Interview: Leopold Leeb on "Missionaries to China: A Historical Dictionary"
Participants:
NRC: Nate Carpenter, Managing Editor for Lehigh University Press
LL: Professor Leopold Leeb, Renmin University of China
*this transcript has been edited from the original audio for readability and length. Listen to the entire episode on Spotify and Apple.
NRC: I'm Nate Carpenter, managing editor for Lehigh University Press. Thank you for joining us. We're talking today with Professor Leopold Leeb, who is a professor at Renmin University of China and is a prolific author and scholar of Christianity in China. We're here today talking about his forthcoming book, which will be published by Lehigh University Press and is due out later this year titled Missionaries to China: A Historical Dictionary. Professor Leeb, thank you so much for joining us.
LL: Thank you for inviting me.
NRC: We are about to publish a very big book. Missionaries to China: A Historical Dictionary is a monumental work. It's a historical dictionary that covers nearly 1,400 individuals who are important to the history of Christian missionary activity in China from the very earliest days in the seventh century up until the 20th century. This is an excellent addition to the scholarship, as attested to by your reviewers. So first of all, congratulations on this book.
LL: Thank you. It is a very heavy volume, and I worked a long time on it.
NRC: I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about what prompted you as a scholar to say, “Look, this is something that we need in print—a dictionary of this sort.”
LL: Well, it started very early with my interest in China and Chinese history. I learned the Chinese language in 1988 for three years. I was in Taiwan, and that somehow turned all my interests to Chinese history, Chinese culture, and also the history of Christianity in China. I was always very interested in this one question: what would Christianity bring to China? And who were the Chinese Christians, and who were those missionaries who brought the faith to this Far Eastern country?
I finished my PhD thesis in Beijing—I studied Chinese philosophy in Beijing from 1995 to 1999. Since 1995, I've been staying in Beijing, so it's 30 years now. After my PhD thesis, I made a visit in Germany to a sinological institute called the Monumenta Serica Institute. I was talking to the head of this institute, who was also an expert on the history of Christianity in China. I asked him, “Listen, I am able to translate things from English to Chinese, and I would like to publish something in China. What kind of book would you recommend?”
He took out this one volume by a very famous American historian, and recommended that I translate it. It's called A History of Christian Missions in China. It's a classic, although published very early, in 1929. So I sat down and began to work. After five years, we had translated it; it was published in Hong Kong in the year 2009.
At the end of this book, there is an index of the names of the missionaries. LaTourette wrote in English, and there were no Chinese characters in that book. But as maybe some of you know, all foreigners who go to China—especially missionaries who stayed for a long time—had to have a Chinese name. For the translation, I needed to know those names. I looked for a dictionary in China which would have the names of these many foreign missionaries, and I couldn't find any [other than] one outdated and very small [volume]. So I worked for a long time to go through these names and try to find them out one by one. I elaborated that index until it had 30 pages, then I made it into a bigger one of 100 pages. The publication house in Hong Kong decided not to add this index, so I said, “I will make a separate book out of it.” I published that index in the year 2013 in Beijing in Chinese.
NRC: Just before you continue, when you said that you were looking for those Chinese names that Latourette had published in English, where were you looking?
LL: Yes, there are some dictionaries in Chinese on, for example, foreigners in modern China. They had the names of the more famous missionaries, like Matteo Ricci. His name is Li Madou. That is easy to find. But those other, not-so-famous missionaries—their names are difficult to find. Some of them had two or three Chinese names. In the beginning, it was quite chaotic. So I thought for Chinese scholars and historians, it would be very important to just have a name list with the names in English and in Chinese.
But then I thought I should add the more important data of these missionaries: where they were from (France, Britain, the USA) and where they worked in China. With this basic data, I created this very first simple dictionary. But immediately, questions of historiography come up: what are the criteria to say this is an outstanding missionary? Is it the books he wrote, or the institutions he or she set up? You have to make a selection.
In the year 2017, a huge work was published by Huang Guangyu—it's all in Chinese. He has a list of 13,000 Protestant missionaries to China. So there are so many. And you have to make a selection. My own background, I come from Austria. I was brought up in a Catholic family. When I was 20, I knew only one China missionary: Father Joseph Freinademetz. He was canonized a saint in 2003. Later, I was connected with a mission society called the Divine Word Missionary (SVD). They were founded in 1875 especially for work in China. I had many German sources to work on regarding those 500 German-speaking missionaries. I wrote short biographies of these 500 men plus a congregation of more than 200 German-speaking women. For a dictionary, you cannot take all 500; you have to choose who are the more important ones.
NRC: How did you go about managing that tension?
LL: It always depends on the material you have. Even if somebody is very important, if there are no materials about him or her, you cannot write anything. So, I tried to add people who deserve to be mentioned beyond the "canon" of Ricci.
Maybe I can take one example: a missionary brother. Many Catholic mission societies had brothers who did practical work like setting up buildings or running printing presses. There was one brother from Vienna who came to Shandong in the 1920s; he was teaching painting at the seminary. He was later recalled to the Catholic University in Beijing, where he encouraged Chinese painters to paint biblical scenes in a Chinese style. I thought this brother—Berchmans Brückner—should be included.
Others specialized in architecture or music. There was an Austrian from Croatia who used the erhu—a traditional Chinese instrument—to do mission work. He used traditional Chinese music to sound familiar to the people. These are areas I wanted to expand upon. I am only one person, so this dictionary is mainly the work of my own research, but it should actually be a big team of historians working together. It should be a three-volume encyclopedia in the future, hopefully.
NRC: You noted historically there have been some challenges faced by some of your colleagues in China when it comes to writing the history of the church in China.
LL: Yes. We made this dictionary and it will be published in the USA, but actually, one would expect that such a dictionary would first be published in China. The problem is that historiography in China is subject to ideological considerations. The "open century" from 1840 until 1949 is usually seen in China as a century of imperialism and colonialism.
It is not easy in China to write a positive biography on any of these figures. The time before 1840 is more balanced; there are many works on Matteo Ricci. But for other missionaries it is hard to publish a balanced view because they are still considered under the label of "cultural aggression" or "cultural invasion."
My lasting motivation is a bit of "indignation." There is a Latin proverb: facit indignatio versum (Indignation makes the verse). I feel there is an injustice done to these messengers of the faith who dedicated their lives to China and were often very welcome in their environments. They suffered a lot in service to the Chinese. The ideal would be for Chinese and foreign historians to work together.
NRC: Did you ever consider missionary service yourself?
LL: Yes, when I was young, I thought of going to Africa. My parents were volunteer workers in Africa for three years. But at 21, I had the opportunity to go to Taiwan to learn Chinese. My approach became much more intellectual and academic. Observing Christianity in China is very rewarding for me. I remain in contact with the Divine Word Missionaries.
I also interviewed elderly Chinese people in Beijing. I asked about their perception of China missionaries. Some remembered the old German missionaries who left in the 1950s. These voices are now gone, so those records are a very important contribution to understanding how the Chinese population actually perceived these "foreign messengers."
NRC: Did these interviews shape your own understanding of missionary activity?
LL: Yes. You get details you wouldn't notice in foreign sources. An old man told me that in the 1930s and 1940s, they could distinguish a German from an Austrian from far away. He said the Germans marched ahead very optimistically, while the Austrians were more humble and less energetic. It reflected the national standing of the countries at the time.
One sister told me that 100 years ago, many Chinese women catechists who didn't know Chinese characters would use an "ABC" writing system taught by missionaries. It was faster to learn than characters. They would even write letters to each other in this simple script. These details I never found in the written sources, and they make the history much more colorful. I was also privileged to interview six or seven old German and Austrian missionaries before they passed away. One worked in Gansu province. These are precious materials.
NRC: What do you hope for the scholarship and research on Christian missionaries in China in the future?
LL: There are many areas to develop. For example, the theme of how missionaries left China between 1948 and 1955. Were they imprisoned or sentenced? More importantly, the Chinese side. To see the missionaries without their Chinese counterparts is one-sided. I would love to see a dictionary on Chinese Christians.
Then there is the period after the takeover by the Communisits.We also need more material on the period from 1949 until the end of the 20th century to see how the faith carried on until the revival in the 1980s.
Recently, I discovered the texts of a Chinese priest named Li Ande, who lived from 1693 to 1773. He wrote a 600-page diary in Latin around 1750. It has many comments on foreign missionaries and the suppression of the church in Sichuan. This is a great source that shows how Chinese priests saw foreign missionaries.
NRC: One of the things that you bring up in the introduction to your book is the issue of language; you point out documents in the archives written in Latin.
LL: That is true. It explains why some Chinese historians hesitate; in the Catholic church, you should ideally know Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, French, and especially Latin. Latin was the common language for all foreign Catholic missionaries and the Chinese priests.
My work in China includes teaching classical languages—Latin, Greek, and Hebrew—to enable Chinese historians to work with these documents and monuments. By monuments, I mean the tombstones. Many, like Matteo Ricci’s, are bilingual in Latin and Chinese. That is a very important symbol of the dialogue and harmony of Eastern and Western culture. Two scripts, two languages, in one spirit.
NRC: I'm so thankful that you took the time to talk with us today. Congratulations on the book.
LL: I want to thank the team from Lehigh University Press for helping me over these six or seven years.
