The West China Missions Advisory Board’s Directory 1926, According to Missions
Item
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Title
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The West China Missions Advisory Board’s Directory 1926, According to Missions
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Identifier
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DS_0001
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Description
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Subtitle: "Arranged in Denominational Groups, giving home addresses of the Boards, or Societies, and the Chinese names of missionaries, with the dates of their first arrival in China." Document also contains list arranged alphabetically.
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Commentary
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The West China Missions Advisory Board (WCMAB) compiled a list of missionaries in West China annually. Each denomination was responsible for compiling their own statistics and forwarding them to the advisory board member in charge of statistics. For this reason, the stats compiled for the different denominations are not uniform. For example, the Friends Foreign Mission included the names of missionary wives, while none of the others did. Some denominations included the higher education degrees that wives obtained, while other didn't.
Nevertheless, the WCMAB lists are invaluable data about who was stationed where, when, and by whom. The summer of 1926 was the heyday of missionary activity in West China before the Nationalist Revolution of 1926 to 1927 when all the missionaries had to evacuate for a period of six months to a year, and many did not return. It was also the year that the Canadian Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists joined together to create the United Church of Canada, thereby consolidating their West China mission under one umbrella. It is therefore the ideal year to gain a snapshot of West China missionary statistics.
Analysis of this dataset of 607 total individuals stationed in Sichuan is presented in a series of bar and pie charts linked to this record. This dataset is one of three branches of a strategy to identify and characterize the cohort that the umbrella project, Imaginaries and Modernities Among West China Missionaries, focuses on. The other two are: 1. a dataset of biographical information about over 700 missionaries mentioned in diaries, letters and reports held primarily among West China missionary descendant families, and also in archives; and 2. qualitative data found in these same diaries, letters and reports.
Those stationed in Yunnan and Guizhou have been omitted from the 1926 WCMAB analysis. Their inclusion would not make a significant difference to the results because the numbers are small and, if anything, would strengthen the demarcation made between cohort and non-cohort missionaries. These charts focus on percentages of missionaries along lines of nationality, denomination, geography, gender and education. By analyzing these variables, we can clearly see the subset of missionaries who are in a cohort as distinct from those who are not. With the exception of gender, each of these variables sets the two groups apart.
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Creator
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West China Missions Advisory Board
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Date Created
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June 1926
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Is Part Of
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WCMN 28(7)
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Record Date
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2024-11-06
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Contributor
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Cory Willmott
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Type
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Dataset
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Published In
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Supplement, West China Missionary News 28(7): 1-28
1926 Sichuan Missionaries' Nationalities
1926 Denominations of all Missionaries in Sichuan
1926 Field Locations of all Missionaries in Sichuan
1926 Gender & Marriage Status of North American Missionaries in Sichuan
1926 Denomination and Gender of All Missionaries in Sichuan
1926 Sichuan Men's Higher Education Degrees
1926 Sichuan Women's Higher Education Degrees
