Robert Morrison, sent alone to China by the London Missionary Society in 1807, spent his missionary career planting a foothold in China for the benefit of evangelicalism and constructed the foundation upon which the Protestant religion in China rested. Although he planted British Protestantism in China, surprisingly. scholarship has failed to produce a critical examination of his life or mission. My thesis addresses this gap, but while it seems sensible for one to approach such a study with a hagiographical framework (and there are a number of such studies on Morrison), I am employing a critical methodology in order to ask what led to Morrison's goals and outcomes. Consequently, my research concerns itself with illuminating the preparations, assumptions, and strategies that influenced the planning of the first China Mission and, consequently, that shaped Morrison's goals and achievements in China. Such a concern leads me to assess the influence of David Bogue, who served as the tutor at Gosport Academy, where Morrison received his missionary training. This thesis, thus, analyses Bogue's influence upon Morrison's mission in order to expose the intellectual and theological foundations upon which Morrison's efforts rested and, therefore, to question his creativity and to problematise the generally accepted notion of Robert Morrison as the 'beginning' of the Chinese Protestant religion. My research confines itself to archival materials from libraries in London, Edinburgh, and Hong Kong - some of which (particularly those that relate to Gosport Academy but also Morrison's Anglophone library in Hong Kong) have never been exploited for academic research. The thesis demonstrates the value of these newly discovered archives by exploring the ways in which they call into question conventional understandings of Robert Morrison's pioneering efforts and contributions; rereading Morrison's mission through the lens of these resources I will provide a new and fruitful way of understanding early Protestant missions in China.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:512016 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Daily, Christopher Allen |
| Publisher | SOAS, University of London |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/17443/ |
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