Phases of West China Missionary Life Digital Exhibit

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The objective of this digital exhibit is to provide a sensitive, nuanced, and complex account of the lives of Protestant missionaries in the West China mission field between 1892 and 1952, both as individuals and as members of transnational missionary communities and networks. We are particularly concerned with missionaries’ engagements with a variety of modernist practices and what we call the “theopolitical imaginaries” of this group in the half-century between the height of missionary fervour in the global north which led to the influx of anglophone Protestant missionaries into Sichuan, and the consolidation of the Communist government which saw their final departure. We draw from the vast array of letters, journals, periodicals, memoirs, biographies and autobiographies produced by this group, as well as archival holdings in Canada and the United States.