Rumor and Secret Space:
Organ-Snatching Tales and Medical Missions in Nineteenth-Century China
Xiaoli Tian1
Department of Sociology
The University of Hong Kong
Tian, Xiaoli. 2015. “Rumor and Secret Space: Organ-Snatching Tales and Medical Missions in
Nineteenth-Century China.” Modern China. 41 (2): 197-236.
Abstract
This article examines anti-missionary rumors that prevailed in nineteenth-century China and led
to the Tianjin Missionary Case of 1870. Relying on archival sources, I show that many rumors
were fueled by Protestant missionaries’ medical practices in addition to political conflicts.
Furthermore, the rumors were framed in spatial concepts. The rumors arose and persisted not
because the missionaries deliberately hid information, but rather because the visibility of their
daily activities, the accessibility of the space they inhabited and practiced in, and the spatial
placement of their living quarters contradicted the cultural norms in nineteenth-century China
and therefore prevented the Chinese from acquiring correct information about the missionaries. I
argue that the ambiguity of information that causes rumor is the result of the confrontation
between two ways of understanding space.
1
I would like to thank Andrew Abbott, Guy Alitto, Stefan Bargheer, Louise Edwards, Robert Freeland, Sida Liu,
Daniel Menchik, Pamela Oliver, and Dingxin Zhao for their advice on this paper. I especially appreciate the helpful
comments from the reviewers of Modern China.
Keywords: rumor, secret space, China, medicine, missionary
Wild rumors about Christian missionaries1—for example, that they gouged out the eyes
of the dying, opened hospitals in order to eat the children admitted as patients, and cut open
pregnant women to make medicine from their fetuses—were pervasive in nineteenth-century
China and widely believed (Su, 2001; ter Haar, 2006; Li, 2009).2 Contrary to the opinion that
rumor is a temporary phenomenon thriving only in periods of social duress (Knapp, 1944), these
rumors were extraordinarily long-lived. In many cases, the rumors directly aroused, preceded, or
were otherwise related to “anti-missionary cases.” These anti-missionary cases, which usually
involved attacks on missionary stations or churches and the subsequent beating or killing of
missionaries, played a significant role in Sino-foreign relations in the latter part of the 1800s
(Fairbank, 1957; Cohen, 1963; Lu, 2011).3
Scholars have noted that the provision of medical services constituted an important part
of Protestant missionaries’ activities in nineteenth-century China (Croizier, 1968; Walls, 1996;
Grundmann, 2005; He, 2006; Yang, 2006). Anti-missionary rumors coincided with popular
suspicion toward medical missionaries, but studies of these rumors have yet to explore how they
were related to missionaries’ medical practices. To fill this gap, I focus here on the Tianjin
Missionary Case of 1870. I choose to focus on this case, from among the huge number of antimissionary cases, because it is considered to be one of the most important anti-missionary cases
of the late Qing Dynasty (Cohen, 1963) and because rumors played a significant role. Besides its
prominence, another major reason I concentrate on this case is the basic one of availability of
source materials. The investigation of the Tianjin Missionary Case after the incident produced
valuable historical documents that allow us to study the historical processes related to rumor
production. Although more than eight hundred anti-missionary cases were recorded in
1
nineteenth-century China, this is the only one, among those that were thoroughly investigated, in
which the nature of rumors was discussed.
While exploring the historical archives, especially those on the Tianjin Missionary Case,
I noticed the importance of space and secrecy in the formation of those rumors. To the Chinese,
the missionaries’ activities were seen as “evil” because they were “secret,” and they were
“secret” because they were conducted in a space that looked secret to the Chinese but not
necessarily to the missionaries themselves. This finding from the data pushed me to look more
seriously at the role of space in rumor production and circulation. I then looked at the
missionaries’ side. There is no evidence that the missionaries wanted to appear secretive to the
Chinese. But they ended up seeming that way because their understanding of what constituted a
secret space was different from that of the Chinese. I also found that the missionaries’ medical
practices increased the sense of secrecy of the space they occupied in the community. How
different customs involving space generate specific rumors will be the focus of this article. Here,
in order to enrich the understanding of the communication difficulties between China and the
West, I apply an analytical approach that derives from the social science literature on rumors and
is different from approaches used in existing narratives of this well-known event in late imperial
China.
To do this, I draw mainly on English- and Chinese-language archival documents, as well
as on official Qing publications. In the discussion that follows, I first provide historical accounts
of surgeries performed by Protestant medical missionaries and how they were perceived by local
patients, the rise of suspicion concerning Western medicine, the origination and dissemination of
rumors, the Tianjin Missionary Case and its subsequent investigation, and the political and
cultural conflicts between the Westerners and the Chinese. After reviewing some studies of
2
rumors in other contexts, I then identify and examine the problematic of rumor itself by
scrutinizing the spatial aspects of Christian missionaries’ activities.
Historical Context: Medical Missions and the Spread of Eye-Gouging Rumors
Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, Protestant missionaries had been coming
to China to evangelize and convert the Chinese to Christianity.4 However, the Protestant
missionaries soon found that the Chinese were extremely resistant to their preaching, so they
instead began providing medical services to reduce opposition and to promote amicable contact
between themselves and the Chinese. The Protestant missionaries’ priority was the “saving of
souls,” but hospitals and clinics produced more converts than preaching did (Lowe, 1895;
Lambuth, 1920; Balme, 1921). Soon Protestant missionaries accepted medical work as the most
effective evangelical tool in China (Whyte, 1988: 134).5 As a result, the number and activities of
medical missionaries in China increased significantly. For example, in 1860, there were about
eighty-one Protestant missionaries in China (Cohen, 1963), thirty-six of whom were medical
missionaries.6 By 1850 there were at least ten missionary hospitals, and by 1889 the number had
grown to sixty-one (Balme, 1921: 85).
The Protestant missionaries’ medical services attracted a lot of patients in a short period
of time. For example, in a Shanghai hospital started by William Lockhart, a medical missionary
sent to China by the London Missionary Society, there were only two or three patients a day in
1844, the year the hospital opened. But in two years’ time, the total number of patients treated
annually at the hospital grew to over ten thousand (Lockhart, 1861: 264). In the early 1860s,
medical services became the most visible, most enduring, and most appreciated of means of
3
reducing prejudice and disseminating the Gospel at the majority of the Protestant missions (Hood,
1986: 74–84; Kessler, 1996; Brown, 1997: 69–70).
The early Protestant medical missionaries were especially successful in ophthalmic
surgery and removing huge external tumors and bladder stones (Wong and Wu, 1936; Choa,
1990). Consequently, the Chinese showed a lot of gratitude for the missionaries’ medical
services:
The feeling of confidence on the part of the patients is worthy of notice. One of
these was reminded shortly before the operation that with all the care that could
be taken the result was sometimes fatal—he interrupted the remark by saying, “I
have been too long acquainted with you, doctor, have seen too much in this
hospital with my own eyes, to require [you] now to inspire my confidence.” The
operation was successful, and the man, soon restored to health, returned to his
family. His father, who was a learned man, wrote a letter of thanks for the kind
treatment of his son, expressing his abundant thanks for favours which he could
not recompense (Lockhart, 1861: 311).
This was typical of stories that were told by many medical missionaries in different
places to show their achievements. Peter Parker, who was the first full-time American medical
missionary to China, constantly mentioned the gratitude shown by the Chinese. According to
Parker’s reports, patients presented numerous tablets and poems containing expressions of their
gratitude (Parker Hospital Report 11). A merchant who had been operated upon for cataracts
stated that he would have Parker’s picture engraved on wood, with writing explaining what
Parker had done for him. Many patients wanted to bow before him, touching their foreheads to
the floor to show how grateful they were (Parker, 1836). Numerous medical missionaries
4
reported that their Chinese patients showed their appreciation by sending them little gifts of eggs,
tea, cakes, and so on (Schofield and Schofield, 1898: 183).
Despite their initial success in attracting attention and earning the gratitude of the
Chinese, the missionaries soon found that their medical practices fed wild rumors against them,
no matter how much they denied the accusations (Zinsser, 1940). Missionaries’ medical practices
were often misunderstood by the Chinese, and this only became worse in the post-1860 era. The
details can be found in numerous anti-missionary pamphlets, which accused the Christian
missionaries of taking the eyes and the hearts of the Chinese for use in medical or alchemical
experiments, drugging and raping Chinese women, and giving Chinese women and children
anesthetics to poison them (Wang, 1984: 5, 7–10, 21, 158).7
Eye Surgeries and Eye-Gouging Rumors
One of the most widely circulated rumors was that the Christian missionaries snatched
the eyes from their Chinese patients, stored the eyeballs in jars, and hid the jars in church
basements. This rumor was broadly believed by the Chinese people, who also believed that
Chinese eyes were desirable to Westerners for various imagined purposes—for example, for
their medical powers, because they were useful in photography, or because they contained lead,
which could be refined to make silver (Wang, 1984: 9). Ter Haar indicates that kidnapping
scares—in which fetuses and children were supposedly stolen so that their organs could be used
to prepare medicine—were a regular phenomenon in the history of China (2006: 106–8).
However, eye gouging was a new rumor subject that appeared only in the nineteenth century.
The rumors about eye gouging by Christian missionaries emerged as early as the 1840s.
In Hai guo tu zhi (An illustrated gazetteer of the maritime countries), a popular book written by a
5
well-known geographer and thinker of the Qing Dynasty, an article introducing Christianity
claimed that when Chinese converts were sick and dying, the Christian missionaries came to take
their eyes. Then, when they died, their bodies would be covered with a white cloth to hide the
fact that their eyes had been removed (Wei, 1852). In the 1850s, the rumors of Christians
gouging out eyes and taking hearts were circulated in southern China, especially in Guangdong
and Fujian Provinces. The rumors usually went like this: “Christian missionaries eat the dead
body. When people are dead, the missionaries take their eyes to extract silver. One hundred taels
[liang] of Chinese lead can make eight taels of silver. Only Chinese eyes are usable; Westerners’
eyes are not effective” (Wang, 1984: 154–65; translation mine from the Chinese original). For
reasons that were unknown, it was believed that Chinese eyeballs contained lead. In the late
1860s the circulation of anti-Christian rumors reached a high point. It was not clear whether the
distribution of those rumors was organized or random. Cohen (1963) believed that “it was
organized in certain instances, spontaneous in others” (224).
It is important to note that although only Protestant missionaries were actively using
medicine as an evangelical tool, the medicine practiced provided material for the rumors against
all Christian missionaries. That is because the common people of China had not yet learned to
distinguish between Protestantism and Catholicism, grouping both under the latter designation
(Cohen, 1963: 70).8
These widely believed rumors about eye gouging coincided with the historical fact that
the early hospitals established by Protestant missionaries in China were ophthalmic hospitals
(Wong and Wu, 1936: 302–32). For example, Thomas Colledge, a Scottish surgeon who founded
the Medical Missionary Society in China, opened a hospital in Macao in 1828 that chiefly treated
eye diseases (Wong and Wu, 1936: 308–15). In addition, Peter Parker’s Canton Hospital, opened
6
in 1835, was called “the Ophthalmic Hospital in Canton” and cured many patients with eye
diseases (Parker Hospital Reports 1–15). Following the approach of Parker, most Protestant
medical missionaries favored the practice of ophthalmic surgery. For example, Benjamin Hobson,
a medical missionary sent by the London Missionary Society, reported that patients with eye
problems constituted the majority at the Macao Hospital operated by the Medical Missionary
Society in China (Hobson, 1844).
Given this preference, it is not surprising that the Protestant medical missionaries treated
more cases of eye disease than any other kind of medical problem. During the first three months
of his practice at the Ophthalmic Hospital in Canton, Parker treated 1,020 eye cases among the
1,061 patients who visited the hospital; thus, eye cases accounted for about 96% of the total
cases (Parker Hospital Report 1). In the following years of operation, the Ophthalmic Hospital in
Canton continued to specialize in the treatment of eye diseases, especially the removal of
cataracts. From July 1, 1845, to December 31, 1847, the hospital treated 7,571 patients. Of these,
5,669 presented with eye diseases, constituting nearly 75% of the total (Parker Hospital Report
14).
Eye operations were also a daily practice in other Protestant missionary hospitals.
William Lockhart also found that eye disease was prevalent in his Chusan hospital, which was
run by the Medical Missionary Society in China. Lockhart reported that from September 23,
1840, to February 20, 1841, the Chusan hospital treated 1,554 patients for eye disease, or about
44% of the total 3,502 patients (Choa, 1990: 37).
This preference for treating eye diseases was true even in hospitals opened by the
Chinese with Western doctors. According to an 1886 report written by John Kenneth Mackenzie,
a British medical missionary sent by the London Missionary Society, 589 surgeries were
7
performed at the Viceroy’s Hospital9 that year; of those, 212 were eye surgeries. In addition, eye
diseases had been the most common type of affliction treated at the institution (Bryson, 1891:
390–95).
From the reports of Parker, Lockhart, and others, it was evident that the incidence of eye
diseases in China was considerable:
The number of blind people was particularly very great. Some time during the
1830s, it was ascertained that there were about four thousand seven hundred fifty
blind people among Canton’s million or million and a half people and this number
probably did not include half of those who had diseased eyes (Parker Hospital
Report 4).
Eye problems constituted such a great portion of their cases that medical missionaries
often asked why the Chinese suffered so much from diseases of the eye. They blamed it on the
fact that Chinese medical practitioners were particularly ignorant in the treatment of eyes:
It may be replied that probably the ordinary amount of ophthalmia is not much
greater among them than among the people from other countries. . . . However . . .
the native surgeons being unable to arrest disease . . . the results of inflammation
have seriously affected the state of the organ (Lockhart, 1861: 250).
Faced with this situation, the medical missionaries found an advantage in their ability to
operate on eyes and treat surgical diseases that Chinese medical practitioners were ignorant of
and thus unable to treat. Another reason why the medical missionaries favored the practice of
ophthalmic surgery is because it could dramatically restore sight, hence facilitating the patient’s
conversion to Christianity. The Medical Missionary Society in China justified this focus as
follows:
8
To many hundreds of human beings, suffering from blindness, perhaps the
severest affliction with which it has pleased Providence to visit our imperfect
nature, the blessed light of heaven had been restored, the darkness of a long
gloomy night dispelled, and the road to happiness and useful industry once more
before re-opened eyes (Ljungstedt, 1839: 58).
The fact that the eye-gouging rumors appeared only after the Protestant missionaries
began to practice eye surgery on Chinese subjects suggests that the rumors were closely related
to the Protestant missionaries’ medical practices. Although the Protestant missionaries were
successful in their efforts, the ophthalmic surgeries were understood as something else by the
Chinese. For example, Parker recorded a case of a patient suffering from cataracts. The patient
said to him, “If you like, you may take them both out and put them in again” (Parker Hospital
Report 14). Parker told the story in his report as evidence of the trust he had gained from the
Chinese patients. However, we can see from this story that eye surgery was already
misunderstood by the patient: she thought the doctor was going to take out her eyes. This
misunderstood process could have easily been interpreted as eye gouging by observers.
The rumors persisted well into the twentieth century and were also recorded by many
Protestant medical missionaries. For instance, Dugald Christie, a Protestant medical missionary
who had worked in northeast China, recorded his observation of this popular belief:
[It was believed that] the Catholics and we were alike anxious to obtain children’s
hearts and eyes, and were willing to give large sums for them. When the priest
called, he brought under his robe a little child. We retired into a dark room,
weighed it, removed the eyes and heart, and agreed upon the price (Christie and
Christie, 1914: 6).
9
Christie’s account suggests that the eye-gouging rumor was widespread in the nineteenth century.
The Chinese believed that the missionaries had opened hospitals to collect Chinese eyes and use
the eyeballs to make a powder that was needed for photography. “How can a box see to make
pictures,” it was reasoned, “if it has not eyes inside?” (Christie and Christie, 1914: 5)
John MacGowan, a member of the London Missionary Society, also reported that he and
his fellow missionaries were accused of removing the eyes of Christians after death, a rumor that
was believed by many: “The scholars accepted it as true; the commonest coolies repeated it; the
middle classes everywhere talked about it as a fact, and even the mandarins were prejudiced
against the Christians, because they believed the common report” (1909: 52). Even when
missionaries came to China in the 1930s, they still found that Christian missionaries were
believed to be foreign devils who had come to China to scoop out the eyes of Chinese children so
as to grind them up for medicine to send abroad (Adolph, 1945: 39).
Medical Space and Rumors
To further understand the content of the rumors, I analyzed 207 anti-missionary
pamphlets.10 Based on this analysis, I found that the majority of the rumors were related to either
medicine or secret spaces, or both.
<Table 1 here>
Many rumors were related to Protestant missionaries’ medical practices or the medicines
they distributed. For example, the accusations that Christian missionaries extracted eyes, hearts,
kidneys, or other human body parts or fluids to make magical medicine, particularly from
children, pregnant women, or the dying, were the most widely circulated and deeply believed.
Table 1 shows that rumors of organ snatching were the most frequent: 66% of the pamphlets
10
contained this accusation. The charges of giving anesthetics and poisoning Chinese patients
appeared in 35% and 29% of the pamphlets, respectively. In addition, charges of kidnapping
children were also related to medicine because people believed that Christian missionaries seized
Chinese children and women to make medicine from their body parts.
Many rumors were expressed in spatial terms. These were rumors regarding, for example,
the closed doors of church buildings; the exclusion of the public from churches and missionary
residences; the private hearing of women’s confessions; men and women living together in one
room; the hiding of weapons and ammunition in the basements of the churches; and the hiding of
Chinese patients’ vital organs, including eyeballs, in the church basements. The sexual seduction
of women was the second most frequently attributed crime, mentioned in 55% of the pamphlets.
Closed doors were mentioned in 22% of the pamphlets. It is worthwhile to emphasize that
rumors about the sexual seduction or rape of women were also derived from the spatial
conceptions of the Chinese people. The suspicion of sexual seduction or rape was related to
activities in which women participated in religious activities in the same room with men. My
content analysis of the rumors suggests that people were concerned with what they saw during
everyday encounters, especially those elements that were unfamiliar, like the church basements
and the closed doors on the churches.
Two pictures from an anti-missionary pamphlet further illustrate the way in which rumors
were formed.11 In Figure 1, while two Christian missionaries gouge out the eyes of a Chinese
subject in a room, another watches the door carefully, and two others guard the entrance to the
building, indicating that the missionaries do not want their activities to be seen by others. The
kneeling figures in the foreground are two converts who are spies and obey the foreigners.
<Figure 1 here>
11
Figure 2 is titled “A little boy losing his kidney”. Kidney is important because it was
believed in traditional Chinese medicine that the kidney was a vital organ needed for
reproduction (Cheng, 1999). Figure 2 is a warning to parents of the possibility that the evil
missionaries will cut out their children’s kidneys, so they cannot have descendants. While the
whole family surrounds the child, a man outside is listening furtively. The warning is that if the
family and parents are not careful enough to prevent the grunting devil (xie jiao, “foreign
religion”) from coming to their household door, the whole family will regret it.
<Figure 2 here>
From both the pamphlets and the pictures, we can see that space was an important
element in the construction of rumors. The two repeated themes in the rumors, medicine and
space, actually both pertain to the theme of secrecy. Indeed, the word “secrecy” (mimi) is
mentioned explicitly in many pamphlets. As I will discuss later, the medicine practiced by
Protestant missionaries looked secretive to the Chinese. Secrecy was viewed as structured into
the space where medicine was practiced.
Indeed, when Christian missionaries came to China, they also occupied space in local
communities. The most obvious way in which missionaries made themselves felt on the local
scene was through the mission compounds they occupied and the buildings they built, sometimes
in a Western architectural style (Renshaw, 2005). These new spatial establishments changed the
local landscape. For example, both Protestant and Catholic missionaries were blamed for
bringing bad luck to the local community because their churches were built in a manner that
disturbed geomantic forces (feng shui) (Feuchtwang, 1974: 172–75, 236–54; Wyman, 1997).
Therefore, it is necessary to focus on how the Chinese people responded to the appearance of
unfamiliar spaces in their local environment and on the conflict between these unfamiliar spaces
12
and the relationship to space in their tradition. In the next section, I will use the Tianjin
Missionary Case to explore how the spatial arrangements of daily activities contributed to the
misunderstandings between the Chinese and the Christian missionaries.
The Tianjin Missionary Case
In the mid to late 1860s, rumors about kidnapping and eye gouging by Christian
missionaries began to circulate from southern to central and northern China, including Hunan,
Hubei, Zhili, and Jiangxi Provinces (Zeng, 1987: 6979–80).12 These rumors spread in Tianjin as
well, frequently blaming the Catholic missions. At that time, the French Sisters of Charity had
been giving small cash rewards to people who brought homeless or abandoned children to their
orphanage in the city of Tianjin, strengthening the rumor that the sisters removed children’s
hearts and eyes to make medicine.13
The summer of 1870 was a very hot one, in which epidemics killed forty children in the
Tianjin orphanage in twenty days in May 1870, increasing the already high number of child
deaths there. Under pressure from so many deaths, the sisters hastily placed the dead bodies in
trunks that served as coffins and carelessly buried them in a public cemetery at night. On June 4,
it was discovered that stray dogs had dug up one of these coffins and eaten the bodies of two
children inside. When people saw the children’s destroyed bodies, wild tales began to spread.
Suspicious about the deaths, hundreds went to the cemetery and dug up more of the coffins,
trying to find out what had happened to the children. To their horror, they found coffins that each
contained the bodies of multiple children. These discoveries outraged both local officials and
commoners and fortified the rumor that missionaries were taking children’s eyes and hearts to
make medicine.
13
Two days later, on June 6, local residents arrested two men, Zhang Shuan and Guo Guai,
and sent them to the Tianjin Yamen. They were accused of kidnapping children in Jinghai and
selling them to the French orphanage in Tianjin. They confessed that they had used anesthetics to
kidnap young children, but they denied the charge that they had used the children’s organs to
make medicine. No evidence was found for this accusation, either (Liang, 2002).
On June 18, several local residents accused Wu Lanzhen, a nineteen-year-old Tianjin
resident, of kidnapping, and he was arrested and brought to the Tianjin Yamen for questioning.
Wu confessed that he had gotten the anesthetic he used for kidnapping from the missionaries and
claimed that his crimes had been instigated by a converted Chinese Christian named Wang San.
He also confessed that he had previously kidnapped one child and had received five yin yuan
from the French Sisters of Charity in exchange for the child. Most importantly, he claimed to
have also sold children to the janitor of the orphanage, which confirmed the rumor that the
kidnapping was related to the missionaries. Wu Lanzhen’s confession seriously raised tensions
between the townspeople and the orphanage staff.
Tianjin residents demanded that the local yamen arrest Wang San. With turmoil starting
to grow, hundreds of Chinese gathered outside the French Sisters of Charity’s church on June 19
and demanded access so they could investigate. French consul Henri Fontanier, trying to play his
role as protector of Catholics, refused the request.14 Realizing the seriousness of the situation,
missionaries and foreign officials blamed local officials and the gentry for stoking the tensions
and asked local authorities to take action to exert control (Liang, 2002: 18–20).
Together with other local officials, the Beiyang commerce official Chong Hou, who was
the highest-ranking Chinese official in the Tianjin district at that time, met with Fontanier on
June 20. A decision was made that they would take Wu Lanzhen to the church on June 21. On
14
June 21, they searched the whole church but did not find anything suspicious. Nor could Wu
Lanzhen identify the Chinese convert Wang San mentioned in his affidavit. But by this time
thousands of people had congregated outside the church, and turmoil began to grow.
Amid the growing unrest, Fontanier asked local officials to drive the crowd away from
the church. In response, Chong Hou, who had already left the scene, sent a few officials there to
try to persuade people to disperse. Unsatisfied with the local officials’ attempts, Fontanier left
the church and, with his assistant, headed to Chong Hou’s yamen. The angry Chinese crowd
followed him to the yamen, where he forced his way inside. Once inside, Fontanier aimed a gun
at Chong Hou and fired, but missed. Then a local official, Liu Jie, came to the yamen with a
large crowd following him. The moment Fontanier saw him, he rushed into the crowd and fired
at Liu Jie, but ended up killing Liu Jie’s servant instead. This was the last straw for the crowd,
which became furious and rioted, killing Fontanier and his assistant. The enraged crowd went on
to attack Christian institutions, including four Protestant mission stations, and to kill thirty to
forty Chinese converts and twenty-one foreigners. The destruction lasted for three hours.
Political and Social Conflicts behind the Rumors
Many historical and political factors contributed to the Tianjin Missionary Case
(Fairbank, 1957; Cohen, 1963). Most current literature looks at the incident as an outbreak of
hatred of imperialism against the background of religious, political, and economic contacts
between China and foreign powers (Fairbank, 1957; Mo and Guo, 2003). To be sure, it was not
an accident that the Tianjin Missionary Case happened in Tianjin, where the humiliating treaties
of 1858 had been signed and which was one of the earliest treaty ports. The actions of the
foreigners also played a part. Particularly, the French occupied a former imperial villa as their
15
consulate. To make things even worse, in 1869 the Catholics built a massive new cathedral,
Notre Dame des Victoires, together with an orphanage, on the site of a razed Buddhist temple
(Whyte, 1988). These actions increased tensions between foreigners and the locals and set the
stage for the violence in 1870 (Liang, 2002: 18–20).
Another possible source of resentment toward the foreigners was that the foreign
missionaries challenged the status and interests of the local gentry,15 who felt threatened by the
Christian missionaries and thus mobilized anti-Christian sentiments (Latourette, 1929: 348–50,
467–68; Cohen, 1963: 86–87, 141; Cohen, 1978: 556–60, 564–70). However, in a quantitative
study of all anti-missionary cases, Chen (1991) showed that the majority of the anti-missionary
cases were initiated and led by commoners, rather than by local gentry. Cohen (1963) noted that
“there were more than a few instances in the 1860’s in which popular hostility to the foreign
religion was aroused not by the gentry, but by the people’s direct contact with the missionaries
and converts” (174). Sweeten’s study of Catholics in Jiangxi also showed that, over four decades,
conflicts between Catholics and the local community in Jiangxi were not gentry-led movements
(2001: 2). Some more recent work also emphasized the role played by ordinary people in various
kinds of anti-imperialism movements in modern China (e.g., Li, 2004; Xi, 2008). Indeed, people
had various reasons for their attitudes toward Christianity. These came from personal or
community experiences rather than from prejudices passed on by the gentry.
In contrast to the political approach, ter Haar emphasizes a cultural tradition that had
existed in China for centuries. To ter Haar, the anti-missionary rumors involved stereotyped fears
of kidnapping and organ snatching that were built on well-established traditions of orally
transmitted fears and rumors (2006: 191). For the average Chinese, the missionaries were yet
another example of the outsider groups that were traditionally held responsible for such
16
kidnappings. Wyman (1997) also argues that missionaries were targeted not because they had the
characteristics of foreigners but because they fell into a categorizing scheme that differentiated
all outsiders from the locals. Suspicion toward outsiders is also the theme in Kuhn’s seminal
study of the queue-cutting and soul-stealing panic in the Qianlong period (Kuhn, 1990).
Ter Haar, Wyman, and Kuhn all identify an important characteristic of traditional
Chinese society: outsiders were regarded as suspicious. To be sure, missionaries were like other
outsiders to some extent. However, Christian missionaries were also different because they were
usually not as mobile as other outsiders who were traditionally blamed for kidnapping or organ
snatching. For instance, Christian missionaries built churches and lived in the local communities
for a much longer time than traveling monks or strangers from another town. Therefore, if
missionaries were discriminated against because they were outsiders, we would expect that such
suspicion would weaken after they had spent some time in the local communities. On the
contrary, missionaries were still regarded skeptically even after many years of residence in
China.16
Although they cannot fully explain the rumors, proponents of the cultural approach urge
us to look at the local encounters between the Chinese and the missionaries. Indeed, ordinary
Chinese people were more sensitive to elements that were close to their everyday life than to
ideologies such as anti-imperialism. For example, although it was not deliberate, the imprudence
of the Catholic sisters inadvertently encouraged kidnappings by some local bandits. To the sisters,
the cash reward of five yin yuan for a child was a small amount, but to many Chinese, five yin
yuan was enough to motivate a kidnapping. That was actually a lot of money in late nineteenthcentury China. In the market, one yin yuan was equivalent to one tael.17 For ordinary people, one
17
tael was enough for a few months’ living expenses (Peng, 1994). It seemed quite probable that
these rewards encouraged kidnapping; certainly many Chinese believed this.
However, while these factors may partly explain the outbreak of the Tianjin Missionary
Case, none of them explains the substance of the rumors or why they were so widely believed by
the nineteenth-century Chinese. No matter what their attitudes were toward the foreigners, it
seems that the vast majority of the Chinese were firmly convinced that the malpractice attributed
to the missionaries was true. To better understand this, next I will review some studies of rumors
in other contexts, hoping the analytic and theoretical tools they offer can help to explain why
people believe rumors.
Social Studies of Rumors
Rumor has been regarded as a way to either deal with individual or collective emotions,
derived from fears and anxieties, or to express the underlying hopes, fears, and hostilities of the
group (Knapp, 1944; Allport and Postman, 1947; Shibutani, 1966). Both early and recent rumor
studies share the consensus that the message of rumors is, by nature, an unconfirmed explanation
of events at the time of transmission (Knapp, 1944; Allport and Postman, 1947; Peterson and
Gist, 1951; Donovan, 2007; Fine and Ellis, 2010). Although many elements have been identified
as necessary for rumor transmission (Klapper, 1960; Shibutani, 1966; McGuire, 1969; Rosnow,
1980), the ambiguity of information has been deemed the most essential (Allport and Postman,
1947; Rosnow and Fine, 1976; Rosnow, 1980). However, little research has been done on what
causes ambiguity. The ambiguity of information is either taken for granted or treated as a
conspiracy—a deliberate hiding and manipulation of information (Renard, 2007)—or else clearer
18
information is simply not available, such as when routine channels of communication break
down, do not exist, or cannot be trusted (Shibutani, 1966).
One potential reason for the unavailability of information is that it is kept hidden, as a
secret. Indeed, secrecy is an extreme form of inhibition of all types of knowledge or information
flow across boundaries (Simmel, 1906; Shils, 1956), which results in unclear information. It is
thus understandable that secrecy might give rise to rumors.
Most definitions of secrecy suggest a conscious and deliberate attempt by individuals to
conceal information. For example, Shils (1966) argues that secrecy is the mandatory, or
voluntary but calculated, concealment of information or activities. But sometimes information is
restricted without conscious effort by individuals or groups. For example, individuals simply
cannot successfully communicate many private thoughts. In some cases, “secrets” are maintained
only because outsiders do not have the intellectual capabilities to discover them (O’Connell,
1980; Tefft, 1980). Concealing information can be voluntary or mandatory, but it can also be
involuntary and nondeliberate. Therefore, we need to know the conditions under which the
involuntary and nondeliberate hiding of information might happen and what influence this can
have on rumor production and transmission.
To be sure, rumor arises from the failure of communication of information. However, this
failure or unavailability of information is not always caused by conspiracy. As Donovan (2007)
points out, the ambiguity surrounding rumors is often actively developed or imputed by
interlocutors themselves, and self-consciously subjective relationships to information are a more
relevant explanation than gullibility, or what Chorus (1953) describes as a lack of critical
capacity. That is to say, what people believe and why they believe or doubt some information is
contingent on the knowledge context. Reflecting these premises, therefore, I propose to resituate
19
rumors in relation to the cultural differences in ideas about space and secrecy, in order to
understand better why rumors arise and why they take a particular form.
Scattered mentions of the impact of space on rumors have appeared in the literature on
rumor studies. It has been noted that the collective-living habits of the Chinese have played an
essential role in the rumor that the Chinese workers in some African countries are prisoners
(Dobler, 2008; Yan and Sautman, 2012). Studies of organ-theft rumors in Africa and Latin
America also show that those rumors exploded during a period of increased international
adoptions, in which local residents could see that babies were being shipped from their poor
communities to foreign countries, alien spaces to which they did not have access
(Scheper‐Hughes, 2000; Campion‐Vincent, 2011). Fine and Ellis’s (2010) study of the rumors
that unsuspecting tourists’ kidneys were being stolen while they were abroad also shows how
people feel less in control of their body when they are in a foreign space.
Echoing these recent studies, the starting point of this article is a given conception of
space and of routinized spatial arrangements. I insist that existing customs of space can influence
the way people respond to newcomers, who usually organize their daily activities in different
spatial configurations. For example, missionaries in nineteenth-century China stored coal in the
church basement, a structure that was unknown to the Chinese, who usually used their backyards
for coal storage. The premise of this essay is that an examination of anti-missionary rumors can
help us understand the ways in which rumor can be seen as an instance of how different concepts
of space shape micro-politics. I want to interrogate and contextualize these rumors in the daily
experience of the people who were involved: both the Chinese and the missionaries. To do this,
we need to look at local practices. Thus, I return to the historical case at hand, where Zeng
20
Guofan’s investigation and reports about the Tianjin Missionary Case give us an account of what
the nineteenth-century Chinese officials thought had happened.
Space in the Tianjin Missionary Case
After the Tianjin Missionary Case, the Central Court ordered Zeng Guofan, who was the
governor-general of Zhili Province at that time, to investigate it.18 Zeng went to Tianjin and took
on the last mission of his political career.
Zeng Guofan’s Investigation
Zeng’s first memorial, which he presented on June 27, 1870, outlined the policies that the
Central Court should pursue. He pointed out that the official investigation needed to determine
two things: (1) whether the rumored connection actually existed between the Catholic church in
Tianjin and kidnappings that had taken place in the city in the spring of 1870 and (2) whether
there was any truth to the widespread rumors that the Christian missionaries extracted eyes and
hearts from Chinese patients (Zeng, 1987: 6967–68).19
On July 21, Zeng’s report on his investigation of the case was presented to the throne. It
stated that the Chinese people’s misunderstandings were the main reason for the incident, and he
claimed that the eye-snatching rumors were false. In a July 27 memorial, Zeng again firmly
discounted the rumors about Catholic involvement in kidnappings (YWSM: TZ, 73: 44–45). He
noted that the charges against the missionaries in Tianjin were similar to rumors that had been
circulated earlier in Hunan and Jiangxi Provinces and more recently in Yangzhou (in Jiangsu
Province), in Daming and Guanping (both in Zhili Province), and in Tianmen (in Hubei
Province). However, the truth or falsity of these rumors was never determined.
21
During his investigation, Zeng examined the space occupied by the Catholic priests and
sisters. He investigated the basement of the Catholic church, which was not a structure common
to Chinese buildings, and found out that it was just a place to store coal. He and many others also
went to other parts of the church and found no eyes or hearts, contrary to the claims in the
pamphlets and rumors. Further, he examined the corpses of dead children that had been buried
and dug up, and found that, contrary to claims, their eyes and hearts had not been taken (Zeng,
1987: 6980).
In his reports, Zeng took advantage of his firsthand experiences to make it clear that he
had found absolutely no evidence supporting any of the charges of kidnapping or organ
snatching (Zeng, 1987: 6980, 6992). Based on his investigations, Zeng reported that the popular
suspicion came from the following five sources (Zeng, 1987: 6981; translation mine from the
Chinese original):
1.
The church kept its doors closed all year long, so it was hard for people to know what was
going on inside. Both the church and the orphanage had basements, but Chinese people
never entered the basements. It was believed that children were hidden in them. Moreover,
these buildings had not been built by local workers, so nobody knew the truth about the
basements.
2.
People who went to the mission station for medical treatment occasionally refused to return
home, including one teenage girl, the child of a member of the local gentry.
3.
The sisters took in dying children and adults, and the Chinese people may have seen the
sisters washing the eyes of the newly deceased. Also, boats from other countries delivered
hundreds of people to the church, but nobody ever saw them leave.
22
4.
There was a popular belief that mothers and children received by the Catholics lived in
separate parts of the church building and sometimes did not see one another for a whole
year.
5.
There had been kidnappings in Tianjin in the spring of 1870, and the church had been
implicated in them. The Chinese people were suspicious because the church buried corpses
at night, with two to three corpses sharing one coffin.
These five sources of suspicion suggest that people’s understanding of space, more so
than their understanding of medicine itself, was essential to their suspicion of the Christian
missionaries. The first source, the church’s closed doors, meant that the space was not accessible
or visible to others. The second concerned the medical treatments received by the Chinese, but
what mattered was that the treated people chose to stay in the hospital instead of going home.
The third also concerned a suspicion about the one-way interchange between the inside and
outside spaces. The fourth contradicted norms about the spatial placement of people: mothers
and children should live together, but they were put in different rooms in the church. The fifth,
the kidnapping scare, was indirectly related to medicine, but the fact that corpses were buried at
night implied that it was done secretly. Burying two or three corpses in one coffin was
problematic because it contradicted existing perceptions of how space should be shared.
Zeng realized that there was a connection between notions of secret space and the popular
suspicion of and anxieties about the church. In fact, he explicitly mentioned the “sense of
secrecy” caused by the architectural structure of the church (Zeng, 1987: 6980).20 The general
aura of secrecy that enveloped the management of the orphanage, dispensary, church, and
hospital was the most important source of popular suspicion.
23
In addition to showing the falsity of the rumors, Zeng also tried to control their effects.
His intentions to dispel the rumors about missionary work were well documented in his diaries
and letters to family member (see Liang, 2002: 30, 32, 75–93). He requested that the imperial
court reveal the truth to the country, both to pacify the foreigners and to dispel the suspicions of
the gentry and the commoners. This report is remarkable not only because Zeng based it on facts
and investigation, but also because it represented the only effort of Chinese authorities to clear
up the rumors so widely believed by the people. As a result of Zeng’s investigation of the Tianjin
case, the throne issued an edict: “Since the rumors about the Catholics have been proven false, in
the future people of the empire need have no suspicions in this regard” (YWSM: TZ, 73: 23).
Zeng’s Failure
One might expect that Zeng’s report and the edict issued by the emperor would help
dismiss the rumors, because if rumor were caused by ambiguity of information (Allport and
Postman, 1947; Rosnow and Fine, 1976; Rosnow, 1980), one potential way to dismiss rumor
would be to provide warranted and clear information. That was exactly what Zeng did. He tried
to provide clear and warranted information (based on investigation, issued by the officials, and
endorsed by the emperor). However, even after the official announcement was made, people still
did not discard the belief that Christian churches were involved in the activities decried in the
rumors. Instead, they strongly criticized Zeng’s memorial clearing the missionaries of the charge
that they extracted eyes and hearts from Chinese patients (Zhu, 2001: 314–15).
Instead of changing popular opinion, Zeng was accused of being a traitor. A July 24
report to the throne by Song Jin, a Qing government official, said, “There are jars of young
children’s eyes in the orphanage of the church” (reproduced in Liang, 2002: 114). As a result,
24
even Empress Dowager Cixi, the de facto ruler, believed that there were stolen eyes in the
orphanages. In her edict to Zeng, she said that “when people entered and destroyed the
orphanage, they found eyes and hearts of children. People handed them in to Chong Hou, but
Chong Hou destroyed the evidence instead of reporting it to the court” (reproduced in Liang,
2002: 116).
Under great pressure, the Court was forced to issue an imperial order relieving Zeng of
his command (Zhu, 2001: 316).21 Zeng retired to his viceroyalty at Nanjing and was even
expunged from the list of officials from Hunan Province. In the end, he was under such great
pressure that he had to admit in a later memorial that the accusations of eye snatching might be
true (Zeng, 1987: 7096).
The tragic end of Zeng Guofan’s political career suggests that the rumors about
missionaries were related to something deeply embedded in the culture of the era. In the
following section, I search for these elements by looking at the way in which missionaries
organized their practices and the social context in which they conducted their daily activities.
Secrecy and Spatial Arrangements
The analyses above suggest that rumors and popular suspicion were related to the “secret
space” involved in the missionaries’ activities. To understand this, we need to look at the local
sense of space. A sense of space is the attribution of meaning to a place, natural or built
(Rotenbert and McDonogh, 1993). I find that the visibility of activities, accessibility, and the
spatial placement of people were important to the local people’s understanding of space. In this
section, I discuss missionaries’ activities with regard to these three aspects of space.
25
The Visibility of Activities
First of all, medical missions played an important role in Protestant missionaries’
evangelical activities, but the visibility of activities in Western medicine was mystifying from the
perspective of the traditional Chinese way of curing. In traditional Chinese medicine, treatment
took place in the house of the patient’s family. Usually when someone was sick, the family
would invite a physician to come to the patient’s bedside. The doctors conducted all the
diagnoses and treatments under the surveillance of the patient and the relatives (Hume, 1940:
120). Care of the patient was provided exclusively by the family members, in the patient’s own
house. If patients were old or very seriously sick, it was very important that they go back to their
own house no matter how far they were from home at the time (Yang, 2006: chap. 2).
But in the medicine practiced by Protestant missionaries, all diagnoses and treatments
were conducted in a place that was not visible to the patient’s family.22 Moreover, operations
were also done in a special room to which nobody had access except the doctors, nurses, and
patients. The relatives of the patients could not accompany them into the operating room, which
made it a “secret space.” Furthermore, care was provided by nurses. Patients stayed overnight in
the hospital, a very unfamiliar space, and died in the hospital instead of in their own homes.
Thus, when Chinese people entered the missionary hospitals, they entered a sequence of
unfamiliar spatial settings. The activities in missionary hospitals were much less visible than
those in what they understood to be a “healing” space. As the missionaries conducted their
activities in what the Chinese regarded as “secret space,” the patients did not know what to
expect. In the Chinese view, it looked as though the missionaries were hiding something from
them.
26
Later, some Protestant medical missionaries realized that these differences were
problematic and tried to reduce the level of “secret space” involved in their medical practices.
For example, to reduce suspicion toward the hospitals, most hospitals allowed the relatives of the
patients to accompany them while they stayed there overnight (Balme, 1921). Doctors also tried
to make their operations visible to the public. In early May 1883, rumors circulated that Scottish
missionaries, including Dugald Christie, were working with local Catholic priests and nuns who
were believed to be “anxious to obtain children’s hearts and eyes, and were willing to give large
sums for them.” To dispel the suspicions, Christie decided to allow the Chinese to watch while
he performed surgical operations. According to Christie’s record, dozens, and on some days even
hundreds, of Chinese visited the missionary hospital, not to seek treatment, but to watch him
perform operations. After a couple of years, Christie was accepted by the local community
because his open-air surgeries succeeded in dispelling many suspicions (Christie and Christie,
1914: 40–43). Dr. Worth at the Jiangyin mission station also tried to overcome the rumors that
foreign doctors were engaging in immoral medical practices by at first performing all operations
in public to show that no disfigurement of the body had occurred (Kessler, 1996: 31).
In addition to performing surgeries in public, some Protestant missionaries also changed
infrastructures to accommodate the local sense of space. For example, beginning in the late
nineteenth century, many missionary architects and their clients were consciously trying to make
their buildings superficially appear more “indigenous” and less Western (Renshaw, 2005: 63–64).
Another accommodation the Protestant missionaries initiated was to make the healing process
more visible to patients and their friends or relatives by changing the architectural structures of
the missionary hospitals. For example, in many missionary hospitals, “when their turn came, a
patient would enter a separate examination area sometimes partitioned off but often remaining in
27
full view. This arrangement was commonly adopted so that Chinese who were waiting, and any
friends or relatives who had accompanied the patient, could see what the doctor was doing. They
hoped that this would inspire confidence, allay fears, and prevent rumors from arising”
(Renshaw, 2005: 146). Some Protestant missionary hospitals built in the late nineteenth century
also incorporated segregation of the sexes in the waiting rooms (Renshaw, 2005: 142).
In a nutshell, in the late nineteenth century, some Protestant medical missionaries began
to realize the problem of secret space involved in their medical practice. They tried to
accommodate the local sense of medical space by making their curing processes more visible to
reduce suspicion and rumors.
Accessibility of Space
Accessibility is another important aspect of space. Compared to other religious buildings
and spaces in nineteenth-century China, Christian churches were less accessible and therefore
looked more secretive to the Chinese.
In nineteenth-century China, temples were public spaces where many secular community
activities took place (Yang, 1961). A Chinese village temple usually held a wide range of ritual
services and public activities, such as the holding of folk operas for the entertainment of the
temple deity, and the buying and selling that accompanied temple fairs (Brim, 1974; Litzinger,
1996: 51–52). Additionally, people slept overnight in Buddhist and Taoist temples. Temples that
were a short distance from a village were convenient resting places for beggars (Smith, [1899]
1970: 139). So these buildings and spaces were familiar to people.
However, the doors of the Christian churches were always closed, and people could not
enter them without permission. This was a practice shared by both Catholic and Protestant
28
missionaries in nineteenth-century China. Even in rural areas where non-Catholics could
sometimes observe church ceremonies, Catholic priests often restricted access. Because of this
inaccessibility, “to some non-Catholics, churches seemed dark places and took on an aura of
mystery” (Sweeten, 2001: 48). As Sweeten noted, “Religious services held in Catholics’ homes
might have led to suspicions about sectarian activities, but closed church doors caused other
misunderstandings” (2001: 50). Sweeten further points out that “allowing ready access to the
church would have showed the general public that there was nothing strange or mysterious
inside” (2001: 50).
The closed doors became such an important issue because they highlighted an underlying
difference in the understanding of privacy in the West and in China. As Huang (2000) points out,
the word “private” has different connotations in English and in Chinese. In nineteenth-century
China, Western travelers, adventurers, and missionaries found the Chinese customs inexplicable.
MacGowan noted that “such a thing as a private house, in the sense that it is sedulously guarded
from the outside world, is unknown to the Chinese” (1909: 241) and that “the doors [of the
Chinese home] are open the livelong day; every sound from the street, as well as the voices of
the neighbors in the adjoining compartments, penetrates it” (243). MacGowan used a story to
illustrate this point. While he was traveling in China, crowds followed him everywhere. Once, to
escape the persistent following, he dived into the house of a respectable-looking man who had
politely invited him to come in and sit down. However, the crowd entered with him, as though
the place belonged to them all, and they made themselves completely at home. Most of them
stayed as long as MacGowan did. The owner of the house did not appear to think there was
anything out of the ordinary in this intrusion on the privacy of his home (241). In a situation like
this, it is easy to see why the inaccessibility of churches would lead to suspicion of evil dealings.
29
The Christian churches not only had closed doors, but also were often located in walled,
gated, and guarded mission compounds. Indeed, the physical locus of missionaries’ work was the
mission station, a compound enclosed by a wall or fence (e.g., see Kessler, 1996: 9). From the
time they arrived in China until the time they left, most of the missionaries lived and worked in
the highly organized structure of the mission compound.23 All the facilities used by missionaries
were in a closed space. This was especially true of Protestant missionaries, and Catholic
missionaries who worked in big cities.
The majority of Protestant missionaries tended to be confined in the mission compounds
in the treaty ports (Austin, 2007: 118). Although both Protestant and Catholic missionaries
evangelized in both cities and villages, Protestants were more urban than were Catholics (Bays,
2012: 60). Even after the 1860 treaty allowed missionaries to travel into “the interior,”
Protestants tended to stay in the treaty ports and penetrated slowly beyond the port cities—at
least until the founding of the China Inland Mission in 1866.24
Compared to Protestants, Catholics penetrated more in rural areas, especially before 1860.
Before 1860, Catholic missionaries tended to work mainly in small villages to avoid harassment
from officials (Wiest, 2000). But after 1860, because the treaties permitted missionaries to enter
China’s interior and to recover Catholic Church property confiscated a century earlier, Catholic
missionaries established themselves in or near large cities (Sweeten, 2001: 41–42; Bays, 2012).
In those cities, Catholic priests built mission headquarters that gradually developed into large
mission compounds, just as Protestant missionaries did (Sweeten, 2001: 42).
Therefore, despite the different evangelical approaches, both Protestant and Catholic
missionaries built compounds in the cities. For many practical reasons, they retreated inside their
compounds and asked the Chinese to enter their space, a space that was usually separated from
30
the rest of the community (Austin, 2007: 119).
Such an establishment was owned or leased by the missionary society, and was
under the protection of the extraterritoriality clauses, being in effect an enclave of
“foreign territory” in its community. Inside the enclosure were the installations for
the work of the station and for the housing of its personnel: missionary residence,
a church, classroom buildings, a dispensary and/or hospital, and auxiliary
buildings. The compound was entered by way of a gate, usually guarded by a
Chinese keeper (Forsythe, 1971: 13).
Thus, the missionary compounds were closed units, segregated from the local
surroundings. They were independent and distinctive. Even in rural areas where large mission
compounds were less common, Catholics in some provinces tended to see their missions as
enclaves of Christianity in an alien society and used their churches to regroup the Chinese
converts into Catholic villages (Wiest, 2000: 252–53), in order to protect them from the
pressures and hostility of the non-Catholics (Lindenfeld, 2005). By doing so, the Catholics also
formed a closed unit and became largely “a community apart, isolated and often estranged from
their fellow Chinese” (Cohen, 1978: 557).
What made things more complicated was the fact that Protestant missionaries used their
medical practices to evangelize China. Because medical missionaries were both doctors and
ministers, they usually built their hospitals inside or adjacent to churches. Hospital and church
were usually in one building, gated and guarded. For the local people, it was very hard to tell the
difference between the church, inside which foreigners practiced a strange religion, and the
hospital. The miraculous atmosphere of the church reinforced the mystery of the hospitals
maintained by the medical missionaries. As Zeng recognized, the general aura of secrecy that
31
enveloped the management of the orphanage, dispensary, church, and hospital was the most
important source of popular suspicion.
To be sure, many of the earliest missionary hospitals established in treaty ports were not
located in mission compounds. Rather, they used existing (Chinese) buildings (Renshaw, 2005:
51). But many of them were still secluded for the practical reason that it was hard for
missionaries to secure a good location as their rental, and buying was not allowed until the 1860s
(Cadbury and Jones, 1935: 37–38; Parks, 1948). For example, Peter Parker’s Canton Hospital
was confined in the Thirteen Factories, the area where the foreign traders lived in Canton (see
Figure 3).
<Figure 3 here>
The physical style and size of church buildings also played a part. In the early years and
in rural areas, most churches and their affiliated facilities were small and modest,
inconspicuously located in existing Chinese buildings. Those buildings were not different from
those around them (Renshaw, 2005: 51–52). For example, Dr. Worth’s clinic at the Jiangyin
mission station was a rough and small clinic in a rented building in the city. “Its construction was
so flimsy that an opium addict once kicked down the wall of his room and escaped” (Kessler,
1996: 31). The hospitals missionaries later built in the port cities, however, “tended to be in
either a ‘colonial’, or modest foreign style” (Renshaw, 2005: 52). Also after 1860, when
Catholics began to build their mission headquarters in cities, more and more church buildings
were large and built solidly of brick and stone (Sweeten, 2001: 43), making them highly visible
because of their sheer size and European architectural style. These architectural styles, combined
with the hospitals’ location inside the missionary compounds, made the problem of space more
salient.
32
The interiors of the churches were also different from those of Chinese buildings. Many
rooms were not visible, and the Chinese people did not know what their functions were.
Furthermore, as Zeng noted in his reports on the Tianjin Missionary Case, the churches were
often built by workers from other towns instead of by local workers, which therefore made the
interiors mysterious to the local residents and fueled suspicion (Zeng, 1987: 6981). All these
factors increased the secrecy of churches.
In summary, the churches and the affiliated hospitals inserted a very unfamiliar space into
a community that had established customs regarding space. The strange and closed internal
spatial arrangements of the church, all the mysterious rituals happening inside it, and the fact that
missionaries were also doctors with the spatial practices described above further increased the
perceived secrecy of the missionaries.
Accessibility is such an important aspect of the customs of space that one might speculate
that if the churches had been more open, there would have been fewer suspicions. In fact, in
earlier years, even though missionaries were not aware of the problem of secret space, some of
them evangelized in a way that accidentally lowered the level of secrecy involved in their
practices, and consequently reduced suspicions. For example, in some rural areas, the Catholics
made their space more open and accessible by sending adopted infants to local wet nurses
instead of keeping them at the church orphanages. Consequently, in those areas the Catholics
were able to become an integrated part of the local community (Sweeten, 2001).
On the Protestant side, the China Inland Mission (CIM) was more mobile than other
Protestant missionary organizations, so much so that it gained the nickname “Constantly in
Motion” (Austin, 2007: 128). Hudson Taylor, the group’s founder, assumed the strategy of
extensive itinerations, rather than intensive church-building. Taylor and the CIM usually started
33
from a central city and made evangelistic tours of the neighborhoods in surrounding cities and
villages. He would stop at public spaces wherever people gathered, such as tea shops and
religious shrines. They also conducted intensive house-to-house visiting (Austin, 2007: 4). By
November 1867, the end of CIM’s first year, it had twenty-five missionaries at eleven stations in
Zhejiang and Jiangsu Provinces (Austin, 2007: 119). The CIM became the largest of all the
missionary organizations in China (Whyte, 1988), probably because its approach seemed less
secretive to the Chinese.
The Spatial Placement of People
Another aspect of spatial arrangements is the spatial placement of people. People live and
conduct their activities in specific spaces, and there are spaces in which certain people are or are
not allowed. This spatial arrangement also determines the visibility of particular groups of people.
A repeated theme in the rumors in nineteenth-century China was the accusation that
women had been seduced or raped by Christian missionaries. To be sure, there are many
historical and cultural reasons for this rumor. For example, these anxieties about women being
seduced and raped by foreigners might have been rooted in the patriarchal society, in which
women were regarded as property of men (Su, 2001). However, one phenomenon is noteworthy:
the rumor was always stated in spatial terms—for instance, that in the missionary compounds
“men and women live in one room (男女共处一室).” This statement usually referred to the
practice of men and women preaching in the same room in churches (Sweeten, 2001: 49). This
implied that the Chinese thought that men and women being in one room together was improper
and considered a crime. The implication was that women should not be in the same room
together with men, for fear that they would be raped or seduced.
34
Indeed, in nineteenth-century China, women were not allowed to be present in public
together with men, especially with men who were not their husbands or close relatives. Women
had their own space. It was very important that women not be seen by people other than their
intimate relatives. Many Westerners in China at that time noticed the sexual segregation that
existed in Chinese society. For example, Christie and Christie (1914: 23) observed that even in
northern China, where women were not as restricted as in other parts of the country, sexual
segregation still existed and women were not allowed in most public spaces. Smith observed that
“as soon as a Chinese girl is betrothed, she is placed in a different relation to the universe
generally. She cannot go anywhere, because it would be ‘inconvenient.’ She might be seen by
others. To the native, it is hardly possible to think of anything more horrible” (Smith, [1899]
1970: 265). It is not surprising, then, that the Christian rituals of women and men worshipping
together would lead to suspicion of sexual misconduct. In fact, Husdon Taylor and his CIM used
missionary women to conduct house-to-house visits in order to reach Chinese women precisely
because Chinese women did not appear in public (Austin, 2007: 4).
In conclusion, Christian missionaries looked mysterious to the Chinese populace because
of the way they organized their daily activities, both medical and religious. People in nineteenthcentury China had their own relationship to space. They understood secrecy as what was
invisible or inaccessible, and attributed it to activities whose spatial arrangements differed from
the existing social order. The secrecy the Chinese perceived in the missionaries’ activities and
the unavailability of information were caused by the differences in spatial arrangements. Thus,
rumors were partly the result of the spatial settings of missionaries’ daily practice.
Conclusion
35
In this article, I argue that the spatial arrangements of missionaries’ everyday activities,
which contradicted the existing spatial settings in the local Chinese communities, encouraged the
nineteenth-century Chinese to believe wild accusations about the missionaries’ conduct and led
to riots and killings. I conclude that the confrontation between these two ways of understanding
space made mutual understandings between the missionaries and the Chinese difficult to achieve,
and that this incomprehension consequently led to rumors.
The common feature of secrecy is that knowledge is not reciprocal. But in nineteenthcentury China, the missionaries had no intention to hide information from the locals. Instead,
they wanted to be understood and to show what they were doing. However, the spatial
arrangements of their activities made this intention incomprehensible to the locals. The
nonreciprocity of information was caused by the two groups’ different settings of activities and,
specifically, their different understandings of space.
The missionaries were clueless about local conceptions of space, and this caused major
barriers to communication. To be clear, I am not saying that if certain spatial relationships had
been altered, the “massacre” might not have happened. I am not trying to distance my
explanation of rumors centered on the role of secret spaces from the political explanations that
focus attention on generic xenophobia. The two explanations are not irreconcilable. The spatial
practices of medical missionaries were rooted in their own conception of space, which cannot be
separated from the new culture they were trying to introduce into China. Therefore, my argument
enriches the current understanding of what constitutes imperialism and which elements lead to
anti-imperialist sentiments.
Moving beyond this specific historical event, this article shows that the ambiguity of
information that causes rumors is deeply rooted in the conceptual patterns of a particular cultural
36
group. Not only are rumors a function of importance and ambiguity, but hidden spaces can lead
to assumptions about what is happening behind closed doors. When people hold different views
of space, the misunderstanding of information is likely and can lead to rumors.
In addition to providing a cultural explanation of conflicts between the Chinese and the
missionaries in nineteenth-century China, the above discussion about space and information also
sheds light on the sociological study of rumor and, more generally, the study of information
transmission. This helps us understand why even when the alleged facts were repeatedly refuted,
many still believed them. Indeed, what is considered as evidence is culturally defined.
Sometimes, contradictory evidence is simply ignored or is considered to have resulted from a
conspiracy, and this view fortifies rather than dismisses the rumors.
This study shows that the spatial organization of everyday activity informs how people
respond to new information. People use their prior knowledge and experience to understand what
happens to them. Therefore, rumors are most likely to arise when the parties to the rumor have
low critical ability to judge the information transmitted. And this is most likely to happen when
two cultures come into contact but do not understand each other. More specifically, I emphasize
the location of information, that is, the power of different customs of space in providing the
grounding for unsecured beliefs. Spatial access contributes to a recognition of “social
transparency,” which in turn contributes to how we understand the possibility (or even the
likelihood) of conspiracy. For that reason, looking at the presence of Western knowledge through
its interaction with local cognitive patterns such as spatial conceptions is a promising method for
future studies of China-West interactions in modern China.
37
Table 1. The Content of Anti-Missionary Rumors*
Content of the Rumor
Times Appeared
Percentage**
Organ snatching (including eye gouging)
137
66%
Sexual seduction of women
114
55%
Use of anesthetics to kidnap or control people
74
35%
Poisoning
61
29%
Closed doors of the churches
47
22%
Chinese converts as bandits
36
17%
Missionaries digging up graves
23
11%
Missionaries pretending to be officials
19
9%
Weapons and ammunition hidden in the church
17
8%
Missionaries pretending to be Western diplomats 11
5.3%
Queue cutting
6
2.8%
Total number of pamphlets
207***
Sources: Wang (1984) and QMJA
Notes: *The majority of the pamphlets are collected in Wang (1984). The rest I found in QMJA.
**The percentage was calculated by dividing the number of times the rumor appeared by the
total number of pamphlets (207).
***Very frequently, different types of rumors appear in one pamphlet, so the total here is larger
than the total number of pamphlets (207).
38
Figure 1. Anti-missionary pamphlet (1)
Title: The hog sect gouging the eyes
Text on the right: If you insult the gods, they will definitely know. If you gouge out the eyes of
others, others will gouge out yours.
Text on the left: The devils who have followed the devils’ religion [Christianity] do not forget
that only those with sight may become blind; the blind cannot recover their sight.
Source: Reproduced by permission from Zhou (1891: Picture VI). © The East Asian Library and
the Gest Collection, Princeton University.
39
Figure 2. Anti-missionary pamphlet (2)
Title: A little boy losing his kidney
Text on the right: [The evil missionaries] remove the child’s kidney so he cannot have
descendants, and we are afraid that this might lead to the extinction of the Chinese.
Text on the left: Men’s and women’s tears made the sleeves wet. The whole family is regretful
now. They were not careful enough and so the devil of the evil religion [Christianity]
came to their household’s door.
Source: Reproduced by permission from Zhou (1891: Picture VII). © The East Asian Library
and the Gest Collection, Princeton University.
40
Figure 3. Location of Peter Parker’s ophthalmic hospital
Source: Cadbury and Jones (1935: 39).
41
Notes
1. Throughout the paper, I use the term “Christian” to refer to both Catholics and Protestants, and
specify when I am referring only to Protestants or Catholics.
2. In fact, organ‐theft rumors have been found in varied social locations dating back to at least
medieval Europe (Dundes, 1991; Bennett, 2009), and this type of rumor has continued in the
contemporary world. For example, rumors surfaced in Brazil and Guatemala in the 1980s that
Westerners were kidnapping local children and harvesting their organs (Scheper-Hughes, 1996,
2000); more recently, rumors have circulated that unsuspecting tourists or business travelers are
being drugged and having their kidneys stolen while in foreign countries (Fine and Ellis, 2010;
Campion‐Vincent, 2011).
3. On how many anti-missionary cases happened in nineteenth-century China, see Gu (1981),
who recognized 400 cases. Chen (1991) calculated 811 cases (excluding those during the Boxer
Rebellion) based on JWJAD and other records such as Qing official documents, personal records,
newspapers, and Western records. Fairbank (1957) notes that Wu and Chen (1941) listed
documents on almost 400 cases.
4. On September 4, 1807, Robert Morrison arrived in Macao. Sent by the London Missionary
Society, he was regarded among some Protestants as the first Christian missionary to China
(Milne, [1820] 2008; Morrison, 1839). On Protestant missionaries in China in the first half of the
nineteenth century, see also Lockhart (1861), MacGillvray (1907), Lambuth (1920), Cranston
(1930), Philips (1969), and Rubinstein (1996). Although the Qing government officially banned
Catholicism in 1724, some Chinese Catholics survived. For estimates of the number of Chinese
Catholics, see Latourette (1929: 173–74). After 1842, a new wave of Catholic priests moved
42
back into areas inhabited by Chinese Catholics (Wiest, 2000: 252), expecting to have former
churches restored. However, the two groups of missionaries, namely Protestants and Catholics,
did not cooperate with each other, nor did they respect each other very much (Fay, 1970).
5. Catholic priests also did some medical work, but the medicine they practiced was rudimentary
and much more limited in scope. While there were a few Catholic hospitals in big cities such as
Shanghai and Wuhan, most Catholic medical care was conducted at an elementary level in the
villages (Whyte, 1988: 135). So when I talk about medical missions I refer only to the work
conducted by Protestant missionaries.
6. How many Protestant missionaries were in China at a certain historical point is hard to
estimate, probably because each denomination acted on its own; therefore, it is not easy to
calculate the total number. Cohen (1963: 70) mentions that there were eighty-one missionaries in
China. Bays (2012) estimates about a hundred. Although it’s hard to get an accurate estimate, we
do know that the number of Protestant missionaries in China by 1860 was still very low (Whyte,
1988: 117), but that it then grew rapidly during the 1860s and later (Bays, 2012: 68). For this
paper I calculated the number of Protestant medical missionaries from Wong and Wu (1936) and
Chinese Repository. To be sure, more missionaries were sent by Protestant missionary societies
(see Wylie’s [1867] comprehensive list and biographies of Protestant missionaries in China
before 1867). But before 1860 a large percentage of them did not end up landing on Chinese soil,
or they failed to stay for any length of time (Bays, 2012: 46). Similar to the Protestants, Catholics
were not active until the 1860s either, as Bays pointed out: “The first few decades of the
nineteenth century were a time of lying low for the Catholic church in China” (2012: 52).
43
7. Wang’s (1984) book is a collection of anti-missionary pamphlets from 1861 to 1899. The
main source of Wang’s collection was JWJAD. He also included documents from other sources,
such as Qing ji jiao an shi liao, YWSM, and various local gazetteers. His collection is quite good
but not comprehensive, and it does not include pictures.
8. Some Chinese officials did distinguish between Catholics and Protestants, reserving their
harshest condemnation for the former (Latourette, 1929: 418–19). But the distinction was made
only by high-level officials and did not have much influence on either the policies toward
missionaries or the common people’s responses to the missionaries. In many cases, when
something done by either Catholics or Protestants led to conflicts, all Christians in the area were
blamed, beaten, or killed. For example, during the Yang Zhou Missionary Case in 1868, both
Hudson Taylor, the founder of the China Inland Mission who was in Yang Zhou at that time, and
the French Catholic missionaries led by Father P. Joseph Seckinger were chased and hit by the
Chinese. Taylor’s church was burned and his wife had a miscarriage during the disturbance
(Taylor, 1927: 264–67).
9. The Viceroy’s Hospital was established in Tianjin in 1881 by Li Hongzhang, a high-level
official in the Qing Court. It was the first Western hospital opened by the Chinese.
10. I chose 173 pamphlets from Wang’s collection. Only those in Parts 1–4 are included.
Documents in Parts 5–8 of Wang’s collection are not included because they are official
memorials and publications, rather than pamphlets. In addition to those in Wang’s (1984)
collection, I added some other pamphlets that can be found in QMJA. When Wang published his
collection, QMJA had not been compiled yet. So here I include those in QMJA as well. QMJA
was compiled by the First National Archives of China and Fujian Normal University. It includes
44
the Qing official archives kept at the First National Archives of China, translated British
parliamentary documents, and foreign affairs documents of the United States and France. It also
includes translations of relevant newspaper reports and personal reports written by foreigners.
11. The pictures are reproduced from a book published by Hankow Mission Press in 1891, titled
The Cause of the Riots in the Yangtse Valley: A “Complete Picture Gallery.” It is an anonymous
reproduction of an antiforeign pictorial work, “Jin zun sheng yu bi xie quan tu” (Anthology of
pictures following orthodoxy and warding off heterodoxy), whose original authorship is
attributed to Zhou Han. The same pictures have been reproduced and discussed in Su (2001).
Cohen also reproduced Figure 1, “The hog sect gouging the eyes,” among other pictures from the
same collection, to discuss the role of rumors in anti-missionary movements in the 1860s (1963:
chap. 5) and later during the Boxer Rebellion (1997: 164–66).
12. The account given here of the Tianjin Missionary Case is based on various sources. I looked
at all the published Chinese documentation on the Tianjin case in collections compiled by
Chinese scholars (QMJA, 1; YWSM: TZ, 72, 73), and Zeng (1987: 6966–7094). For a list of
primary and secondary sources, including both contemporary Chinese accounts and Western
summaries, see Cohen (1963: 229, n. 1)
13. According to Mungello (2008), the sisters’ practice of giving cash rewards in exchange for
unwanted children was related to the existence of infanticide in China. Because most Chinese
would rather abandon their unwanted infants than give them to Christians, “small financial
incentives were offered to help in the gathering of abandoned children” (114). This was also
related to the so-called “Holy Infancy” movement dating back to the 1840s, in which Catholics
rescued abandoned babies and baptized them in their orphanages to save their souls with a last45
minute baptism. This Catholic practice gave rise to many horrific rumors (Whyte, 1988: 116).
14. Beginning in the late 1840s, France in particular proclaimed itself to be the protector of
Catholic interests abroad. The French were always ready to use force or diplomatic intervention
whenever there were conflicts between Catholic missionaries or their Chinese converts and other
Chinese. This policy change had major influence on the Catholic practice in China, and was one
of the main reasons why the majority of the anti-missionary movements were directed toward the
Catholics. See Cohen (1963).
15. In imperial China, the local gentry were retired officials or their descendants who owned land
in the local community. They also included potential officials, i.e., all those who had passed the
civil examinations and held a degree. These men influenced local government officials as well as
many local affairs because of their learning, their potential influence with the bureaucracy, and
their wealth in land (Esherick and Rankin, 1990: 2).
16. One might argue that the missionaries were regarded as suspicious because of their race or
because they were foreigners. See Wyman (1997) for a discussion of why exclusion was not
based on race, ethnicity, or national identity.
17. According to A Monetary History of China (Peng, 1994), around 1870, one tael equaled
1,856 wen (a unit of currency), and the price of rice was about 4,480 wen per dan (a unit of
weight). In northern China in that period, one rice bun cost about four to five wen.
18. Zeng Guofan (1811–72) was the most eminent official in the late Qing period. He defeated
the Taiping Rebellion and was a leading reformer. He was known for his strategic perception and
administrative skills. Fairbank (1957) highlighted Zeng Guofan’s “admonition to the gentry and
46
populace of Tianjin, to act only on firm evidence and through official channels.” Therefore,
Zeng’s report provides a solid basis of information to find out what happened.
19. “Memorial” refers to zou zhe, private or official reports to the throne in the Qing Dynasty.
They were usually reviewed by the emperor or by ministers of state authorized by the emperor.
The original documents were dated according to the Chinese lunar calendar. To be consistent
with the rest of the text, I use the Gregorian calendar instead of the lunar calendar here.
20. Zeng wrote in his memorial, “盖见外国之堂终年扃闭，过于秘密，莫能窥测底里。”
(The doors of foreign churches are closed all year long. It is too secret. People cannot see what’s
going on inside the church.) (Zeng, 1987: 6980; translation mine).
21. Another possibility for Zeng’s dismissal is that his political enemies used this opportunity to
remove him from power. But my argument still holds. The fact that the rumors served the
political interests of court factions indicated the importance of the rumors—Zeng’s enemies
thought they would have a good chance to take him down because they knew that his memorials
on the Tianjin Missionary Case would arouse many controversies.
22. Medical practice was not like this in the West at this time. Doctors on horseback and home
visits were more common than professional medical practices as defined today. The
reconstitution of hospitals as institutions of medical science did not happen until the 1870s (Starr,
1982: 147–48). However, when missionaries came to China, for practical reasons they had to
stay in dispensaries instead of going to patients’ homes. The number of doctors was so few
(usually each missionary station had only one medical missionary) that it was too dangerous, and
sometimes forbidden, for them to leave their missionary compounds.
47
23. From the earliest days until the closing years of missionary work, the question of the isolated
compound versus a complete adoption of Chinese ways of living remained an unresolved issue
for the missionaries. The vast majority of Protestant missionaries accepted that they had much
higher standards of living and justified this by stating that to leave the compound and live with
the Chinese would have exposed them to highly contagious diseases. This was a risk missionary
boards were reluctant to have them take. Consequently, most of the Protestant missionaries
stayed in their compounds. Hudson Taylor was an exception. The CIM avoided building large
mission compounds in cities. Instead, they penetrated the countryside (Bays, 2012: 68)
24. Some early Protestant missionaries did leave the treaty ports and work in rural areas. For
example, Young J. Allen, an American Protestant missionary who arrived in China in 1860,
often went out of the city to preach in the villages and small towns nearby (Bennett and Liu,
1974: 163). Another example is the Basel missionaries’ work among the Hakka in rural
Guangdong as early as the 1840s (Lutz and Lutz, 1998). The Basel mission society’s work
represents one of the most successful Protestant missionary efforts of the nineteenth century.
Before 1870, the North China mission of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign
Missions also reached the smaller towns outside of the treaty ports (Fairbank, 1957).
48
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