“Through a brilliant analysis of Catholicism in one remote village, Harrison leads us to rethink much of the last three centuries of China’s history. Her series of beautifully written narratives challenges not just our usual understanding of Christianity’s reception, but the entire way we think about how local places fit into national and global networks of culture and trade.” —Robert P. Weller, co-author of Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience and Ambiguity

“This is one of the most fascinating books on Christianity in China that I have ever read. By following the history of one Catholic village over more than three hundred years, Henrietta Harrison convincingly shows how Chinese Christians sought authenticity as members of a transnational and global community.” —Nicolas Standaert, author of The Interweaving of Rituals

"Harrison has written an ethnographic history that will be a model for future researchers. She has linked archival research (in the Vatican's vast collections) with on-the-spot investigations of villages in north China. None of this work is easy, but the results are spectacularly successful. This is a must read for anyone interested in Chinese social history." —James L. Watson, Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society and Professor of Anthropology Emeritus, Harvard University

Henrietta Harrison is professor of modern Chinese studies at Oxford University. Among her books are The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Man's Life in a North China Village, 1857-1942 and The Making of the Republican Citizen: Ceremonies and Symbols in China.

The Missionary's Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village

By Henrietta Harrison

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27312-2

Contents

List of Illustrations, xi,
Acknowledgments, xiii,
A Note on Terminology and Names, xvii,
Introduction, 1,
1. The Ancestors Who Founded the Village, 13,
2. The Bishop and the Wolf, 41,
3. The Priest Who Ran Away to Rome, 65,
4. The Boxer Uprising and the Souls in Purgatory, 92,
5. The Missionary Who Cursed the Village, 116,
6. The Four Fragrances and the Flying Bicycle, 145,
7. The Village Since the 1980s, 172,
Conclusion, 199,
Notes, 211,
Glossary, 249,
Bibliography, 253,
Index, 271,

CHAPTER 1

The Ancestors Who Founded the Village

There are three different stories about how Cave Gully was founded. Many people will tell you that the village began when a foreign missionary settled there, but the Duan and Wu families both claim that their ancestors were the first to arrive, some eight generations ago, and that they settled land occupied only by abandoned tombs. The ancestor of the Wu family is said to have come from a nearby village called Wu Family Cliff. Like many poor people, he made his living pushing coal down from the hills in a barrow to sell to the people of the plains villages. His wife used to bring him lunch, which he ate at the foot of the hills where a stream flowed out onto the plain. After a while he saw that the land was abandoned, so he planted some crops, and when some of his crops were stolen he put up a hut so he could stay overnight to keep watch. Eventually he and his family moved to the site. The Duan family say that their ancestors came from Mu Family Village in nearby Qingyuan county and did business in Beijing where two brothers, Duan Tianhe and Duan Wanhe, converted to Christianity. When the brothers came back home they were persecuted by their neighbors, so they left the village to found a new settlement. They arrived as traveling doctors and built a four-room cave dwelling, which gave the new village its name of Cave Gully. The Duan provide evidence for their early arrival by saying that the original cave dwelling survived until recently and must have dated back to the Ming because the chimney was built into the wall, as the Ming emperor decreed for commoners, rather than outside as was done later. They say that when this building was recently demolished to make way for a new highway, a picture of an angel (or maybe Jesus, the accounts vary) was found under the plaster on the wall.

Stories like these about the first ancestor of a family to settle in a community are common across China and can give us important insights into a village's history. This does not mean that all the events in them took place exactly as described: the stories of the Duan and Wu families disagree about which family arrived first, there is no evidence for a Ming dynasty chimney regulation, and the wall painting has not been seen in living memory. On the other hand several elements have been part of the stories told by many Catholic families in this area since at least the nineteenth century and are important for understanding their history. Firstly, conversion to Christianity marked a new beginning for the family, who now remember their history starting with the ancestor who converted. Secondly, the people who converted had left their homes: they were merchants who joined the religion in Beijing or migrants founding a new community. Thirdly, and most surprisingly, there are no missionaries in the stories.

Eight generations takes us back to the eighteenth century. At that time Cave Gully was far from any centers of missionary activity. So why did families there join this new religion? What did it mean to them? And why did it then matter so much that they remember this event as the beginning of their family history? Some time after the first conversions, when Cave Gully had grown to eight families and we meet its villagers in the archives for the first time, they were willing to suffer flogging rather than renounce their religion. To understand why, we need to know what it was that they believed and practiced and how it reached them.

It was at the intersection of two great trading systems that Shanxi people first encountered Christianity. The province is shaped by river systems that wind through uplands and mountains between the Mongolian steppe in the north and the ancient Chinese heartlands of the Yellow River in the south (see map 1). For centuries the Mongols were a major military power, a constant threat to the Chinese state, and Shanxi was the corridor to the Mongol frontier. Beginning in the fourteenth century, merchants selling provisions to the frontier armies were paid with certificates allowing them to trade salt under a government monopoly. This drew them into long-distance trade, not only in salt, but also buying the sheep, horses, furs, and medicines that were products of the steppe and selling the Mongols grain, cloth, tea, and other products from China. Shanxi merchants spread over all the major cities of the empire. Naturally there were large numbers in the capital, Beijing, but in the sixteenth century they were also working in the distant southern city of Guangzhou where they sold their furs and medicines to Portuguese merchants who were buying tea, porcelain, and other valuable items for the European market. It was these Portuguese merchants who brought the first European missionaries to China.

The stories that families have passed down suggest that most often the Shanxi merchants first encountered Christianity in Beijing, which was the major commercial hub for north China and where, in 1601, the Jesuits established their largest and most influential mission, using their knowledge of mathematics and astronomy to win the support of the Ming court. In the open intellectual atmosphere of the time many educated men were curious about the foreigners and drawn to the new forms of practical learning. Like the schools of Confucian thought fashionable at the time, the new Western learning was associated with a cosmology, rituals, and rules for living; soon the missionaries gathered groups of converts who not only learned from them but also shared in their rituals and listened to their ethical teachings. Some Shanxi merchants living and working in Beijing became part of these groups. Like the missionaries, the merchants spent most of their lives far from home: to ensure their loyalty to the firms they served, they left their families behind in Shanxi and lived in their place of business, returning home only once every few years. Much Chinese religious practice was built round the family and local community, but merchants far from home were more likely to worship deities whose cult spread beyond a single locality. Joining such a religious group could also offer them useful business links and a close new community. Some Chinese deities like Guandi or Mazu filled this role, as did Buddhism, but the Teaching of the Lord of Heaven, as Christianity was known, was apparently also an attractive option.

Men who had been baptized in Beijing were eager to invite the Jesuits to visit them and their families back home. One of these was a wealthy man named Duan Gun from a village just outside the prosperous southern Shanxi town of Jiangzhou, who had returned home and persuaded his family members to join the new religion. Among Duan's friends were the sons of another Jiangzhou merchant who had made a...