Ch 6-2: Holy Cows: Milk for Church and Nation
At first, missionaries introduced Western cattle to serve their own needs. They frequently used milk products such as butter and ice cream (Dye n.d., 18, 50; M. Johns, n/d, 10; Service 1989, 221). Many missionaries who grew up on farms enjoyed caring for cows as they had back “home” (Johns 1992, 81). However, these factors do not explain missionaries’ dependence on cow’s milk. As Joseph Taylor (1936, 57) put it, while the Chinese did not keep cows for milk, “the missionary must have milk.”
Missionaries believed in milk’s efficacy for curing and maintaining health. Missionary doctors prescribed milk and eggnogs for Myrtle Johns (n/d, 6) to drink when her baby was not gaining weight as expected. In 1923, Grace Service’s (1989, 265) husband Robert’s doctor prescribed milk to cure exhaustion from overwork. In 1908, Grace Service (1989, 74) prepared whey for a sickly newborn. Cow’s milk was considered essential to babies’ health. This belief was no doubt reinforced by the pervasive advertising by powdered and canned milk corporations.
Very few missionary mothers employed Chinese wet nurses (Johns n/d, 6; Simkin 1978, 53, 57). Instead, missionaries kept their own cows to provide milk for their babies and butter for their tables (Service 1989, 65; Simkin 1978, 69; Taylor 1936, 57). In 1907 new YMCA missionaries Bob and Grace Service obtained two cows and a “cow coolie” from seasoned missionaries (Service 1989, 59). Between 1918 and 1922, Stanley Annis (1990, 53) employed a “cow coolie” to look after three cows and a few calves, which involved feeding them fresh grass, ground soy beans and bran, as well as milking them daily. Canadian Methodist Mission accountant, Alfred Johns (Account Book, 22), recorded a missionary buying a cow with calf on May 23, 1913. He also recorded various other missionaries' monthly milk expenses, and that for cow feed and cow “boys.”
Chinese Wooden Boats on the Min River
Missionaries took these boats with their goods and cows on their way to summer resorts.
In 1916, David Crockett Graham (Autobiography, 56) and his family took two boats to Mt. Omei, one for themselves, and another for their servants and cows. When Daniel and Jane Dye (China: The Early Years, 30) went to Mt. Omei in the summer of 1917, three boats were required: one for men, one for women, and one for cows. The Simkins’ (1978, 159-60) cows also needed their own boat on the way to Mt. Omei in the summer of 1935. Margaret Outerbridge (Munro 1990, 81,119, 128) also took her “part-foreign cows” to Mt. Omei. The cows were shod in straw sandals of the same model worn by the carriers so that they would not slip on the narrow mountain paths. The reason for these inconveniences to both humans and cows was to ensure that babies had enough nourishment. However, even with this constant attention on milk, the situation was unsatisfactory because Chinese cows produced only a fraction of the amount of milk typical of a European or North American dairy cow.
Dr. Frank Dickinson, the head of Agricultural Science at WCUU, had been developing a herd of cross-bred Chinese and Canadian cows since sometime in the 1910s when he, Alfred Johns and Walter Small had imported a pair of Holsteins and a pair of Jerseys from Canada (Johns 1992, 73). In 1921, their Canadian colleague Rev. A.P. Quentin had also imported Canadian bulls, which were put into breeding service by the Szechwan Dairy Cattle Improvement Association in 1924 (Dickinson 1939, 289-90). In 1925, Emily Gentry (2009, 27, 46) was thrilled that Dickinson moved an entire herd to one of the missionaries’ summer homes at Behludin, preventing her from “having to use canned milk” or powdered milk. By 1936, Dickinson had a herd that included cows some three generations removed from the original foreign cattle (Taylor 1937, 57-8).
Due to the success of Dickinson’s husbandry, in 1938 he was “given charge of Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s prize herd of fifty-five Holstein cattle” for the purpose of improving Chinese milk and dairy production (Munro 1990, 9-10). In 1939, through the sponsorship of the Chiangs’ New Life Movement, Dickinson initiated a “Travelling Bull” program in which one of Mme. Chiang’s prize bulls would travel around Sichuan to “service” mission cows. He encouraged missionaries to advise their “dairymen” that this prize bull would be available for service during the summer months at Mt. Emei where many missionaries had cottages (Dickinson 1939, 290).
Mme. Chiang’s goal in cattle breeding was to strengthen Chinese bodies, both as a symbol of national strength and as a pragmatic strengthening of Chinese military power. Given what we now know about lactose intolerance, we would expect the Chinese dairy industry to flounder. However, during the period of rising Japanese aggression in the 1930s, a Chinese anthropometric study showed that Japanese were on average taller than Chinese. This magnified a concern about the weakness of Chinese bodies and provided an impetus to improve nutrition in Chinese youth (Fu 2016, 644).
Following Western practices, Republican Chinese leaders settled on dairy milk as the solution. They may have associated cow’s milk with robust health due to dried and condensed milk corporate sponsorship of baby contests (Tillman 2020, 1769-71). Similarly, missionaries’ baby clinics in which dried milk “KLIM” was given to undernourished infants reinforced the belief in milk as medicine. Mrs. Margaret Bridgman and Miss McIntosh led “baby wellness” clinics in which they introduced KLIM to Chinese babies’ diets.
Remarkably, China is now one of the top three milk producing and consuming countries in the world (Cohen 2017, 269). Milk’s popularity grew exponentially in China between 2000 and 2005 fueled by a recent study’s claim that “the average height of Japanese increased by ten centimeters after their years of drinking milk since World War II” (Tian 2018, 60). Song Tian (2018) attributes this to the “scientific witchcraft” of commercial interests and the public’s blind faith in selective “scientific evidence.”
Missionaries sincerely believed in the benefits of cows’ milk for themselves and others. Historic hindsight, however, confirms that milk is neither beneficial nor natural for the 70% of the world’s populations that are lactose intolerant. Therefore, the reasons missionaries gave for Chinese reluctance to keep cattle should be reexamined. Cows require more grazing area than do goats, draft animals and crops (Gentry 2009, 24). Chinese farming traditionally employed water buffalo as draft animals. The introduction of foreign dairy farming entailed an industrial revolution of the economy. Tian (2018, 78) points out how industrial dairy farming in China today is damaging to the environment, as well as cruel to the animals.