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Constructing Cathay
John Macgowan, cultural brokerage,
and missionary knowledge of China

W. K. Cheng
Department of History, Mills College

As relation between China and the West changed precipitately in the middle
of the nineteenth century, there was a heightened demand in the West for
knowledge about the “Flowery Kingdom”. But until well into the twentieth
century, virtually the only direct source of information about China and the
Chinese came from missionaries, in which respect they were often lauded as
“cultural brokers”. As missionary communication of their experience pro-
vided Western readers with a vicarious experience of China, their cultural
brokerage inexorably shaped Western popular perceptions of China and the
Chinese in the West. These perceptions, when channeled politically, often
had a defining effect on the nature and manner of the Western presence in
China. This essay examines the China writings of John Macgowan, a veteran
missionary from the London Missionary Society. What is interesting about
Macgowan’s cultural brokerage is that unlike other missionaries (e.g., Arthur
Smith) who often struggled with the difficulties between the missionary
enterprise and Western expansionism, Macgowan uninhibitedly affirmed the
intimacy between Mission and Empire. His writings on China and Chinese
life — their social behavior and habits of thought, their relation with the
living environment, the religious and cultural values by which they ordered
their lives — therefore gave strong credence not only to the necessity, viabili-
ty, and nobility of the christianizing project but ultimately to the sanctity of
Western presence in China. In other words, Macgowan’s brokerage of his
China knowledge exemplified the processes in which knowledge was legislat-
ed and communicated to establish the ideological conditions of the Western
expansionism in China.

Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 12:2 (2002), 269–290.

issn 0957–6851 / e-issn 1569–9838© John Benjamins Publishing Company
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270 W. K. Cheng

Introduction

Western missionaries working in modern China were often lauded as “cultural

brokers” who, apart from proselytizing the Christian faith, introduced Western
science and other areas of secular knowledge to aid China’s modernizing efforts.
While much have been written on the missionaries’ role in introducing appreciable
aspects of modernity into the Chinese historical landscape, cultural brokerage
of the missionaries, however, involved more than their engagement as “agents
of change” in the Chinese context; many missionaries also served as “purveyors
of knowledge” about China and the Chinese for the Western audience.
The missionaries’ role as cultural informants of things Chinese became
increasingly critical as the nature of Sino-Western relations changed precipi-
tately in the mid-nineteenth century. Many in the West began to note how the
“new relations with China” awakened in the public a new interest in the
Chinese Empire (Nevius, 1869: 5). In this respect, China missionaries were
ideally suited to meeting this new demand for knowledge about China, not the
least of which was that, since the primary objective of missionizing was to
“change Chinese minds and hearts” (Barnett & Fairbank, 1985: 2), their work
naturally obliged them to become careful observers of Chinese culture, society,
and people.
Indeed, missionary knowledge about China had had an unusually profound
influence on how China was perceived in Western opinion. Aside from the fact
that the social status of missionaries in Western society gave their testimony
added credibility, missionary reports on China were, until well into the twenti-
eth century, virtually the only source of first hand information available to the
Western public about the “Flowery Kingdom”. As missionary knowledge
inexorably shaped Western popular perceptions of China and the Chinese in
the West, these perceptions, when channeled politically, often had a defining
effect on the nature and manner of the Western presence in China.
Obviously, the intention of the missionaries’ communication of their
Chinese knowledge was seldom merely academic; its ultimate objective was to
authenticate the Christian enterprise in China. Indeed, to many in the West,
China represented a new found frontier, an expanding horizon that provided
fresh opportunities and renewed purpose for the advancement of Western
civilization, at the core of which was, of course, the Christian faith. It was in this
respect that the missionaries became in effect the West’s quintessential “fron-
tiersmen” who ventured into uncharted waters, battled native hostility, and
extended the reach of Western civilization. Insofar as missionary writings on
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Constructing Cathay 271

China provided a medium through which participation in the West’s great

enterprise was made possible for the Western public, writing and communicat-
ing about China was an integral part of the broader, collaborative movement to
extend the frontier of God’s empire in China.
Central to this collective enterprise was the writing of Chinese life, in all its
social and cultural manifestations, through which the Western readers could
experience vicariously the missionizing encounter. The portrayal of Chinese life
— their social behavior and habits of thought, their relation with the living
environment, the religious and cultural values by which they ordered their lives,
etc. — was arguably the most popular genre of missionary writings in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not only did missionary writings on
Chinese lives and places, many of which written in the intimacy of first-person
traveler-observer, provide an outlet for the Western hunger for information
about the Chinese, more importantly, this brokered knowledge was also obliged
to lend credence to the necessity, viability, and nobility of the christianizing
project. The moral urgency to christianize China was often exacerbated —
indeed complicated — by the fact that missionary writers often tended to
highlight the darker aspects of Chinese life in order to obtain more funds to
save its people.
Needless to say, the missionary brokerage of Chinese knowledge was never
a monolithic edifice. Under the general, unifying call to missionize China were
competing visions regarding the manner in which the Christian enterprise was
to be advanced in the Middle Kingdom. Accordingly, the portrayal of Chinese
life was subjected to differing emplotments.
This study examines the China writings of John Macgowan (d. 1922), a
veteran missionary from the London Missionary Society who stayed in China
for a total of fifty years (1860–1910), much of which in Amoy, Fujian.1 Al-
though an important figure in the Amoy Mission, Macgowan was not as well
known as some of his high profile colleagues such as Timothy Richard, Young
Allen, or Arthur Smith. Subsequently he was rarely mentioned, if at all, in the
standard works on the missionary movement in China.2 Yet Macgowan was
unusually prolific in writing about China. After several publications on the
Chinese language,3 in the late 1880’s he began a series of works, many apparent-
ly quite successful, on the subject of Chinese culture, society, and history,
particularly what he called “the inner life of the Chinese” (Macgowan, 1912: 7).4
What is interesting about Macgowan’s cultural brokerage is that, unlike
other missionary writers (e.g., Arthur Smith) whose constructed image of China
often reflected their own struggle with what has been called “the missionary
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272 W. K. Cheng

bind”, a profound existential dilemma arising from the recognition that “they
could not exist in China without foreign force, but that they could not progress
if they were identified with it” (Hayford, 1985: 160), Macgowan uninhibitedly
affirmed the intimacy between Mission and Empire. As a missionary writer
Macgowan often showed himself to be impenitently Anglophilic, particularly in
the sense that the Englishman was the embodiment of Western civilization.
Most significantly, Macgowan’s empathetic stance towards the imperial
enterprise means that he was signally unencumbered by “the missionary bind”,
allowing him to be much more attuned to the impulses of the Western popular
imagination of China.5 Macgowan’s cultural brokerage, in other words,
betokened a scheme of perception that, much more so than that of other
missionary authors, exemplified the processes in which knowledge was legislat-
ed and communicated to establish the ideological conditions of the Western
presence in China.

Travel as mission

It is not insignificant that Macgowan’s first foray into the brokerage of China
knowledge began with the charge of Robert Morrison, the first missionary
dispatched by the London Missionary Society to prepare for the “ultimate
settlement in China”. To Macgowan, Morrison’s story represented the arche-
type of missionary operation in China. In accord with all frontier expectations,
Morrison’s assignment was a saga dotted with nearly insurmountable difficul-
ties. We are told that Morrison, having abandoned his original intention to
acquire the Chinese language in Penang, a British possession, arrived in Canton
in 1807. There he soon “found himself exposed to considerable annoyance and
even danger” and was compelled in the following year to leave for Macao. His
studies having thus been interrupted and seeing the great risk of remaining in
China, he decided to return to Penang to continue his language learning. But
just before his scheduled departure, he was offered an appointment by the East
India Company as an interpreter, a post he gladly accepted as it gained him the
right of residence in Canton (Macgowan, 1889 [1971]: 11–12).
Macgowan’s interpretation of this turn of events is revealing. He empha-
sized that Morrison “consented to become an official” only to serve the higher
purpose to which he had committed his life. And if there was in Macgowan’s
account any residual reluctance on Morrison’s part about this diversion, it was
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Constructing Cathay 273

more than compensated by the otherwise inaccessible opportunities that were

suddenly opened for him:
He could now study without interruption, and, moreover, his official duties
gave him such wide opportunities of getting a deeper insight into the language,
that he was being continually qualified for the great work of translating the
Scriptures into China (Macgowan, 1889 [1971]: 12–13).

Morrison’s story, therefore, evinced a demonstrable moral that later missionar-

ies were to take heart: the high purpose of erecting God’s ecumenical empire
ought to seek its grounding in the parallel expansion of the interests of the
British Empire.
For Macgowan, this kinship between Mission and Empire was in fact the
underlying motif of Western presence in China. Consider how Macgowan
recounted his voyage to the Orient in Beside the Bamboo (1914), a figurative
journey that took the readers to a re-staging of his own China sojourn. “I am
going to take you in imagination”, Macgowan began, on “a very long journey to
the far-off land of China, that we may see with our eyes the strange people that
live there”. We notice before long that their virgin voyage from England turned
out to be a Haeckelian recapitulation of the glorious advances of the British
Empire. As their steamer began to gather speed upon departure, the beautiful
landscape of England — “glades and meadows and fields golden with ripening
harvests, and shady lanes, and hawthorn hedges” — was fast receding into the
past. Yet the expanding physical distance of the homeland only served to
intensify the longing of its presence, as they soon reached “a great stretch of sea”
where England’s greatest son, Horatio Nelson, gave his life to thwart Napoleon’s
invasion of England. Here Macgowan’s travelers were mindfully lost in the
thoughts of “the great victory the memory of which sends the blood pulsing
through the heart of every one of his countrymen”, and began to visualize the
battle scenes and the fierce fighting, “and above all to see the signal flying from
the famous Admiral’s ship ‘England expects that every man this day will do his
duty’” (Macgowan, 1914: 9–11).
The Mediterranean was “more beautiful than any that we have yet seen”;
but as soon as they entered the Orient, the experience abruptly changed, and
Macgowan’s narration took on a different trope. The first thing that impressed
him about Port Said, for example, was that it was “a poor miserable ramshackle
kind of place”. As the journey continued, the torment of the landscape became
increasingly smothering: “… as we steam into the dull and heavy air, the
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274 W. K. Cheng

weather becomes more hot and stifling. Headlands that seem to have risen from
the bottom of a volcano stand out in startling nakedness, with not a shred of
nature’s clothing upon them, whilst islets that appear gasping for breath, and
crying out for a single drop of water to fall upon their scorched and parched
heads, peer upon us as we gaze with wonder upon them” (Macgowan, 1914: 12,
14, 22). But then, suddenly,
something rises there before our vision, that fills our hearts with emotion. It is
the English flag that we see waving from the battlements of the fort, and in an
instant a vision raised by some invisible fairy flashes before our eyes, and the
dreariness of the scene around us vanishes, and the great blazing sun has lost
his fire, and the thoughts of home and kindred fill our hearts instead
(Macgowan, 1914: 22–23).

Here Macgowan’s travelers realized that they were not just seekers of the exotic
but proud subjects of the British crown who found in the presence of British
force the solace of home in faraway lands.
It came as no surprise, then, that Macgowan’s journey in China was saddled
with gleaming testimonies of British strength. Of the patriot’s pride, nothing
was more evident than in Macgowan’s adoration of the steamboat as the emblem
of British gallantry. As their ship reached a stretch of the sea off Amoy, “one of
the most capricious and uncertain along the entire coast”, Macgowan’s wariness
suddenly gave way to exhilaration upon the apparition of an English steamboat:
But see! … It is a magnificent steamer of fully two thousand tons burden that
is gallantly breasting her way against storm and sea. She is just out from
England, and that nameless attraction which ever weaves itself around any ship
coming straight from the homeland rivets our eyes upon her. What a noble
sight she is, and how strong! The great foaming, hissing waves dash against her
with all their might, and lift her upon their tops, and break themselves into
spray on her decks, but nothing can stay her advance (Macgowan, 1897: 137).

Needless to say, the image of the undaunted steamer was merely a metonym for
the awesome naval power of the British Empire, the ubiquitous presence of
which stood as a constant reminder of what made the British advance in China
possible in the first place. It was a kind of omnipresence that had become so
thorough and inescapable that it had ceased to be conspicuous. This is how
Macgowan (1897: 264) described the panorama of Hong Kong: “Beautiful
buildings, well-kept streets, and winding roads bordered with trees”, and the
magnificent bay “dotted with ships, steamers, men-of-war, launches, and
Chinese junks of every description”. Nestled in the hubbub of the bustling
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Constructing Cathay 275

colony, British gunboats casually blended into the easy expanse of the populated
scene, as routine and commonplace as any quotidian element in everyday life.
Yet it would be a mistake to overlook the purpose behind the presence of
British arms, for in China it was what kept the British safe and the Chinese in
place. Observing the assortment of junks and sailing vessels and steamers in the
harbor of Amoy, for example, Macgowan (1889/1971: 26) mindfully noted that
“one ship that flies the white flag of England shows that one of our men-of-war
has come from our far-off home to guard and protect us if needs be”. When
they set off for Canton, they noticed that sailing alongside their ship was a huge,
menace looking lorcha with protruding guns and, worse, a suspicious crew:
… and we can easily conceive that, were it not for the English men-of-war that
patrol the sea, they would find no difficulty in becoming pirates and turning
the guns that seem so innocent now against the unarmed traders that travel
along the coast (Macgowan, 1897: 278–281).

The Cantonese pirates indeed, “none so terrible and ruthless as they”, if not for
the naval power of England “to rid the seas of these monsters” (Macgowan,
1889 [1971]: 16).
At issue in Macgowan’s narration is that shaking out the pirates on the
Chinese coast in fact betokened a general method of British operation in China.
Thus when Macgowan’s ship approached the Bogue Forts that guarded the
entry to Canton, he took time to reflect upon how the place had “for us a special
fascination”: it was here that “the Chinese, in their arrogance and contempt for
English power, fired on one of our men-of-war”. The Chinese defenders, who
for all practical purposes were indistinguishable from the pirates, committed
the same mistake of not yielding to British prowess, and suffered a complete
and immediate routing as a consequence. Henceforth the Bogue Forts became
a monument where British visitors on their way to other destinations in China
stopped to delight at the waving English flag that claimed possession of “the
river up to this point” (Macgowan, 1897, pp. 286–87).
And that was precisely how Britain got things done. It was for this reason
that Macgowan was disheartened whenever he felt the Chinese were not dealt
with more forcefully. Take the boat people who lived uncomfortably close to
Shameen, a quaint little island off the city of Canton, which Westerners had
made into “as much like a piece of England as they possibly could”. Lamenting
that the British authorities had not insisted on expelling them, Macgowan
(1897: 296–97) contended that it was indeed this kind of “exceedingly weak”
policy that was “accountable for many of the disasters and complications that
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276 W. K. Cheng

[had] occurred throughout China during the past few years”. The great mistake
of British diplomacy in China was in treating the Chinese as though they were
English (Macgowan, 1897: 300). Since the Chinese could only be persuaded by
force, they “ought to be compelled” to honor all treaty agreements “to the very
letter”, just as the British Government should always “demand the punishment
of the mandarins in every case where there has been an infraction”; and then
“the troubles that are constantly arising throughout the empire will cease”
(Macgowan, 1897: 297).

The character of empire

We have seen that for Macgowan the approach of force was necessitated by the
irreconcilable differences between the Chinese and the British, differences that
in turn underscored the racial superiority of the latter. This confidence in the
nobility of the Anglo-Saxons was nowhere more evident than in the distinctive-
ness of the Englishman in a crowd of natives. This is how Macgowan described
a street scene in Hong Kong:
On the causeways, which the frowning peaks above sternly command to be
narrow, the English and Chinese move along side by side … See! here is an
Englishman, with his fair face, and blue eyes, and brown hair, with the air of
the home-land still, in our imagination, upon him. How strong and manly he
looks as he swings along! The difference of race comes markedly out when we
contrast him with the men who crush by him … and we are apt to look with
contempt upon his fellow pedestrians (Macgowan, 1897: 235–36).

If the mission of travel was to reconnoiter the trails of glory, Macgowan

(1897: 234) hastened to add that the imperial edifice was sanctioned not by
brute force but on “the strength of the English character”. The English,
Macgowan (1897: 265) pointed out, were like the ancient Romans, both
endowed with the innate drive for road-making, thanks to which the world of
civilization got extended to less fortunate lands. There was in fact something
altruistic about empire building, the virtue of which was fully evident in Hong
Kong where Britain’s work transformed “the bare and rocky island” into a
magnificent town “adorned by building fit for the residences of princes”, a town
where the huge Chinese population peaceably mingled with some ten thousand
foreigners, the latter “including the army and navy” (Macgowan, 1897: 226).
The glory of Empire to which Macgowan’s travelers gave testimony was not
 Constructing Cathay 277

only order and peace but transformation and conversion. Just as the splendor
of Hong Kong as a showcase of British magnificence lay in the fact that it
exemplified the ideal of the frontier, where “the imperial character of the
English race” manifested in its calling “to create cities in places where none
existed before, to people them with busy multitudes, and to cause commerce to
attract the ships and steamers of all nations to their harbours”, the Chinese were
so won over by “the generous treatment … of the English that they have
become as loyal in their attachment to them and in their submission to their
power as they would be were they men of the same blood and race as them-
selves” (Macgowan, 1897: 276).
Here the impetus for Macgowan’s excitement over the works of the British
Empire became fully discernable. Grounding Mission in Empire was, after all,
more than a matter of practicality, as there was a far-reaching parallel between
serving God and serving Empire, that is, that which motivated and justified
Empire also motivated and justified Mission. When Macgowan (1897: 300)
maintained that studying “the habits and thoughts of the [Chinese] people” was
requisite to realizing — and rectifying — Britain’s erroneous diplomatic policy
in China, he was in fact referring to a general method that was to govern the
enterprise of missionizing China. At the heart of this method, as we have seen,
was a heightened sensitivity to racial character as the determining condition,
and as such “the inner life of the Chinese” was formally turned into a field of
research where useful knowledge could be obtained.

The inscrutable Chinaman

How then was one to gain access to the inner life of the Chinese? We know that
Macgowan’s preferred mode of inquiry was to assume the observing eyes of the
narrating traveler. Yet time and again he insisted that the Chinese mind was
utterly incomprehensible as it was impenetrable. In Sidelights on Chinese Life,
for example, he announced plainly that “The Chinaman’s mind is a profound
and inexplicable puzzle that many have vainly endeavoured to solve”. The
Chinese mind was desperately “wanting in lucidity”, always visited by a
“haziness of thought” (Macgowan, 1907: 7) and simply “an absolute bundle of
contradictions”. Moreover, it was a “general and axiomatic truth” (Macgowan,
1907: 2) that “turbidity of mind” was in fact “constitutional in the Chinaman”,
which was the reason why the Chinese were never able to recognize what to an
average Anglo-Saxon would have been demonstrable self-contradictions
278 W. K. Cheng

(Macgowan, 1907: 207). Small wonder that the Chinese mind, Macgowan
hastened to add, was terra incognita not only to the foreigner but even to the
Chinese themselves (Macgowan, 1907: 1)!
To be sure, by Macgowan’s time the image of the “inscrutable Chinaman”
(Macgowan, 1907: 10) had already been affixed in the Western perception of
China. Particularly in the missionary community, there was a remarkable
consensus about the Chinese face being resistant to any reasonable effort to
decipher it.6 Be that as it may, one would expect that Macgowan’s adoption of
the genre of travelogue, which by definition demands treading no further than
the observable surface, as a privileged form of writing would have posed some
difficulties. That it did not suggests that for Macgowan, the obtuseness of the
Chinese and the gander of the narrating traveler were comfortably reconcilable.
To take travel as a sufficient agency of knowledge was to imply that the
subject under research was of such nature that the Chinese “inner life” existed
not in the depth of the unseen but on the crust of their being, and as such it was
essentially an exhibition, a public display, an exteriority. Just as what was
observable in the open was literally all there was, knowing the Chinese therefore
required no more than, figuratively and metaphorically, a casual walk through
the Chinese streets, where “everything is open to the public. What they talk
about, what they eat, how they spend their time, and how hard the majority of
them have to work can all be seen by a quiet walk down any of them”
(Macgowan, 1889 [1971]: 32). The most astute knower of the Chinese was in
fact the peregrinating traveler, whose form of inquiry turned out to be most
suited for the kind of knowledge that was being sought.
Hence, the inscrutability of the Chinese actually reinforced the exteriority
of Chinese life. If the Chinese mind was impervious to comprehension, if it was
impossible to reach beyond the surface of the Chinese face, it was not because
the hardened shell was shielding something in the depth of consciousness. Just
as Chinese life could be wholesomely obtained in the form of the spectacle,
Chinese inscrutability was entirely behavioral, a phenomenon without an inner
dimension. Insofar as the Chinese mind could only express itself by habits of
trained instinct, their impenetrable mind was an unmediated manifestation of
the exteriority of their “inner life”. And thus in Macgowan’s scheme, what the
sphinxlike exterior of the Chinese face labored to hide was merely craftiness and
deviousness, behavior that bespoke the absence of a “sense of truth” in “ordi-
nary and everyday life” (Macgowan, 1907: 11).
More importantly, to emphasize the inscrutability of the Chinese was to
establish difference as the precondition of knowledge; the more formidable the
 Constructing Cathay 279

wall of incomprehensibility was, the more generic the dissimilitude could be

claimed, and the more squarely China would be placed as the West’s consum-
mate “Other”. It is therefore only natural that when speaking of the Chinese he
encountered in everyday life, Macgowan (1907: 3; 19, 96; 20, 123; 17–18)
referred again and again to the one undifferentiated sameness that typified the
Chinese, namely, the yellowness of their surface — his “yellow mind”, his
“yellow brain”, his “yellow race”, and “the yellow hue that tinges his skin with
a most inartistic colour”. Ironically, the most expressive part of the inscrutable
Chinaman turned out to be the surface of his face: “The high cheekbones, the
large mouth, the almond-shaped slits out of which the small black eyes twinkle,
and the yellow skin over which no ruddy colour ever passes, all tend to give a
common, unaesthetic look to the great mass of people that one meets with in
ordinary life” (Macgowan, 1912: 80).7
To signal that knowledge of the Chinese “inner life” could be obtained by
scanning the surface of their existence was to imply that what was observable on
the outside had no signification other than itself; therefore, one could speak of
Chinese characteristics but not character, if by the latter one had in mind the
kind of inner personality that naturally emanated from within the Englishman.
No wonder all Macgowan could catch as typifying traits of the Chinese —
inscrutability, turbidity, lack of lucidity, craftiness, “amazing credulity”
(Macgowan, 1907: 7), “inability to be thorough” (Macgowan, 1907: 18) — were
all corporeal flaws that he easily contravened with the common and ordinary
qualities abundantly stored in the average Englishman. This dichotomy of the
outer and the inner, characteristics and character, was obviously designed to
affirm British superiority over the Chinese that Macgowan had expressed
elsewhere in broad racial terms. Missionary knowledge, however, was funda-
mentally normative in motive; in the end, to know China was to clear the
ground for Mission and Empire and to make crusaders out of travelers. It was
for this reason that Macgowan’s journey of knowledge took an analytical turn:
only when his inquiry became a diagnostic exercise on the pathology of Chinese
life could the knowledge thus obtained render the remaking of China self-
evidently justifiable and necessary.
Consider this incident in Sidelights on Chinese Life that annoyed Macgowan
immensely. Macgowan and a friend were planning a trip to the interior and
accordingly contracted a team of sedan chair bearers to meet them at daybreak
the next morning. The bearers, however, did not show up until well into the
morning, leaving Macgowan waiting for hours. Realizing that “time to a
Chinaman is of no importance whatever, and that the difference of an hour or
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280 W. K. Cheng

two in any engagement that is made is a matter so trifling as not to be consid-

ered worthy of mention”, Macgowan still found the outcome incredulous. He
reasoned that since the word “daylight” had been specifically mentioned and
designated as the time of meeting, they would of course “promptly appear as
soon as the first flush tinged the sky in the east”. Indeed, when the bearers
finally showed up and got promptly reprimanded, they were “mightily taken
aback” and replied, “What is it now but daylight” (Macgowan, 1907: 348).
The significance of this episode lies in how Macgowan took this opportuni-
ty to prove a principle of general application. For Macgowan, it was not simply
a matter of foreigners forgetting that the Chinese “are usually accustomed to
look at things from a different standpoint from ourselves”. Rather, the issue
must be properly raised at the level of intellection. If to the Chinese time was
but a hazy continuum, it was because “their minds are more turbid and less
keen than ours”, so much so that “[d]aylight, for example, with us has a definite
meaning, but with a Chinaman represents a time that begins with the dawn and
with the indolence of the East may extend to seven or eight o’clock”
(Macgowan, 1907: 348–49). In other words, it was not that the Chinese had a
different notion of time but that they were constitutionally incapable of
conceptualizing it.8
When Macgowan reproached the inaptitude of the Chinese in appreciating
the principle of time, he was alluding to a profound and general privation in
Chinese civilization. To comprehend time as a category of everyday life implied
a level of mental clarity, a certain sophistication in ratiocination in the collective
intellect that to the nineteenth-century West could only be the reward of
modern progress.9 Just as the absence of “nerves” among the Chinese was often
quoted as indicative of their cultural stagnation (Smith, 1894: 90–97, particular-
ly 90–91), so too was the “definite meaning” of time an index of modernity. The
Chinese inability to synchronize with Western time attested to the fact that their
civilization remained in a stagnant, timeless state. It was for this reason that, for
Macgowan, the majesty of the British character was not the least lessened by the
fact that the Chinese could trace their ancestry “to a time when England had no
place on the map and its people were naked and untamed savages”. What
mattered was that Britain now stood proudly as “the last embodiment of the
civilization of the West” (Macgowan, 1897: 235–36) while China remained an
antiquated carcass of a forgotten past. The subtext in Macgowan’s complaint
about the Chinese disregard of time was therefore really an exercise in compara-
tive civilizations. The constitutional turbidity of mind, the debilitating deficien-
cy of the Chinese to comprehend the mechanics of time, were all symptoms of
 Constructing Cathay 281

a civilization unfortunate enough to have never experienced Progress. There

was, then, a good reason why in serving the great encounter between the
Christian West and heathen China to which Macgowan and his travelers were
to bear witness, all inquiries for knowledge must in the end converge on the
exteriority of Chinese being, for beneath the surface of Chinese life there was
but a vast hollowness, an empty space where History should have been.

Of ancestors and idols

We have seen how the unvariedness of the Chinese city offered the Western
observer certainty in knowledge, so much so that travel was privileged as the
optimum mode of inquiry. Here we see that in Macgowan’s construction the
phenomenon of uniformity was indeed intimately related to the exteriority of
the Chinese being, in that both were the results of China’s unchanging civiliza-
tion, which in turn was attributable to the elemental absence that had defined
the content of Chinese life. Because of this primal deprivation, the Chinese
present was nothing more than a kind of habitual or mechanical performance
of established procedures. This explained the stubborn tenacity with which the
Chinese adhered to their past, giving rise to the unvarying routine found in
every facet of Chinese life. Take the Chinese cities: “Every city is built up on the
same model throughout the length and breath of the land, and whilst some are
larger and more imposing than others, the plan of the walls and the configura-
tion of the streets, and architecture of the houses are pretty much the same
everywhere” (Macgowan, 1907: 176). The Chinese adherence to tradition was so
mulish that at times it grew to comical proportions, as was the common practice
in China’s fish markets whereby fish that had gone stale was halved and smeared
with pig’s blood, even though, as Macgowan (1907:193) pointed out, “this simple
and childlike deception is plain to every one that … no one is taken by it”.
In many respects, the case of the fishy deception exemplified the crux of
China’s problem. Chinese life was so immured within the walls of the past that
it had become an aimless motion of repetition. That no utility value at all could
be derived from such blind adherence not only suggested the extent to which
the past had zombified the Chinese present but that there was something more
insidious and primary — the root inertia — in the marrow of Chinese civiliza-
tion. Here Macgowan offered three observations. First, the monotonous shape
of Chinese cities: “The ideal city was drawn in the brain of the designers and
builders of the first one in the remote and misty past of Chinese History, and
282 W. K. Cheng

the spectacle evidently has seemed so sublime and overpowering to the succeed-
ing generations of Chinese that no original genius has appeared since then to
dare to suggest anything better” (Macgowan, 1907: 176). Second, the farming
tools used by the Chinese were handed down from the ancient past dutifully
untouched, for “to alter them, or even to make a suggestion that they could be
improved in any way, would be such a monstrous heresy that the nation’s hair
would turn grey” (Macgowan, 1907: 166). And, finally, the fish market trick: “It
is one of the devices of the trade, that some clever scamp invented in the past …
[The] trick is kept up, in order that the inventor of it, wherever he may be to-
day, may not ‘lose face’ in the eyes of his descendants” (Macgowan, 1907: 193).
In all three instances, the specter unmistakably belonged to the ancestors.
To be sure, ancestral allegiance had long figured in the Western imagina-
tion as a conspicuous trait of Chinese civilization, and thus Macgowan’s
emphasis on its centrality in Chinese life was neither original nor surprising.
What is interesting here, however, was how Macgowan engaged this familiar
truism to serve certain critical functions in constructing his China knowledge.
For one thing, to reduce Chinese civilization to the reified presence of ancestors
was to say that the Chinese tradition was merely a recurring shadow of the past
and not the result of historical sedimentation — hence progress — as was the
case in the West. More important, however, was what Macgowan understood
as the fundamental nature of this ancestral power. The Chinese relation with
their ancestors was not simply an exercise of honor and veneration, but was a
practice infused with “religious”, “spiritual” qualities — hence the term
Macgowan always used was “ancestor worship”. Indeed, what else could it be if
the ancestors could be offended into causing calamities to their living posterity?
That was why Macgowan (1907: 76), having first conceded that ancestor
worship at first glance “seems to be very beautiful”, decided that it was really a
sinister business, an out-and-out form of idolatry: the Chinese ancestors were
themselves idols, indistinguishable from the pantheon of idol-gods that had so
thoroughly engrossed Chinese life.
This matter with Chinese ancestors and idolatry in general led to two
critical implications regarding the Chinese “religious” being. First of all, the
more the Chinese were given to ancestral and other forms of idolatry, the
stronger it implied that they were not entirely incapable of recognizing the
incompleteness of the here and now and hence of envisioning a higher realm of
existence. The Chinese being, as flawed as it was, contained an exploitable
potential to be missionized. Second, this potential, however, was so bastardized
by idolatrous superstition that the “spiritual experience” of the Chinese was
 Constructing Cathay 283

always kept in a depressed state, hopelessly manacled in the trappings of earthly

desires and pecuniary calculations. Thus, the Chinese gods and ancestors were
all believed to have unlimited wealth to dispense, to be “high-spirited” but
“easily offended and vindictive”, and the offerings and the ceremonies and
ritual the Chinese performed in their idols’ honor were aimed to “avert the
sorrows that the supernatural beings might bring upon them”, or so that “sons
and riches and honor would be sent to the family” (Macgowan, 1907: 65, 76).
Chinese “religious” life, in other words, was “entirely a mere matter of busi-
ness” (Macgowan, 1912: 101). In the end, whatever spiritual longing there was
in the Chinese being was contorted and transfigured into a mere facsimile of the
drab and hollow existence (hence exteriority) of everyday Chinese life.
It was no wonder that, since the Chinese “spiritual sphere” was so preoccu-
pied with the ledger of gains and losses, neither gods nor ancestors had anything
to do with the moral quality of the worshippers. Thus, noted Macgowan, a man
of “notoriously bad character” could be utmost in reverence to his idol, to
whom he made the most lavish offerings, but “when he turns to go home he is
just the same man as he was before”.10 Chinese “religion”, therefore, had no
uplifting effect on the moral being; all the idols and ancestors left the Chinese
was an unfulfilled soul. And it was here where Macgowan’s disquisition came
full circle, for the more onerous the Chinese pursued their idolatry, the more
contorted their “religious” life was, the more it attested to the muzzled, nearly
irrepressible yearning that their spiritual needs be satisfied (Macgowan,
1907: 321), and the more imperative a God, a personal Power (Macgowan,
1907: 338), at once divine and solicitous of the moral well-being of the believers,
be brought to their midst.
To Macgowan, however, the consequence of idolatry was not limited to the
spiritual realm; it was in fact the root cause of their material destitution. Even
though life’s hardships had made the Chinese the most industrious people in
the world (Macgowan, 1907: 297), their tireless toil had not brought about any
improvement in livelihood. Yet all this poverty, Macgowan emphasized, was
entirely avoidable. China was a country with natural resources abundant
enough “to fill the homes with plenty, to set factories at work, and to change the
hunger-stricken people into happy, contented citizens”. However, these
resources were left unexploited, because, as dictated by Chinese superstition,
“no one dare put a spade into the ground lest he should dig into the dragon’s
back” (Macgowan, 1912: 115).11
Obviously, for Macgowan and his readers, the most important part of all
these analyses was how this knowledge of the Chinese existence figured in the
284 W. K. Cheng

Christian scheme of things and, by extension, the sanctity of Western presence

in China. Macgowan’s argument was that in the end, the destitution of the
Chinese was really “religiously” induced, and as such their material deprivation
could not be separated from their sinful being. To be sure, God endowed the
physical world with a wealth of usable assets, but Nature was, above all, divinely
created, which was why it was both usable and animated with empyrean beauty.
The appreciation of Nature, therefore, should be complete and wholesome, as
how people related to their land reflected how they related to God. Being
wasteful of nature’s material resources was in the final analysis a form of
desecration, and particularly so in the Chinese case given the idolatrous origin
of their wastefulness. Consider, for example, the epistemological tapestry
Macgowan weaved in his description of an area poetically called “The Peaceful
Streams”, where romance and idyll and stone and minerals were seamlessly
mixed with Nature’s nemesis and the Chinaman’s sin:
As we stand gazing upon the scene before us, we are struck with the grandeur
and magnificence of its scenery. In the far-off distance the mountains are piled
up, one range higher than another, till the last with its lofty peaks seems to be
resting against the sky. In the foreground are countless hills along whose sides
the tea plants flourish, and there are undulating plains, and miniature valleys,
and gently flowing streams that have come from the distant mountains, and
which have lost a good deal of their passion as they have traveled away from
them. … Now, but for a wretched superstition, this region ought to be one of
the richest in China, and its people should be living in affluence. … The land
that stretches before us is rich in coal, and one hill at least contains such a large
percentage of the finest iron, that one engineer who examined it reported that
there was enough of the ore in it to “supply the whole world for a thousand
years”, and still it would remain unexhausted. … Now the one controlling
reason why this great natural wealth, that God has put into the soil of this
beautiful county for the service of man, is left untouched is because it is
believed that there are huge slimy dragons who lie age after age guarding the
treasures of coal and iron, and that any attempt to take them from them would
end in the destruction of the people of the whole region (Macgowan, 1907:
69–71).12

Clearly, the Chinese were sinful not only because of the material deprivation
their idolatrous ways entailed, but also because their false worship blinded them
from seeing the majesty of God’s blessing and awesome creations. To the extent
that Nature was God’s benediction for humankind, the more richly endowed
the Chinese land was and the more its mountains and rivers were marvelously
crafted by “Nature’s artistic hand” (Macgowan, 1907: 68), the more heinous the
 Constructing Cathay 285

Chinaman’s desecration of the divine grace — and the more burning the call to
totally transform the Chinese existence.

The Chinaman’s sin

Here the pursuit of knowledge about China that paralleled Macgowan’s journey
finally reached for the raison d’etat for the West’s noble enterprise in China. All
that could be observed in the Chinese being — the exteriority of Chinese life,
the inability to reason and progress, the godforsaken soul left unfulfilled by
idolatrous falsity, in all, the spiteful wretchedness of Chinese existence —
pointed to the absence of Christ as the Logos, the divine Word that was at once
the ordering principle — the Reason — of the universe. What Macgowan was
telling his Western readers, therefore, was that the mission to conquer the
Chinaman’s soul demanded nothing less than the total negation of the Chinese.
Despite how England had saved China (Macgowan, 1913) and how Macgowan
anticipated the eventual christianizing of the Middle Kingdom, inherent in the
missionary undertaking was an ingrained hostility towards the Chinese in the
here and now. A people so unblessed by the Logos were perforce questionable
in their worth, and, worse, their very existence stood to question God’s grandi-
ose design — the more the Chinese populated the land, the more they were
polluting God’s Nature. Indeed, inasmuch as Macgowan the missionary
proclaimed his desire to learn about the inner life of the Chinese “in order to be
able to influence them to believe in Christ as their Saviour” (Macgowan,
1913: 22), Macgowan the knowledge-traveler often found the Chinese intensely
repulsive. In Sidelights on Chinese Life, for example, he expressed his longing to
“get away from the human Celestial”, to be “absolutely alone for a time” so that
“no Mongolian visage with its acres of features and its yellow-bilious looking
smile shall gaze upon you”:
There is a hill near by that you believe to be entirely deserted, and you think if
you could only get up there, the desire of your heart would be gratified. …
Seating yourself on a grassy mound, you look out on the broad expanse before
you, and you breathe a sigh of content. … You hear the sighing of the wind
and you see the grasses waving their heads as though they would talk in dumb
show with you. You look down at the river, that winds like a silver thread along
the plain, and you feel that this contact with nature is a most delightful break
on the eternal monotony of faces that may suggest humour and pathos and
lurking fun behind a yellow exterior, but never beauty.
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286 W. K. Cheng

All at once you receive a shock. You catch the gleam of an eye through an
opening in two or three bushes that you never dreamed of concealing anything
human behind them. You are startled, for you feel that the Chinaman has
outwitted you. … The delightful sense of being alone vanishes, and you realize
that that is an impossibility in China. You stand up disgusted, but with the
feeling of amusement predominant, and one after another comes out of his
hiding-place, where the black, piercing eyes have been scanning your every
movement for the last ten minutes, and at least a dozen ungainly forms creep
up to you and with smiling faces try to make friends with you (Macgowan,
1907: 71–73).

It is here, in the complex in which the desire to annihilate the Chinese was
imperfectly suppressed, that Macgowan’s brokerage intersected with the
broader horizon of the Western imagination of China. It was the China of Mr.
Wingrove, the disconcerted missionary in W. Somerset Maugham’s On A
Chinese Screen (1922: 52, 53), who upon seeing his Chinese assistant could not
hide his feeling of “the most intense physical repulsion”, and “hated the
Chinese with a hatred beside which his wife’s distaste was insignificant”.13 It was
the China of Sax Rohmer, who brought us the indelible image of Dr. Fu
Manchu, overlord of the Asiatics and, worse, evil scientist with Western degrees
— the consummate Antichrist — always plotting the downfall of Western
civilization. It was the China of Broken Blossoms, of Albert S. Evans’ “Barbary
Coast”, of Chinese Exclusion;14 in short, it was the China of Everyman.

Notes

1. For a brief account of Macgowan’s career in China, see Zhongguo shehui kexue yuan jindai
shi yanjiu suo fanyi shi, 1981:302. Macgowan arrived in Shanghai in 1860. Two years later he
became the chief editor of Zhongwai zazhi (“Shanghai Miscellany”), a monthly publication
of news, religion, science and literature (Ge Gongzhen, 1964: 69). In 1863 he was transferred
to Amoy, where he spent the remainder of his China years until retirement in 1910.
2. Macgowan is cursorily mentioned in Latourette (1929, 1975: 363, 430) and de Francis
(1950: 33). I am not aware of any independent study of Macgowan.
3. In 1862, Macgowan published a pamphlet on Chinese phrases in the Shanghai dialect, a
line of work he continued in Amoy where he published, in 1869, A Manual of the Amoy
Colloquial (Hong Kong: de Souza & Co., 1869; Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1988)
and, some fourteen years later, in 1883, a monumental English and Chinese Dictionary of the
Amoy Dialect (London: Trubner & Co., 1883; Taibei: Southern Materials Center, 1978).
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4. Macgowan’s books from the late 1880’s include: Christ or Confucius, Which? Or, the Story
of the Amoy Missions (London: London Missionary Society, 1889; Taipei: Ch’eng Wen
Publishing Company, 1971). A History of China: From the Earliest Days Down to the Present
was published in 1897, with a second edition in 1906 under a new title, The Imperial History
of China: Being a History of the Empire as Compiled by the Chinese Historians, 2nd edition
(Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1906; London: Curzon Press, 1973). Also
published in 1897 was Pictures of Southern China (London: Religious Tract Society, 1897),
followed in 1907 by Sidelights on Chinese Life (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.,
1907) and, two years later, Lights and Shadows of Chinese Life (Shanghai: North China Daily
News & Herald, 1909), which was revised and enlarged in 1912 as Men and Manners of
Modern China. (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912). The year 1910 saw the publication of
Chinese Folk-Lore Tales (London: Macmillan, 1910; Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Library Editions,
1974), a collection of Chinese folktales in translation. That the leader of the republican
revolution of 1911 was a Chinese christian seemed to have had a profound effect on
Macgowan, by which time he had already begun his retirement in England. The exhilaration
of the Revolution would in due time prove to be “abortive” (Lloyd Eastman, The Abortive
Revolution: China Under Nationalist Rule, 1927–1937 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1974]), but in 1911 the promise of Sun Yat-sen’s revolution was enthusiastically
received by the missionary community as the harvest of decades of indefatigable Christian
work. As Macgowan was, by then, carrying out a crusade against scaling down England’s
efforts in missionizing China, he welcomed Sun’s revolutionary pre-eminence as testimony
to the profound transformations in the Chinese character brought on by the laborious
evangelical work of Christ’s soldiers like himself, a theme eloquently developed in his How
England Saved China (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1913). Macgowan’s other works in this period
were Beside the Bamboo (London: London Missionary Society, 1914) and a short pamphlet,
The Way to Win the Whole World for Christ: The Old Way, the Only Way (London: World
Dominion Press, 1924), the latter published two years after his death. To Macgowan, history
bore out the veracity of his China knowledge.
5. For example, one sees in Macgowan the nearly unmediated celebration, often in Social
Darwinian terms, of Western racial superiority that in the late 19th century was widely
believed to be incontrovertibly proven by modern science.
6. Cf. Smith’s well known treatment of the Chinese face in Smith, 1894: 16–18.
7. On the Chinese face, Macgowan (1907: 13–14) was more detailed in Sidelights: “The
features of the face, with the exception of the eyes, have not a single good one amongst them.
The cheekbones of the typical Chinaman are high and protruding; the nose is flat, as though
the original progenitor had had his bruised by falling on a fender and had transmitted it
flattened and disfigured through successive generations, and the mouth, too, is large and
sensuous looking. In addition to all this there is a yellow strain that lies as a foundation
colour through all the others that nature or the burning sun lays on, and the effect is not at
all a pleasing one…. The great mass of the people are exceedingly plain-featured and
unattractive, and they are wanting, too, in those delicate and refined graces that of themselves
are sufficient to give a charm even to a personality that is otherwise anything but pleasing.”
8. For a fascinating treatment on the differing notions of time between American Indians
and Anglo time, see Farrer, 1996.
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288 W. K. Cheng

9. Gregory Blue (1999, 94) points out that in the nineteenth-century Western world
“progress” had become a watchword for defining the “modern” identity of Europe.
10. Macgowan, Sidelights on Chinese Life, 322. A more detailed discussion can be found in
Macgowan, Sidelights on Chinese Life, 81–82: “A man, for example, is an opium smoker, and
every day the habits grows upon him till at last he is perfectly powerless under its grip. He
becomes indisposed to work … has stripped his home of everything he can pawn … and his
wife is almost starving. Driven almost to despair by the awful pains that fill every joint and
muscle of his body with the most exquisite agonies, he sells his wife, and she, only too glad
to escape her wretched life, willingly consents. Now, during the whole time that this gradual
descent in the man’s character has been going on, the idol has been a daily witness of his
conduct, but it has never entered the thoughts of the opium-smoker that the god that sits on
the oblong table and gazes calmly upon him without a wink cares anything at all whether he
lives a moral life, or whether he wrecks it by the grossest iniquities.”
11. In this particular instance Macgowan was referring to Chinese geomancy — fengshui. Of
course, the ancestors represent a pre-eminent factor in Chinese geomancy.
12. A similar description can be found in Macgowan (1907: 69): “A mountain stream runs
right through the centre of [the valley], and night and day the sounds of its music break upon
the air. The hamlets and villages scattered over it add to the beauty of the scene, for they give
the charm of life to the silent forces that lie around. The most beautiful feature about the
whole, however, is the hills, which group themselves so artistically around this charming
valley. They seem like colossal walls that mighty heroes built in ancient days to turn it into
a city of which they should form the battlements. … Now the stone of which these hills are
composed is a beautiful granite, that is specially adapted for house-building, and one would
naturally imagine that the houses in the valley and in the city which lies just over the hills
would all be built of the stone that is found in such abundance around. But such was not the
case. A tradition has come down from the past that underneath these hills are mighty spirits
who would never tolerate that the granite they contained should ever be quarried. … The
result was that all the stone that was used in this region had to be carried up the river from
some place fifty or sixty miles distant.”
13. I am grateful to Bob Entenmann for pointing me to this reference.
14. A fascinating reading of the rape fantasy in Broken Blossoms can be found in Marchetti,
1993, pp. 10–45. Albert S. Evans’ chapter, “A Cruise on the Barbary Coast” (1873), in
contains vivid description of Chinese life in the nether world of San Francisco Chinatown.

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