Hostname: page-component-6dbcb7884d-4tctr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-14T08:46:49.076Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Beliefs, Aspirations and Methods of the First Missionaries in British Hong Kong, 1841-5

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2016

Kate Lowe
Kate Lowe*
Affiliation:
Goldsmiths’ College, University of London
Get access

Extract

The British phase of Hong Kong’s history started when Hong Kong was ceded to Britain on 20 January 1841. The negotiations were carried out by Captain Charles Elliott for the British and the commissioner Ch’i-shan for the Chinese. A small British contingent landed at what came to be known as Possession Point on the northwest of Hong Kong island on 25 January and drank the health of Queen Victoria; on the following day they signalled the taking of possession by hoisting the union flag. Hong Kong had been suggested as a possible British acquisition only on 11 January, when other more acceptable islands, such as Chusan off the northern coast, had been vetoed by the Chinese. Hong Kong was mainly known to sea captains as it had been used as a rendezvous for opium ships for a number of years, but most other people in the area had very little idea about its appearance, population, or potential as a colony.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History Subsidia , Volume 13: Missions and Missionaries , 2000 , pp. 50 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2000 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 For the history of Hong Kong in the early 1840s, see Eitel, E. J., Europe in China (London and Hong Kong, 1895), pp. 135–252Google Scholar; Sayer, G. R., Hong Kong: Birth, Adolescence and Coming of Age (London, New York and Toronto, 1937), pp. 90–161Google Scholar; Endacott, G. B., A History of Hong Kong (London, 1958), pp. 14–78Google Scholar; Evans, Dafydd, ‘Chinatown in Hong Kong: the beginnings of Taipingshan’, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 10 (1970), pp. 69–78Google Scholar; Chan, W. K., The Making of Hong Kong Society: Three Studies of Class Formation in Early Hong Kong (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar; Welsh, Frank, A History of Hong Kong (London, 1993), pp. 132–83Google Scholar; and Jung-fang Tsai, Hong Kong in Chinese History: Community and Social Unrest in the British Colony, 1842-1913, pp. 36–51.

2 Lowe, Kate, ‘Hong Kong, 26 January 1841: hoisting the flag revisited’, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 29 (1989).Google Scholar

3 On Chusan, see Martin, Robert Montgomery, ‘Report on the island of Chusan’ [1844], in British Parliamentary Papers: China, 24: Correspondence, Dispatches, Reports, Ordinances, Memoranda and Other Papers relating to the Affairs of Hong Kong 1846-60 (Shannon, 1971), pp. 129–42Google Scholar; and Munn, Christopher, ‘The Chusan episode: Britain’s occupation of a Chinese Island, 1840-46’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 25 (1997), pp. 82–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Bernard, W. D., Narrative of the Voyages and Services of the Nemesis from 1840 to 1843, 2 vols (London, 1844), 1, p. 304.Google Scholar

5 Cambridge, University Library, Jardine Matheson Archives, C5/6, 65.

6 Smith, George, A Narrative of an Exploratory Visit to each of the Consular Cities of China, and to the islands of Hong Kong and Chusan, on Behalf of the Church Missionary Society in the Years 1844, 1845, 1846 (London, 1847), pp. 530–2Google Scholar, has a list of Protestant missionaries either in China in May 1846 or who had been there within the two previous years.

7 London, SOAS, Council for World Missions archive (formerly London Missionary Society archive), South China, incoming, Box 4 (1840-7), included in report of 22/3 March 1841 by several LMS missionaries: J. Robert Morrison, William Lockhart, W. C. Milne, and Benjamin Hobson.

8 Stanley, Brian, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester, 1990), pp. 160–2.Google Scholar

9 SOAS, LMS archive, South China correspondence, incoming, Box 4 (1840-7), mentioned in letter of 10 July 1842.

10 Ibid., William Lockhart from Macao, 30 May 1842.

11 On him see Beckmann, J., ‘Msgr. Theodor Joset, Prokurator der Propaganda in China und erster Apostolischer Präfekt von Hongkong (1804-1842)’, Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Kirchengeschichte, 36 (1942), pp. 19–38, 121–39.Google Scholar

12 Ryan, Thomas, The Story of a Hundred Years (Hong Kong, 1959), pp. 1–2.Google Scholar

13 Eitel, Europe in China, p. 190.

14 For general background, see Hoe, Susanna, The Private Life of Old Hong Kong: Western Women in the British Colony, 1841-1941 (Hong Kong, 1991), pp. 33, 37, 94–5.Google Scholar

15 Jeter, J. B., An American Woman in China and Her Missionary Work There (Boston, 1874).Google Scholar

16 MrsShuck, Henrietta, Scenes in China: or Sketches of the Country, Religion or Customs of the Chinese (Philadelphia, 1852), p. 38.Google Scholar

17 Jeter, An American Woman, p. 182.

18 SOAS, LMS archive, South China correspondence, incoming, Box 4 (1840-7), 22/3 March 1841.

19 Smith, Carl, ‘Introduction’, in idem, Chinese Christians: Elites, Middlemen and the Church in Hong Kong (Hong Kong, 1985), pp. 4, 7.Google Scholar

20 For some biographical information, see Schlyter, H., Der China-Missionar Karl Gützlaff und seine Heimatbasis (Studia Missionalia Upsaliensia XXX) (Uppsala, 1976).Google Scholar

21 Smith, ‘Introduction’, p. 8.

22 Smith, Carl, ‘Wan Chai - in search of an identity’, in idem, A Sense of History. Studies in the Social and Urban History of Hong Kong (Hong Kong, 1995), pp. 112–13, 153.Google Scholar

23 The histories of these institutions are complicated. See Ryan, The Story, pp. 5–6.

24 Sweeting, Anthony, Education in Hong Kong pre-1841 to 1941: Fact and Opinion (Hong Kong, 1990), p. 143.Google Scholar

25 Carl Smith, ‘The Morrison Education Society and the moulding of its students’, in idem, Chinese Christians, pp. 14–15.

26 Ibid., p. 16.

27 Ibid., p. 23.

28 Ibid., p. 27.

29 The Chinese Repository, 12 (1843), pp. 362–8.

30 Harrison, Brian, Watting for China (Hong Kong, 1979), pp. 109–13.Google Scholar

31 Lockhart, William, The Medical Missionary in China: A Narrative of Twenty Years’ Experience (London, 1861), p. 202.Google Scholar

32 The Chinese Repository, 13 (1844), pp. 379, 603-4.

33 Carl Smith, ‘The contribution of missionaries to the development of Hong Kong’, in idem, A Sense of History, pp. 299–301.

34 Smith, ‘Wan Chai’, pp. 121–2, Sweeting, Education in Hong Kong, p. 145 and Ryan, The Story, p. 7.

35 Tarrant, William, Hong Kong: Part I, 1839-44 (Canton, 1861), p. 37.Google Scholar

36 Ibid., p. 75. Many others noted the building of the mosque: see Eitel, Europe in China, p. 190, and The Chinese Repository, 12 (1843), p. 549.

37 The Chinese Repository, 13 (1844), p. 596.

38 SOAS, LMS archive, South China correspondence, incoming, Box 4 (1840-7), letters of James Legge of 21 April 1845 and of William Gillespie of 27 December 1845.

39 George Smith, A Narrative, p. 69.

40 Ibid., pp. 72–9.

41 Ibid., p. 79. See also Carl Smith, ‘Sham Shui Po: from proprietary village to industrial- urban complex’, in idem, A Sense of History, p. 191.

42 Smith, A Narrative, p. 79.

43 On Christianity’s collaboration with imperialism in China, see Stanley, The Bible and the Flag, p. 109.

44 Carl Smith, ‘The Hong Kong situation as it influenced the Protestant church’, in idem, Chinese Christian, pp. 182–7.

45 Samuel Dyer, Benjamin Hobson, James Legge, Walter Medhurst, William Milne, and Alexander and John Stronach.

46 Smith, A Narrative, pp. 511–14.

47 SOAS, LMS archive, Ultra Ganges, Malacca, incoming, Box 3 (1830-59), letter of James Legge of 31 August 1843.