Phases of West China Missionary Life Digital Exhibit

Home: Phases of West China Missionary Life

Curators: Cory Willmott and Amy Kaler 

Jean Graham and Anne Kennard with Baby Panda

Throughout the exhibit, click on the titles, text and links in red font to find out more about the image or topic.

This digital exhibit aims 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 neither applaud nor critique missionary practices, but rather aim to better understand what they were doing and why.

This digital exhibit is organized around the phases that West China missionaries went through in the process of becoming and being a missionary, as well as what they did and how they fared after their missionary lives. It is composed of short themes and vignettes that provide windows into missionary lifestyles and experiences. We draw from the vast array of photographs, letters, journals, periodicals, memoirs, biographies and autobiographies produced by this group, as well as archival holdings in Canada and the United States.

As the site’s administrator, Cory Willmott welcomes feedback about the site and its contents. Please email her at cwillmo@siue.edu if you have questions or comments about anything on the site, including but not limited to corrections of fact and identification of subjects in photos.

There are certain biases among the missionaries that were common to their time period, which today can be jarring or offensive. These include the use of honorific titles for men and women (e.g. Dr, Mr, Rev, Miss, Mrs), through which men are glorified, and women are suppressed. Racist jargon of the time period is also problematic (e.g. "coolie" and "boy" used to refer to Chinese laborers). We should also pay attention to omissions, such as Chinese people's names, while foreigners' names are given.

On this site we are not able to remedy all of these kinds of challenges. We have retained language of the time period in quotes, but we avoid using it in our own prose. We have attempted to provide all information we can about women and Chinese subjects, but often there is no way to recover it. We encourage visitors to the site to view these issues in terms of the times in which the missionaries were living.