohsing for language study while awaiting the conflict to settle down before heading upriver to Sichuan. Alicia was expecting their first child. Unlike many missionaries who found the language instruction boring, Graham was gifted in language skills and zealously engaged a fanatic schedule of study all day and into the evening hours. He took great pride in mastering both first and second level courses at the Shanghai month-long language school (Graham n/d, 40-41).
Beyond everyday conversational competence, however, advanced students could delve into reading and understanding the Confucian Classics, providing a grounding in Chinese history and philosophy, similar to the course of study followed by elite Chinese scholars. For some new missionaries, this required reading sparked an interest in Chinese religion and history that they developed throughout their lives.
Dryden Phelps and Katharine Willmott (1982) published a book of ancient Chinese poetry in Chinese and English translation, while Roy Spooner published several academic articles about Daoist alchemical knowledge and modern chemistry while at WCUU in the 1930s. David Crockett Graham (Autobiography n/d, 50) wrote a divinity thesis that compared the similarities between Chinese and Christian religious tenets. His conservative supervisor, Dr. Strong, did not pass this thesis, so he wrote another one on “The Divinity of Jesus in Light of Modern Scholarship,” which suited Strong better and gained Graham the degree. Insights from China often did not gain currency back “home.”
Pilgrimage in Poetry to Mount Omei (link to book on the Internet Archive)
