The Drug Smuggling Missionary of the Pearl River

by Eve Fisher

A young Karl Gutzlaff

I talked a while back about the opium trade in China, run by Western "trading companies" like Jardine-Matheson and Russell & Company, who smuggled and sold opium (then illegal) all up and down the coast and rivers of 19th century China.  And how that led to two Opium Wars, which eventually forced the Chinese (who lost) to make opium legal.  And Christianity.  Both legalizations merged in the person of the one and only Karl Gutzlaff (1803-1851), missionary, journalist, translator...

What do you do with a person like Karl?  He started out as a missionary when he was 23, sent to Java by the Netherlands Missionary Society in 1826.  (Karl was German, born in Pomerania.)  He left them after 2 years, and spent the rest of his life in the mission field as an independent operator, earning his living in a variety of ways, some of which were highly unorthodox.  Please remember this:  Karl Gutzlaff was never "officially" affiliated with any organized church ever again. 

He moved around a lot:  from Macau, to Singapore, and eventually Hong Kong. He was a superb linguist, speaking/writing Chinese, Thai, Cambodian, Lao, and perhaps Japanese.  He translated the Bible into all of these languages and wrote dictionaries for at least three of them.  He also - and this is VERY key - married a very wealthy English missionary, Maria Newell, who died in childbirth within a year, leaving him all her money.  In 1834, he remarried, to missionary Mary Wanstall, who at that time ran a school and home from the blind in Macau.  (She died in 1849, and Karl remarried, one last time, in 1850 to an English woman in England.)

Karl, in native dress

1834 was when Karl's "Journal of Three Voyages Along the Coast of China in 1831, 1832, and 1833" was published.  It became hugely popular, partly because it described more of China's interior than any previous book written by a European.  It also described his missionary work, distributing tracts and pamphlets and talking to the people.  Karl did not mention the fact that the 1832 voyage was on an East India Company ship, and the 1833 voyage was on the Jardine Matheson opium smuggling/trading ship "Sylph."  He worked for both as a translator, and while he said he was opposed to the use of opium, he also said that he saw this (distributing Bibles as the opium was being traded) as a great opportunity to spread the gospel.  (G. B. Endacott, A Biographical Sketchbook of Early Hong Kong, p. 106)

In 1840 his Chinese translation of the Bible was published.  It would be the text adopted by the leader of the Taping Rebellion, God's Chinese Son Hong Xiuquan (and I hope to write about that wildly improbable man some day).  It was also the year that the First Opium War began, and Gutzlaff translated for the British throughout, assisted at the negotiations for the peace treaty, and got an official government position afterwards for his trouble.  NOTE:  He did not work for free.

In 1844, he set up his own training school for native missionaries and an organization - the Chinese Union - to send them out.  It succeeded well enough that Gutzlaff went on a hugely popular European fund-raising tour from 1849-1850.  Back in China, though, things were nowhere near as rosy as Gutzlaff proclaimed:  Most of his native Chinese "missionaries" were criminals and/or opium addicts who faked their conversion figures, taking the Chinese Bibles that Gutzlaff had given them to distribute and selling them back to Gutzlaff's own printer, who then resold them to him.  (Jessie Gregory Lutz, Opening China:  Karl F. A. Gutzlaff and Sino-Western Relations, 1827-1852, p. 276) A huge scandal erupted, forcing him to return to Hong Kong in 1851.  It was still going on when he died in 1851.

Despite the scandal, Gutzlaff's legacy was wide-spread and varying.  His idea of native missionaries and foreign missionaries speaking the native language, wearing native dress, living as the natives did, caught on, and was continued through the founding of the China Inland Mission under Henry Hudson Taylor.  This (now the Overseas Missionary Fellowship, a/k/a OMF International) became the primary missionary organization in China.

Harry Parkes, Consul

He and his wife ran a boarding school in Hong Kong, where all the up-and-coming future European leaders of Asia were boarded.  Among them was Mrs. Gutzlaff's nephew, Harry Smith Parkes.  Harry stayed with them from age 13 to adulthood, learning fluent Chinese, and accompanying his uncle on many of his travels, including the signing of the peace treaty for the First Opium War.  Over time, Parkes became acting Consul in Canton, and in 1856, he began the Second Opium War in true British Imperial style:  there was a Chinese ship called the "Arrow", owned by a Chinese, manned by Chinese sailors, under a British flag.  Well, the Chinese sailors were drunk and unruly, the Chinese authorities arrested them and (rumor has it) took down the British flag.  Mr. Parkes saw this as an insult to Britain, stormed into the jail, yelling, swearing, and beating on the jailers with his walking stick.  One struck back, and voila!  Parkes declared war on China.  The British won, and the opium trade and Christianity were both finally, fully legalized in China.

"Dr. Livingstone, I presume."

And then there was Gutzlaff's writing, which influenced both Dr. Livingstone and Karl Marx.  (It's not often that you get to write those two names in the same sentence...)  David Livingstone read Gutzlaff's "Appeal to the Churches of Britain and American on Behalf of China" and decided to become a medical missionary.  Unfortunately, it was 1840, and the outbreak of the First Opium War made China too dangerous for foreigners.  So the London Missionary Society send him to Africa, where (in 1871) Henry Morton Stanley would find him working hard in Ujiji, Tanzania.  "Dr. Livingstone, I presume."



Remember the European fund-raising tour that Gutzlaff went on to raise money for the Chinese Union?  Karl Marx went to hear him speak in London (David Riazonov, "Karl Marx on China", 1926).  He also read Gutzlaff's many writings, which became sources for Karl Marx' articles on China for the London Times and the New York Daily Tribune in the 1840's and 1850's, all of which are anti-imperialist and anti-religion.

(Alas, I have searched for, as yet in vain, for a direct written-in-Karl-Marx'-hand connection between Gutzlaff and Marx's well-known statement, "religion... is the opium of the people."  All I can say is, it was written in 1843, nine years after Gutzlaff's "Journal of Three Voyages..." was published.  Who knows?)

"HK Central Gutzlaff Street sign near Wellington Street" by Wenlensands - Own work.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: HK_Central_Gutzlaff_Street_sign_near_Wellington_Street.JPG#/media/File

A very influential man.  And also, in many ways, a mystery:  a profoundly earnest missionary, who would use any means that came to hand, including the opium trade.  A man of great pride and presumption, who was convinced that the Chinese were inferior to Europeans, and yet was the first to train (or at least try to train) native missionaries.  A great linguist, who made sure he got paid very, very well for his translating work.  As you can see above, there's a street in Hong Kong named for him.  There's his writings.  And there's the image of him, in his twenties, handing out Bibles from the back of the opium ship as the traders are handing out opium from the front...  Karl, Karl, Karl...

A Matter of Belief

There's been a lot of talk on-line about a movie called "God's Not Dead" in which an evil atheist professor forces his students to sign a declaration saying "God is Dead" to pass his class.  (Of course the Christian hero doesn't and wins the day.)  Well, contrary to certain ultra-fundamentalist myths, that doesn't happen.  No professor requires anyone to sign anything against their personal beliefs.  But we do often require them to learn things that don't necessarily agree with their beliefs and therein hangs a tale.
When I was teaching World and Asian history at university, I honestly developed a resentment towards certain types of the home-schooled.  There was the guy who, when I started talking about Charles Darwin, put down his pencil and refused to take a single note.  He didn't care that I wasn't teaching science but history. He didn't care that Social Darwinism was a major part of racism, militarism and WWI.  He wasn't going to learn about Darwin.  Period. Full-stop.

There was another who, when I asked for the connection between the Mexican Revolution and Karl Marx, wrote "Communism is a failed ideology".  (By the way, the correct answer is that Mexico claims that its revolution was the first Communist revolution, which it is.)  He wrote this for EVERY question about Communism, and I gave him a zero every time.  Communism was a huge problem for a number of people, by the way.  They just didn't want to have to learn about it, since, after all, the Berlin Wall had fallen, the Empire was destroyed, and Communism was dead.  (I'd remind them about China, and sometimes there would be a moment of silence followed by a long sigh as most of them picked their pencils back up.  But not all...)




There was always one person who, when I was teaching about Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Islam, etc., had to explain to the class how Christianity was the only true religion.  Sometimes they would demand to know my beliefs, and I would say "I'm here to teach history, not proselytize", but they wouldn't get the hint. In fact, they usually decided that I must be an atheist, since I didn't let them preach to the class.  That or I was a Roman Catholic, and if you can see the logic to that, please explain it to me.

The connecting thread here is that these people all thought that learning ABOUT something was the same as believing IN it.  They really felt that if they learned about a political alternative, like socialism or communism, or a religious alternative, like Buddhism or Islam, they were (1) accepting it, (2) approving it, (3) in danger of becoming it.  Even though they had no problem hosing up all the info they could get about Nazis or serial killers.  Sometimes  they could take it if it was far enough in the past - I could talk paganism till the cows came home, and discuss Plato and Aristotle, Stoicism and Epicureanism.  Although they did get a little nervous when I'd point out the points in Platonism and Stoicism that had been adopted by early Christianity...

But, as I said, I developed a resentment.  I got so sick of trying to teach them that learning about something outside their comfort zone was not me trying to convert them, but was quite simply trying to get them to understand how the world got the way it is, today.  I had to teach them how to learn fearlessly.  And in the process, I realized how much the concept of learning about something = believing in something is a wonderful tool to control people. I don't know what these students were being taught at home, but I do know that if you scare people so they won't learn, you can tell them almost anything.  You have gotten them to put bars on their own minds, which only makes it harder to ever get them off.




Orwell got these statements straight from Jean Jacques Rousseau's "The Social Contract".  But you'd have to have taken notes in my class to know it.