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The French Catholic Mission in China during the Opium War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Peter W. Fay
Peter W. Fay
Affiliation:
Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 9119.
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Extract

The First China War of 1839–1842, commonly called the Opium War, has been and continues to be the subject of a considerable body of literature.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , March 1970 , pp. 115 - 128
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1970

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References

1 The quotation is from the preface to the late Hsin-pao Chang's invaluable Commissioner Lin and the Opium War, Harvard, 1964, the most comprehensive and scholarly account of the war yet to appear. There are studies of the Western public and private trading companies by Morse himself, Fairbank, Greenberg, LeFeveur, and Dermigny; and a recent study of the Cohong by Ann White.Google ScholarWakeman's, Strangers at the Gate, California, 1966, is an example of what can be done about a particular aspect of Sino-Western relations in this period from the Chinese side.Google Scholar The three popular accounts in print are Collis's, MauriceForeign Mud, London, 1946,Google ScholarHolt's, EdgarThe Opium Wars in China, London, 1964,Google Scholar and Selby's, JohnThe Paper Dragon, London, 1968.Google Scholar

2 In March of 1839 there were twelve Protestant missionaries on the China coast: Abeel, Bridgman, Brown, Gutzlaff, Lockhart, John Morrison, Parker, Roberts, Shuck, Squire, Stanton, and Williams. Though so few in number, they were peculiarly visible because they were confined to the Macao-Canton area and to the ships of Westerners, and because they mixed naturally and continuously with a community of Western merchants itself overwhelmingly Protestant. When the war began, they made themselves useful as interpreters and de facto consuls to English officers who were themselves either Anglican or simply more Protestant still. And in the years following the war, they wrote their own memoirs, and figured inescapably in the memoirs and papers of the other Westerners (both commercial and official) upon whom we depend for the Western side of the story. So a person reading in the literature of the Opium War cannot help encountering John Morrison translating for the Superintendency, Bridgman watching the destruction of the surrendered opium near Chuenpi, Peter Parker excising tumours in his little hospital off Hog Lane, Gutzlaff going ashore with the regiments at Tinghai. For all this, however, when it comes to the clash of cultures the reader is still likely to get a heavy dose of Napier and the chairs, of Elliot and subordinate forms of address, and to hear little or nothing about Christ.

3 For the account that follows, I have relied principally upon the letter books of the Société des Missions Etrangères (hereafter ME); I am grateful to the Caltech Humanities Division for the time and wherewithal to consult them. Tsing-sing, Louis Wei, La Politique Missionaire de la France en Chine 1842–1856, Paris, 1960, reaches back into my period, and draws upon the archives of the French Lazarists and of the Roman Propaganda.Google Scholar (For some reason Tsing-sing's quotations from Missions Etrangères papers are, however, taken entirely from Costin, W. C., Great Britain and China 1833–1860, Oxford, 1937; apparently he did not consult the papers himself.)Google Scholarde Moidrey, J., La Hiérarchie Catholique en Chine, en Corée, et au Japon 1307–1914, Shanghai, 1914,Google ScholarVan den Brandt, J., Les Lazaristes en Chine 1697–1935, Peiping, 1936Google Scholar, and Launay, A., Mémorial de la Société des Missions-Etrangères, Paris, 1916, provide certain biographical and administrative information; there are a number of letters from China missionaries in the Annales de le Propagation de la Foi; and for the rest, we are left with a few short pieces by such people as Combaluzier, and hagiography of the type of Montgesty's life of Perboyre. For obvious reasons Catholic missionaries have not been enshrined in the kinds of memoirs that survive for Protestants.Google Scholar

4 See, for example, Fairbank, J. K., Reischauer, E. O., and Craig, A. M., East Asia: the Modern Transformation, Boston, 1965, pp. 120–2, 152–4.Google Scholar Though Latourette, K. S., in his History of Christian Missions in China, New York, 1929, wisely terms the century ending in 1839 a period of ‘retarded growth’ for Chinese Catholics, even he manages by the greater space he allots Protestants to suggest that Catholics were in eclipse.Google Scholar

5 Latourette, K. S., Christian Missions in China, pp. 182–3;Google ScholarTsing-sing, , La Politique Missionaire, pp. 43, 384. The figure two hundred thousand is obviously guesswork; nevertheless it is apparent from letters in the Annales that there were, deep inside China, substantial communities of the faithful.Google Scholar

6 The astonishing statement in Fairbank and others, East Asia: The Modern Transformation, p. 121,Google Scholar that ‘from 1801 to 1829 not a single new missionary was able to enter the country’ (except for Morrison), is apparently taken verbatim from the Histoire Universelle des Missions Catholiques, Paris, 1957, v. 3, 37—which ought to know better.Google Scholar

7 3 August 1835, Annales, X, 70.Google Scholar

8 The fourteen French Lazarists whom I can identify as being in China as of March 1839, were: Torrette (procurator), Danicourt, Guillet, Lavaissière, Simiand at Macao; Laribe, Perry, Peschaud in Kiangsi; Faivre somewhere about the lower Yangtze; Baldus, Perboyre, Rameaux in Hupeh; Gabet and Mouly in Mongolia. The fifteen Missions Etrangères men were Legrégeois (procurator), Callery, Desflèches, Libois at Macao; Barentin in Fukien or en route there; Bertrand, Delamarre, Favand, Freycenon, Mariette, Papin, Pérocheau (Maxula), Ponsot, Verrolles in Szechwan; Renou en route there. The Missions Etrangères also had three men in Korea and a number in Indo-china.

9 Early in the 1830s the victory of an anti-clerical faction at Lisbon precipitated decrees closing the procures and the several monasteries at Macao, and expelling all resident priests not born in Portugal. The Lazarist procurator had to move to the factories. The procurator of the Missions Etrangères went all the way to Goa to plead his congregation's case before the Portuguese Viceroy. In the end both were allowed to return to Macao and resume their work; but Portuguese jealousy, and Portuguese efforts to assert their rights of ecclesiastical patronage, reappeared during the war. See below, n. 29.

10 The two French procures were represented by Gernaert, the single French merchant resident at Canton, until he went home in 1836. Thereafter the French consulship was held successively by the English merchant Lancelot Dent, then by the Dutch merchant Van Loffelt, until in the autumn of 1840 Challaye arrived from Manila. Spain and the Italies had no consuls at all.

11 Just how little they knew and cared is suggested by the almost total absence of references to either the procures or individual Catholic missionaries in the pages of the Chinese Repository, the Canton Register, and the Canton Press; in the memoirs of Morrison, Bridgman, Williams, Abeel, Parker, Lockhart, Nye, Harriet Low, and Bennet Forbes; in the memoirs of the English officers who fought the war; in the F.O. 17 series; and (to judge from those portions I have happened to look at, mostly for other purposes) in the Lay papers, Squire papers, London Missionary Society papers, Jardine Matheson papers, Forbes papers, Heard papers, Williams papers, and ABCFM papers. If we take, for example, Legrégeois, procurator of the Missions Etrangères, and a resident of Macao almost without interruption from late 1828 until late 1841, we find (so far as I can discover) in the entire mass of Anglo-American Protestant material just reviewed only one mention of him by name: when William Hunter describes, in one of his volumes of reminiscences, the incident of the intercepted courier (see below, n. 19). And even Hunter manages to call him a Lazarist!

12 Faivre, to Etienne, , 28 02 1838, Annales, XII, 183.Google Scholar

13 Callery, Joseph, Voyage sur les côtes de la Chine fait en 1838, 2, Tract 289, India Office Library. Oddly enough G. T. Lay, the agent for Bible House, had also toyed with the idea of going up to Chusan in Red Rover, but had decided that her carrying opium made this impossible. That spring he asked Jardine for the loan of another vessel in which to coast Formosa. Jardine refused when he learned that Lay expected him to keep opium off her. Lay to Bible House, 26 February 1838; and Jardine to Lay, 3 April 1838; Lay Papers, Bible House, London.Google Scholar

14 Callery narrates the trip in his Voyage without, however, naming the ‘English vessel’, teak-built and freighted entirely with opium, on which he and Guillet travelled. Assuming she was a Jardine, Matheson & Co. vessel, the shipping information in Wm. Jardine Ltr. Bks., v. 7, Jardine Matheson papers, makes it almost certain that she was Lady Grant.

15 Legrégeois to Directors, 12 December 1838, ME 323.

16 Legrégeois to Directors, 13 April 1839, ME 323.

17 The first time over the affair of Paul and the letters (see below), the second for reasons not clear. Torrette having died in the interval, Legrégeois took refuge the second time with Joset because he was on better terms with this French Swiss than he was with Torrette's successor, the young and inexperienced Guillet.

18 Exactly how many recruits reached Macao during the war, and for which procures, it is difficult to determine. By 1845 there were 76 European Catholic missionaries in China proper (excluding Korea), not counting the procurators and the Portuguese priests resident at Macao. Combaluzier, C. M., ‘Les missions Catholiques en Extrême Orient’, Revue d'histoire des missions, 01 1936. But many of these reached China just at the end of or after the war—so many in fact that it quite alarmed the Protestants: Wells Williams counted six arrivals in August 1842, with sixty-two more said to be at Singapore; ‘they have twenty men to our one, but I trust God is with the unit’. Williams to Anderson, 3 September and 15 October 1842, ABCFM papers, Houghton. The arrivals of which I am certain, between March 1839 and August 1842, are: 1839, three French Lazarists (Huc, Privas, Vautrin), two Portuguese Lazarists. 1840, five Missions Etrangères priests (Berneux, Chamaison, Férreol, Maistre, Taillandier), two French Lazarists (Daguin, Vincent), two Italian Franciscans. 1841, three Missions Etrangères priests (Blanchin, de la Brunière, Guérin), two French Lazarists (Carayon, Combelles), three French Jesuits (Bruyère, Estère, Gotteland), 3 Italian Franciscans. 1842, one Italian Franciscan, two Spanish Dominicans. The new arrivals slipped from Macao into China one way or another. For a long account of one such entry, by the French Lazarist Huc, subsequently famous for the extent and daring of his travels,Google Scholar see his letters in Annales, XV, 73–9, 211–28. Huc left Macao for the interior via Canton in February 1841, unnoticed of course by the Protestant community.Google Scholar

19 The episode is narrated at length by Legrégeois (in a series of letters dtd. January 1840, ME 323) and by Hunter, W. (Bits of Old China, London, 1885, pp. 52–7)Google Scholar; and briefly mentioned by Bridgman, , (to Anderson 15 04 1840, ABCFM papers). Hunter and Legrégeois exchanged letters through a Swiss merchant, and in February Hunter visited Legrégeois at Macao. Snow the American consul was also involved. It is a commentary on Legrégeois' relations, or lack of them, with the Protestant community that when he first learned one of his own letters was among the twenty-two seized, he wondered nervously whether he had said anything in it offensive to Americans.Google Scholar

20 Legrégeois to Directors, 20 January 1841, ME 323. The Taillandier affair occupies a number of letters from October 1840 to January 1841 in ME 304 and 323. It coincided in time with the kidnapping and imprisonment of the English clergyman, Stanton. The two men were held in the same Canton jail; two American merchants, Coolidge and Shillaber, helped both with money and clothing; and when Stanton was released, he went out of his way to give Legrégeois news of Taillandier. Though Legrégeois got Barrot, the French consul-general at Manila, and Challaye, the newly arrived French consul at Macao, to apply for the missionary's release, it was Elliot's intercession, with help from Dent, that did the trick.

21 Elliot, to Palmerston, , 16 February 1840, F. O. 17/38Google Scholar, Public Record Office. For a similar reference, see Elliot, to Conyngham, , date illegible (05 1840?), F. O. 17/40.Google Scholar

22 If we may believe Legrégeois, Dubois, the celebrated French missionary and expert on India, had always been most cordially received by Elliot's father when the latter was Governor of Madras. Legrégeois to Directors, 14 June 1839, ME 323.

23 ‘A mind brutalized, a body enfeebled, the premature death of the opium smoker followed by the sale of all his and his wife's and children's worldly possessions and their descent into a life of misery and crime—these are the normal consequences of this fatal passion’, continues Baldus, , (to Etienne, 3 08 1835, Annales, X, 70–1), adding: ‘but what do Europeans care, and particularly the English, in whom love of humanity never prevails over love of gain?’ There are very few references to opium as such in Legrégeois's letters. But such as there are, are well represented by the remark, à propos of a young unnamed who died while selling opium up the coast: ‘Isn't that a pretty occupation for a doctor?’ Legrégeois to Directors, 7 September 1840, ME 304.Google Scholar

24 Legrégeois to Meynis, 25 October 1839, ME 323.

25 Baldus, , ltr. cited in n. 23, 77;Google ScholarBaldus again, late 1840, Annales, XV, 229–44;Google ScholarCallery, , Voyage, passim;Google ScholarFaivre, to Etienne, , 28 02 1838, Annales, XII, 186–7;Google ScholarDelamarre, , 09 1838, Annales, XII, 481–2. Earlier in his letter, Faivre begins a review of China's moral condition with the observation that at Macao, which he has just left, one stands at ‘the outer limit of civilization … face to face with barbarism’—exactly the reverse, of course, of what the Chinese thought. 185–6.Google Scholar

26 Faivre, , ltr. cited in n. 25, 187.Google Scholar

27 de Bonald, Bertrand, 10 08 1840, Annales, XIV, 77Google Scholar; Morrison, Robert, Memoirs of the Life and Labours of Robert Morrison, London, 1839, II, p. 503.Google Scholar

28 Undated fragment of ltr., Annales, XIV, 315, n. 1;Google Scholar Wells Williams to brother Fred, 31 May 1841, Williams papers, Yale.

29 When early in 1842 a decree arrived from Rome detaching the island of Hong-kong from the see of Macao and confiding it to Joset, procurator of the Propaganda, as prefect apostolic, the Portuguese were so annoyed that they threw Joset and his procure clear out of Macao and warned the two French procurators not to harbour him or some recently arrived French Jesuits. Joset feared he would be pursued even in Hongkong by this Portuguese animosity, and told Johnston the acting English governor so; who ‘burst out laughing’ and proceeded to help him get established. Letters of date February and March 1842, ME 304 and 308; Joset, , 18 April 1842, Annales, XV, pp. 245–9. Later that year Libois complained that the Portuguese were deliberately delaying his mail. Libois to Directors, 18 September 1842, ME 304. It is only fair to add that the French procures did not always get on smoothly with each other, particularly after Torrette died and Guillet took his place; and that the Lazarists actively resisted the re-entry into China of the Jesuits.Google Scholar

30 For the Jancigny mission, see Tsing-sing, , La politique missionaire, pp. 142–53, 172–7;Google ScholarFaivre, J.-P., L'expansion française dans le Pacifique de 1800 à 1842, Paris, 1953, pp. 387–94;Google ScholarCordier, Henri, ‘La mission Dubois de Jancigny dans l'Etrême-Orient 1841–46’, Revue de l'histoire des colonies françaises, IV (1916), pp. 129–232. It is indicative of the mission's preoccupation with showing the flag that the Missions Etrangères men who started for Korea aboard Erigone and Favorite had to leave them in the Yangtze and complete the journey by other means. Libois reviews the episode in a ltr. to Directors, 14 and 18 September 1842, ME 304.Google Scholar

31 Pérocheau, to Langlois, , 09 1841, Annales, XVI, 333.Google Scholar

32 Or so Faivre, wrote (12 1842, Annales, XVI, 297), though I find no mention of this in the English despatches.Google Scholar

33 ‘On balance’, writes Tsing-sing, (La politique missionaire, p. 156), ‘the Opium War brought great distress to the missionaries and to Chinese Christians’. Tsing-sing quotes from a number of missionary letters (pp. 154–6) to show that the Chinese turned their hatred of the English upon the missionaries. But he admits that in Szechwan, the largest of the mission stations, persecution did not increase at all. As for Perboyre, his arrest seems to have been less caused by than coincident with the war.Google ScholarRameaux, to Torrette, , 29 March 1840,Google Scholar reproduced in Combaluzier, F., ‘Martyre du Bienheureux Jean-Gabriel Perboyre’, Neue Zeitschrift fur Missionswissenschaft, v. 9, pp. 254–5. Characteristically, though what was happening to Perboyre was well known to the procures, his martyrdom passed unnoticed in the Protestant community.Google Scholar

34 Gotteland to Libois, 25 May 1842, ME 308. The English Marien he names was almost certainly the Marian, which had brought part of the 55th Foot out from Calcutta the previous year.

35 Tsing-sing, , La politique missionaire, p. 186.Google Scholar

36 Thus two Spanish Dominicans who landed at Kulangsu (Amoy) that summer were offered their choice of houses by the English garrison commander. Libois to Directors, 18 September 1842, ME 304.

37 Legrégeois to Directors, 8 October 1840, ME 304.

38 Libois to Directors, 18 September and 17 December 1842, ME 304.