Diplomatic Gifts and Counter-Gifts: Britain and the Muslim East, 16th to Early 20th Century
A one-day conference in person at the Centre for Diplomatic Archives, French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, la Courneuve, Paris, 27 September 2022
As symbolic commodities circulating within and across cultures, gifts offer rich and multiple perspectives on the conduct of international diplomacy and its corollary cross-cultural transactions. Taking as our focus diplomatic relations between Britain and the three Muslim systems of the Ottomans, Persians, and Mughals over a period ranging from early contacts in the 16th century to the high age of the British empire, we wish to map out the shifts of paradigms and the redefinitions of circuits of allegiance and power through objects over the longue durée. Our comparative approach will cover the three Maussian stages of the giving, receiving, and reciprocating of gifts, as we aim at identifying cultural agreements and disagreements across different systems and contexts over diplomatic gifts and the bonds which they create or disrupt. Particular attention will be paid to the rhetoric and protocol of hierarchy and/or reciprocity in gifts, their metonymic value and its possible repurposing in a changing context, as well as the legal and political personalities of the actors in charge of the transactive process and their various relations to the polities involved.
Organising committee (LARCA, Université Paris Cité): Marine Bellégo, Daniel Foliard, Ladan Niayesh, Stéphanie Prévost
Cadeaux et échanges diplomatiques: Ententes et mésententes entre la Grande-Bretagne et l’Orient musulman (XVIe-début XXe siècle)
Journée d’études en présentiel, au Centre des archives diplomatiques, Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, la Courneuve, Paris 27 septembre 2022
En tant que biens symboliques circulant au sein et entre les cultures, les cadeaux offrent des perspectives riches et multiples sur la conduite de la diplomatie internationale et des transactions interculturelles qui en relèvent. En nous concentrant sur les relations diplomatiques entre la Grande-Bretagne et trois systèmes politiques de l’Orient musulman (Ottomans, Persans, Inde moghole) sur une période allant des premiers contacts au XVIe siècle jusqu’à l’âge d’or de l’empire britannique, nous souhaitons cartographier les changements de paradigmes et la manière dont les circuits d’allégeance et de pouvoir se redéfinissent à travers les objets sur la longue durée. Notre approche comparative entend couvrir les trois étapes maussiennes du don, de sa réception, et du contre-don, pour identifier les accords et désaccords culturels entre différents systèmes et contextes autour des cadeaux diplomatiques et des liens qu’ils tissent ou qu’ils défont. Une attention particulière sera portée à la rhétorique et au protocole de hiérarchie et/ou de réciprocité rendu possible par les cadeaux, leur valeur métonymique et sa possible redéfinition dans un contexte nouveau, ainsi que les personnalités juridiques et politiques des acteurs en charge du processus transactionnel et leurs liens divers aux États.
Comité d’organisation (LARCA, Université Paris Cite): Marine Bellégo, Daniel Foliard, Ladan Niayesh, Stéphanie Prévost
An illuminated letter, written by the calligrapher Edward Norgate and dated 9 July 1621, from James I to the Ottoman sultan Osman II, announcing the appointment of Sir Thomas Roe as ambassador to the Porte and the recall of his predecessor Sir John Eyre. Source : https://www.soas.ac.uk/gallery/bridge/.
A Royal Warrant dated 10 March 1631 mentions Edward Norgate, one of the clerks of the Signet Extraordinary as having “for many years been employed in preparing for the Royal signature letters to the Emperor and Patriarch of Russia, the Grand Signor, the Great Mogul, the Emperor of Persia, and Kings of Bantam, Macassar, Barbary, Siam, Acheen, Fez, Sus, and other remote kings and princes”.[1] This rather long description makes it clear that diplomatic correspondence with “remote kings and princes” was a matter of specific artistic concern and care. From 1661 onwards, the garnishing of “letters to eastern princes” even became an official appointment.[2] Such discriminate treatment may be due to the fact that “England’s relations with Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Asia were established primarily to further the interests of its merchants. The exchange of royal letters was crucial to the maintenance of such relations; little wonder that establishments such as […] the East India Company, were asked to contribute to the cost of embellishing these missives”.[3]
In 1593, already, we know from the Khasseki Safiye that Elizabeth I had sent her a “special letter, full of marvels, whose paper was more fragrant than pure camphor and ambergris and its ink than finest musk, notifying indescribable and immeasurable consideration and love […].”[4] The Sultana’s lavish description of Elizabeth’s letter immediately and tellingly follows her account of the gifts she received. The fragrant and colourful missive served as a complement and addition of sorts to the gift-giving ceremony.[5] The multi-sensory impression made by the letter mattered as greatly as the words it bore, whose own impact depended upon the mediation of an interpreter.[6] Later beautifully illuminated letters, such as the ones sent by James I to Sultan Ahmed I on 17 January 1617[7], to Sultan Osman II on 9 July 1621[8] or to Emperor Abbas of Persia on 14 February 1622,[9] testify to the ongoing artistic value of diplomatic correspondence with the East. Although the one Elizabethan example I have given above is rather exceptional, thereby confirming the fact that “some letters were more like gifts than others”, such later “exquisitely limned letters were often works of art in their own right”.[10]
Rather significantly enough, the limners who ornamented the English monarch’s letters were sometimes also versed in the art of portrait miniatures, which circulated widely in diplomatic negotiations and are known to have played a significant part in Elizabeth’s own relation with Safiye and Thomas Roe’s negotiations with Jahangir, among others.[11] The flourished vellums[12] of diplomatic correspondence showcased techniques and materials near-identical to those used by limners of precious “pictures in small”, (including the use of liquid gold, precious pigments, watercolour and bodycolour). Edward Norgate’s Miniatura or the Art of Limning, even features a vast array of recipes which could have been used by limners of both letters and portraits in small volume.[13] Portrait miniaturists were then in fact still known as “limners” (the word “miniature” having entered the English language in this sense rather late in the 17th century): not only did they share a name, techniques and materials with embellishers of “patents and commissions of embassadours”,[14] but also equally contributed to asserting the agency of limners in extra-European diplomatic negotiations.[15]
[2] “The writer, flourisher and embellisher of letters to eastern princes was appointed by lord chamberlain’s warrant to the gentlemen ushers, daily waiters. He received a fee of £10 a document until Anne’s reign, when a salary was established of £60 per annum at the treasurer of the chamber’s office.””Salaired tradesmen: Other.” Office-Holders in Modern Britain: Volume 11 (Revised), Court Officers, 1660-1837. Ed. R O Bucholz. London: University of London, 2006. 384-390. British History Online. Web. 18 May 2022. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/office-holders/vol11/pp384-390.
[3] Carlo M. Bajetta (ed.), Elizabeth I’s Italian Letters, 1533-1603. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, p. 252.
[4] Lines 15-19 of a letter in Turkish from the Khasseki Safiye to Queen Elizabeth, written in the first decade of Rabi I, 1002/25 November-4 December 1593, translated into English by S. A. Skilliter, “Three Letters from Şāfiye to Elizabeth I”, in S. M. Stern (ed.), Documents form Islamic Chanceries. Oxford, Bruno Cassirer, 1965, p. 119-158, p. 132. The letter is now property of the British Library, London, Cotton MS Nero B. viii, f. 41.
[5] “In relations with non-European powers, royal letters were most commonly delivered at an audience in which a gift was also presented. This gift had often been paraded through the city in which the court was based before being processed through the royal compound to (and even past) the ruler. In such contexts the gift was calculated to convey the wealth of the English monarch and as a sign of the prestige with which they viewed the ruler to whom it was sent. A relatively bare letter, even one with silk threads, would have seemed incongruous when juxtaposed with such gifts”.
[6] Tellingly enough, most accounts tend to confirm that the original letter was presented before its translation. This is the case in Thomas Roe’s description of his presentation of James’s letter to Jahangir, for instance: “After many Complements, I vsed some words to him, deliuering his Majesties letter and showing my Commission, the Coppy wherof (I meane the letter) I then also deliuered in Persian […]” (Letter to the East India Company dated 25 January 1615), in Frederick Charles Danvers (ed.), Letters Received by the East India Company from its Servants in the East. London, S. Low, Marston & co., 1896, p. 10.
[9] London, British Library, India Office Records and Private Papers. IOR/A/1/7B.
[10] Tracey A. Sowerby, “Negotiating with the Material Text”, in Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood (eds.), Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World. Oxford, Oxford University press, 2019, p. 203-219, p. 218.
[11] About portraiture ‘(including portrait miniatures) and diplomacy, see Tracey A. Sowerby, “‘A Memorial and a Pledge of Faith’: Portraiture and Early Modern Diplomatic Culture.” The English Historical Review, vol. 129, no. 537, 2014, p. 296–331. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24473825. Accessed 19 May 2022. About Elizabeth’s gift of a portrait miniature to the sultana, see Richard Wrag’s account, “A Description of a Voiage to Constantinople and Syria, begun the 21. of March 1593. and ended the 9. of August, 1595,” in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, 12 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehouse and Sons, 1904), 6:94-118, 94. About Jahangir and Roe, see Anne-Valérie Dulac, “Miniatures between East and West: The Art(s) of Diplomacy in Thomas Roe’s Embassy”, Études Épistémè [Online], 26 | 2014, DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/episteme.343. William Segar and Edward Norgate are perhaps the most prominent examples of limners who excelled in both the limning of letters and portrait miniatures.
[12] The use of vellum rather than paper was yet another distinguishing feature of letters to “remote kings”. It was also best suited to travelling and changing weather conditions.
[13] The history of this treatise (which survives in two version, one in manuscript form and a later one which was intended for printing) can be read in Jeffrey Muller and Jim Murrell’s introduction to their edition of Norgate’s Miniatura or the Art of Limning (c. 1627–8, then 1648), ed. by Jeffrey Muller and Jim Murrell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). About Norgate’s contribution to “limning” and the dissemination of terminology and techniques, see Anne-Valérie Dulac, “Miniatures in Translation: Words for a Gentle Art”, in Laetitia Sansonetti and Rémi Vuillemin (eds.), Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England. Translation, Transmission, Transfer. Turnhout (Belgium), Brepols, forthcoming, p. 273-292.
[14] I am here quoting from John Fuller’s concise biography of Edward Norgate in The History of the Worthies of England: “[Norgate] became the best Illuminer or Limner of our age, employed generally to make the Initial letters in the Patents of Peers, and Commissions of Embassadours, having left few heirs to the kind, none to the degree of his art therein.” (London: Printed by J.G.W.L. and W.G. for Thomas Williams1662, p. 161)
[15] See Maija Jansson, Art and Diplomacy: Seventeenth-Century English Decorated Royal Letters to Russia and the Far East. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, Leiden, Brill, 2015. About limners/miniaturists see chapter 4 “Limners, Printers and Embellishers”, p. 55-67.
Ladan Niayesh présente « Echoing Cities in Muscovy Company Merchants » par Ladan Niayesh à la Hakluyt Society – Royal Asiatic society à Londres, le 15 juin 2022.
Hakluyt Society’s Annual General Meeting and Lecture on Wednesday 15 June will be held at the Royal Asiatic Society, 14 Stephenson Way, London NW1 2HD, very near Euston Station. The lecture is free to attend. Our lecturer, Professor Ladan Niayesh, will be speaking on ‘Echoing Cities in Muscovy Company Merchants’ Itineraries in Persia and Central Asia (1558-1570s)’. The lecture will be followed by a reception with drinks and canapés. Tickets for the reception, costing £18.00, can be obtained from office@hakluyt.com. Guests are welcome to attend the lecture and buy tickets for the reception. If you cannot attend in person the Zoom link for the meeting can be obtained from our administrator at office@hakluyt.com. Please order reception tickets or ask for zoom links by 10 June.
Diplomatic Gifts and Counter-Gifts: Britain and the Muslim East, 16th to Early 20th Century
A one-day conference in person at the Centre for Diplomatic Archives, French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, la Courneuve, Paris, 27 September 2022
As symbolic commodities circulating within and across cultures, gifts offer rich and multiple perspectives on the conduct of international diplomacy and its corollary cross-cultural transactions. Taking as our focus diplomatic relations between Britain and the three Muslim systems of the Ottomans, Persians, and Mughals over a period ranging from early contacts in the 16th century to the high age of the British empire, we wish to map out the shifts of paradigms and the redefinitions of circuits of allegiance and power through objects over the longue durée. Our comparative approach will cover the three Maussian stages of the giving, receiving, and reciprocating of gifts, as we aim at identifying cultural agreements and disagreements across different systems and contexts over diplomatic gifts and the bonds which they create or disrupt. Particular attention will be paid to the rhetoric and protocol of hierarchy and/or reciprocity in gifts, their metonymic value and its possible repurposing in a changing context, as well as the legal and political personalities of the actors in charge of the transactive process and their various relations to the polities involved.
Organising committee (LARCA, Université Paris Cité): Marine Bellégo, Daniel Foliard, Ladan Niayesh, Stéphanie Prévost
Cadeaux et échanges diplomatiques: Ententes et mésententes entre la Grande-Bretagne et l’Orient musulman (XVIe-début XXe siècle)
Journée d’études en présentiel, au Centre des archives diplomatiques, Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, la Courneuve, Paris 27 septembre 2022
En tant que biens symboliques circulant au sein et entre les cultures, les cadeaux offrent des perspectives riches et multiples sur la conduite de la diplomatie internationale et des transactions interculturelles qui en relèvent. En nous concentrant sur les relations diplomatiques entre la Grande-Bretagne et trois systèmes politiques de l’Orient musulman (Ottomans, Persans, Inde moghole) sur une période allant des premiers contacts au XVIe siècle jusqu’à l’âge d’or de l’empire britannique, nous souhaitons cartographier les changements de paradigmes et la manière dont les circuits d’allégeance et de pouvoir se redéfinissent à travers les objets sur la longue durée. Notre approche comparative entend couvrir les trois étapes maussiennes du don, de sa réception, et du contre-don, pour identifier les accords et désaccords culturels entre différents systèmes et contextes autour des cadeaux diplomatiques et des liens qu’ils tissent ou qu’ils défont. Une attention particulière sera portée à la rhétorique et au protocole de hiérarchie et/ou de réciprocité rendu possible par les cadeaux, leur valeur métonymique et sa possible redéfinition dans un contexte nouveau, ainsi que les personnalités juridiques et politiques des acteurs en charge du processus transactionnel et leurs liens divers aux États.
Comité d’organisation (LARCA, Université Paris Cite): Marine Bellégo, Daniel Foliard, Ladan Niayesh, Stéphanie Prévost Pour plus de détails sur notre groupe de recherche, consulter le blog: https://mhma.hypotheses.org/blog-gifting-the-east
Thomas Roe being received by Jahangir. Mural in St Stephen’s Hall, Palace of Westminster. William Rothenstein, 1927. Photo credit: Parliamentary Art Collection)
In the first instalment of this blog, Ladan Niayesh identifies two key terms derived from Persian and Arabic that were first used by Europeans in the early modern period to refer to types of gift given and received during their encounters with Eastern courts. First, peshkash, a present made to a ruler in recognition or anticipation of a privilege to be granted, for example a new appointment. Second, khilat, a gift presented by a ruler or another ‘acknowledged superior’ to someone of a lower rank, closely associated with the public display of authority and munificence.
Both types of gift were important to the English East India Company’s exchanges with Mughal authorities in India from the outset, as Thomas Roe’s visit to the court of Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605-27) shows. Arriving in December 1615 in the north Indian city of Ajmer, where Jahangir’s court was then based, Roe’s aim was to secure permission to trade for the Company, which had been founded in 1600. Though not the first Englishman at Jahangir’s court – several representatives of the Company had already been received by the emperor – Roe’s visit signalled the intensification of English diplomatic efforts towards the Mughals; serving as ambassador to King James I, his arrival at Jahangir’s court marked the beginning of direct diplomatic relations between the English and Mughal thrones.[i]
A few days after his arrival at Ajmer, while still recovering from the arduous journey across land from Surat, Roe was summoned before Jahangir. Gifts of an English horse-drawn coach, a scarf and a sword were presented to the emperor, before Persian translations of King James’ letters to him were read. At a second audience a few weeks later, Roe then presented Jahangir with an English-made clock. For reasons which we will explore below, closely related to the role of gifts in diplomatic relations, the English request for trading rights in Mughal territories was not immediately granted. Roe was forced to spend the next three years at Jahangir’s court, during which time he also presented the emperor with a miniature by the celebrated miniature portrait artist Isaac Oliver, before an imperial edict (firman) confirming English trading rights was finally secured.[ii] By this point, the gift-giving had been reciprocated, Jahangir presenting Roe with a gold cup inset with rubies and emeralds. During his stay at the Mughal court, Roe was also gifted one or two of the emperor’s horses and presented with copies of Oliver’s miniature that Jahangir had requested his court artists to produce.
Important in these exchanges were not just, of course, the items gifted but the processes of their giving and reception, which were rich in symbolism and ceremony. Roe presented his gifts to Jahangir in the emperor’s audience chamber (durbar), where visitors were usually received, Jahangir looking down on his guests from a throne on an elevated platform, surrounded by members of his court. The later performance of khilat, when Roe was presented with the gold cup, involved the conferring on the Englishman of a golden cloak lifted from Jahangir’s shoulders, a ceremony denoting the acceptance and integration of Roe into the Mughal polity on the part of its highest authority.
What emerges most clearly from the English sources relating to Roe’s stay at the Mughal court, however, is an understanding of gift-giving and receiving as transactional; gifts were considered not as disinterested offerings made through largesse but as contributions towards specific ends, sometimes even as a form of payment. What was gifted was ultimately more important than the processes of giving and reception and what they signified. At Ajmer, Roe worried that the gifts that the English crown had asked him to present to Jahangir – notably the horse-drawn coach – were insufficient to impress the emperor and decided to add the scarf, the sword and later the miniature from his personal possessions, hoping that the latter would pique Jahangir’s curiosity and be appreciated for its rarity.[iii] In parallel, he lamented that he had nothing to offer other influential members of Jahangir’s court, including the empress, Nur Jahan. Roe was right to be concerned. Jahangir, we are told, accepted the presents courteously, and later made use of the coach, but decided that Roe’s presents were insufficient, asking the Portuguese Jesuits at his court why, if the King of England was a great monarch, he had ‘sent presents of so small value’ and letting it be known that what he really expected was some jewels.[iv] By requesting his court artists to make copies of the miniature, the emperor indicated to Roe that the artwork was not so rare or interesting after all, and demonstrated that his artists were equal or superior in talent to their European counterparts.[v]
To make matters worse, embassies from the Portuguese at Goa and the Safavid dynasty of Persia arrived at Ajmer in early 1616, bearing much more impressive gifts than those that Roe had been able to produce. The Portuguese embassy was a particular problem, given that its object was to dissuade Jahangir from permitting English trade in the Mughal Empire. Before long, Roe was admitting defeat, reporting to the Company’s directors in London that, faced with Portuguese competition, ‘articles of treaty on equal terms I cannot effect; want of presents disgraced me.’[vi] Only with the arrival of a new English fleet at Surat in the final months of 1616, carrying more gifts for Jahangir, did the situation change, renewing hopes of a formal contract with the emperor. When the English delegation transporting these gifts arrived at Ajmer, however, Jahangir reportedly broke with protocol by taking possession of them without first summoning Roe to an audience. The emperor then insisted on keeping all the new objects from England for himself, including presents destined for other members of court, velvet and silk intended for sale, and a hat meant for Roe himself! It was in the diplomatic fall-out from this incident that permission for trade was finally secured, leading Roe, who had at first been angered by Jahangir’s breach of protocol, to conclude that, if the emperor kept his promises, he was ‘happily robbed’.[vii]
For his part, Roe was not immune to diplomatic faux pas either, suggesting a degree of incomprehensibility on both sides. During his stay at Ajmer the English ambassador had little patience for the intricacies of Mughal court ceremony, seeing for example in the exaggerated servility of the Persian envoy towards Jahangir something undignified. When Jahangir offered him the golden cup, his first reaction was to refuse it, responding that ‘all he desired was that his countrymen, the English, might have a free, safe, and peaceable trade in his dominions.’[viii] Such a response reveals Roe’s lack of understanding of khilat: the ambassador did not realise that by offering a gift to Roe, accompanied by the symbolic conferral of the cloak from his own back, Jahangir was confirming his acceptance of the Englishman – and by extension of all Englishmen – in the Mughal polity. Preoccupied by his conception of the gift-as-transaction (or payment), usually from an inferior towards a superior, Roe failed to comprehend the meaning of the present that Jahangir offered. Only once the misunderstanding was cleared up, and assurances offered that a firman granting trading privileges would follow, were the cup and symbolic conferral of the cloak accepted.
Throughout his time at Ajmer, peshkash remained a more consistent preoccupation to Roe than khilat. Informed by his experiences at the Mughal court, Roe concluded that jewels, swords, knives, works of art, furniture and wine were all presents likely to win favour with Indian rulers. Quality of workmanship was important, he suggested, along with the novelty of the objects gifted. Above all, however, it was the perceived material value of gifts that mattered. To ensure the future of the English company in India, presents would have to be given generously and regularly, not just to the emperor but to his governors in each region of the empire where trade was conducted. ‘It is the custom to change the governors here every year,’ Roe cautioned. ‘New humours must be daily fed; and presents are here expected as due as the king’s customs.’[ix]
As historians have established, repeated demands for gifts and payments to preserve trading privileges were, by the late seventeenth century, one of the key sources of antagonism between European and Mughal parties in India, provoking war between the English East India Company and the Mughals in the 1680s and contributing to the English decision to establish de facto control over parts of the Mughal Empire, most notably the province of Bengal, in the following century.[x] In this sense, the significance of peshkash to changing European-Mughal relationships of power is understood. In contrast, instances of khilat, in which gifts were offered by ruling authorities to their inferiors, merit further research – not least as, after 1750, Mughal structures of authority were undermined, and relationships of power between Mughal authorities and Europeans turned on their head.
[i] English archival material relating to Roe’s embassy, including the ambassador’s journal and letters, was collected together and published as W. Foster (ed.), The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615-1619 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1899). The spelling and capitalisation of extracts quoted below has been modernised for ease of understanding.
[ii] On the miniature and its significance, see A. V. Dulac, ‘Miniatures between East and West: The Art(s) of Diplomacy in Thomas Roe’s Embassy’, Études Épistémè, 26, 2014 (https://doi.org/10.4000/episteme.343). Accessed 3 June 2022.
[iv] Foster (ed.), Embassy, vol. 1, p. 119. Unfortunately, the Jahangirnama, the key Persian chronicle of Jahangir’s reign, makes no reference to Roe’s embassy. For Jahangir’s actions and views, we are therefore forced to rely on the English sources.
Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary who reached China, at work, translating the first Bible into Chinese. Printing Industry of Chengdu. Eliza Morrison, 1830s
Clocks, maps, musical instruments, religious paintings, scientific books and telescopes… Colourful images of princely gifts come to mind when thinking about the presents offered to Emperor Wanli (1563-1620) by the Jesuits when they reached China in the second half of the sixteenth century.[1] Chosen to display the superiority of European countries and the ingenuity of Western thinkers, such presents aimed at drawing the Emperor and his court towards Catholicism, by linking Christianity to progress. They also operated as means of informal (imperial) influence. But what did Protestant missionaries bring when they reached the shores of China two and a half centuries later? The failure of the Macartney Embassy (1793), and the apparent lack of interest of the Chinese court in the presents brought by the first British mission to China seemed to show that the trust of the Chinese Emperors would no longer be gained by gifts.[2] Moreover, with travel being costly, missionaries could only take with them the few belongings which were necessary to upholding their faith and to maintaining a lifestyle somewhat similar to what they had known in their home countries. Rather than attempting to convert the country through its elite — which had forbidden the practice of Christianity in China —, missionaries targeted lower classes, in the hope that Christianity would then spread to the top of the system. Rare and expensive gifts were replaced by the diffusion of tracts throughout the country. The culture of the printing press had always been dear to Protestants, especially in their evangelising enterprise. But the use of tracts and various printed materials, that Protestants regularly used on a massive scale, exceeded common measure in China[3].
The origin of what became the biggest Protestant printing industry abroad is rooted in the Chinese political context of the early nineteenth century. The Canton System (1757-1842), which controlled trade with the West by confining all exchanges to the southern port of Canton, made it impossible for Protestant missionaries to enter the country. Contrary to Catholic missionaries who already had a network of converts and would disguise themselves to reach remote areas, Protestant missionaries needed another way to spread their beliefs. Hence, they turned to printing and found different ways to smuggle their writings into the country. The Bible, which the first Protestant missionary to China, Robert Morrison (1782-1834) had translated into Chinese, was printed on a large scale. However, missionaries soon turned exclusively to tracts, and sometimes journals, because they were easier to hide and smuggle. Such a method was particularly adapted to the Chinese missionary field. Indeed, contrary to most countries in which Christian missionaries worked in the early nineteenth century, a majority of the population was literate enough to read what was written on the tracts[4]. Moreover, despite the profusion of local idioms and spoken dialects in China, written Chinese remained the same in every part of the country. It was however dangerous to print these tracts in Canton or Macao, where most of the missionaries resided. The latter thus turned to peripheral places such as Singapore or Malacca and set up printing houses there. When missionaries were allowed to enter the country as a result of the Treaty of Nanjing (1842) and of the Beijing Convention (1860), they continued to resort to tracts to spread their message. This led to the creation of a profusion of ecumenical literary societies, set in different parts of China, which provided Protestant missionaries with evangelising material.
It is difficult to assess the exact number of Christian tracts smuggled into China by Protestant missionaries. However, the vehement reaction of their Catholic rivals testifies to the intensity of their endeavour. Catholic missionaries generally accused them of defaming God’s written words by oversimplifying the Christian message and highlighted what they presented as the useless nature of their enterprise. In 1825, a Lazarist priest, called Jean Pupier went as far as writing to his superior in Paris: ‘I myself have heard of a Chinese express his gratitude at being furnished by the Bible Society with paper for a use I dare not specify’, before adding ‘How many houses are there (…) in which the interior partitions as well as the ceiling are papered with pages from dozens and dozens of Bibles’.[5] Such an assertion might have been caused by the rivalry between Catholic and Protestant missionaries on the mission field. However, it might also remind readers of The Good Earth (1931), a novel written by American writer Pearl Buck, who was herself the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries.[6] In this novel, the main character Wang Lu takes a tract handed out by a missionary. Wang Lu looks at the drawing of the crucifixion and concludes that Jesus Christ was certainly a crook who deserved to be put to death. He then uses the tract to repair his shoes. This questions gift-giving and what may be an appropriate gift selection. Thinking in terms of what the sociologist Marcel Mauss called the social contract of the gift (based on the triadic paradigm giving, receiving, reciprocating), the present situation qualifies as a miscounter. The misunderstanding over the nature of the gift results in what the giver (and expected readers) identifies as a misuse of the gift. The gift is thus immediately adulterated and loses its quality as gift for Wang Lu, who fails to reciprocate. The anecdote is also a way for write Pearl Buck to question the tract-giving strategy not only as one which is inoperative, but as one which is a one-way imperialistic move.
At another level, Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth also raises another question, that of the translation of Christian concepts into Chinese. Indeed, as Protestant missionaries from different societies began ordering tracts, they found it very difficult to agree on the translation of central concepts such as ‘God’. Protestants lacked a unifying centralised source of authority, like the Pope for the Catholics. The problem remained unsolved and each denomination went on using a different translation. Printers from the main printing houses thus left blank the spaces where God was mentioned in the tracts and Bibles which they pre-printed. They would then fill the blank spaces with the translation asked by the society placing the order.
However, one could argue that it was not so much the translation of theological concepts but the way they were presented in tracts which could lead to the distortion of the Christian message. The emergence of the so-called Taiping movement in 1850 is a case in point. Their emblematic leader, Hong Xiuquan (1813-1863) was first acquainted with Christian theology through a series of Christian tracts. Although he then studied for a few weeks with Issachar Roberts, a Baptist missionary working in Canton, most of his understanding of Christianity came from the tracts he gathered throughout the country. The deistic system he created for the Taipings was deeply anchored in the Christian tradition. Hong Xiuquan used a series of Christian concepts such as the Golden Rule, the Trinity and a series of biblical passages, but he rewrote them in order to legitimise his rule.[7] He thus presented himself as Jesus’s younger brother and the fourth person of the Trinity and one of his lieutenants was cast as the incarnation of the Holy Spirit. Interestingly, Hong Xiuquan chose the use of tracts to spread his message throughout the country, thus demonstrating his belief in the efficiency of tracts, which had contributed to his own ‘conversion’. The use of tracts inspired other sects such as the Vegetarians or the White Lotus sects, which in their turn resorted to tracts. This contributed to the spread of the anti-Christian feeling in China, which would eventually reach its climax with the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901).
By no means, did missionaries technically bring the invention of the printing technology to China — it is generally seen as one of the four great inventions of Ancient China. They did however greatly contribute to the rise of Chinese modern printing, without this being their main aim. While it is difficult to assess the real impact of such a development on the diffusion of the Christian message, it could be argued that the advent of the printing industry by Protestant missionaries led to the emergence of a new episteme. Indeed, one could argue that, with the development of modern printing in China, ideas started being spread in a non-vertical way, which contravened the traditional Confucian top-down social order and went along the structural transformations underwent by late nineteenth-century Chinese society. Paradoxically, this side-impact of the Protestant missionary tract-giving enterprise served a different cause than originally envisaged (as no less that the gift of Christianity). Indeed, the reappropriation and resignifying of Protestant missionary tract-giving probably had its main impact after Protestant missionaries were expelled from China, that is when the modern printing industry became one of the preferred weapons of the Chinese Communist Party, thus serving a very different cause than European proselytism.
[1] David E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500-1800. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.
[3] José M. Braga, The Beginning of Printing at Macao. Lisbonne: STVDIA, 1963, pp. 59-60.
[4] John H. Ritson, ‘Christian Literature in the Mission Field’, International Review of Mission, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1915, 204.
[5] Jean Pupier to J. A. Dubois, Annales de la propagation de la foi, III (1830-1831), June 16, 1825, p. 47, in Peter W. FAY, ‘The Protestant Mission and the Opium War’, Pacific Historical Review, May, Vol. 40, No. 2, 1971, 151.
[6] Pearl Buck, The Good Earth. New York: John Day, 1931, p. 102.
[7] Jonathan D. Spence, God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan. New York : W. W. Norton & Company, 1996, 12-13.