Missionary Scholars And Chinese History Research

The Chinese Recorder, an English Monthly magazine, was founded by the Christian missionaries. And it was intended primarily for the missionaries in China, so it always did not have the ambitious to propaganda the Westerr knowledge and civilization, but in order to help the missionaries to learn more about the culture and history of China. By which we can have a sketch on their research development and their true views to China.The principal concern of this study is to present an integrated history of the Chinese culture and history research movement by the Christian missionaries, on that condition to show the dynamic change in this research movement through history facts. The whole study is divided into eight sections except Chapters Introduction and Summary:Chapter one of this study will point out the generalized development of The Chinese Recorder and its tendency to professional and secularization, the former tendency laid the foundation to be one of the largest periodicals in China, the second one provided the public space for the missionaries to publish their researches. Chapters from the second part to the Seventh part will look in detail at different major forms of research movement by the Christian missionaries, namely mythology research(2), ancient history research(Chapter 3 ), regional history research(Chapter 4 ), religion history research ( Chapter 5-7 ) and the last one want to give a simple generalization on the literatures both in English and Chinese which have a vital influence on the missionaries' research works. Moreover, the study will target two frameworks to investigate the above contents: the former one is to inspect the the value of historical significance in the missionaries' literatures from the perspective of Chinese academic findings , the last one is to inspect them in the overseas sinology research history to measure their academic characteristic and values. This study holds a argument that there had a new change in the research movement of the Christian missionaries when compared with the previous Jesuits, namely they transferred their research path from a somewhat unconscious idealism to pay more attention to the object's true meaning through understanding the text in their Chinese history research. At the same time, the missionaries had the reality to realize their identity from the Gospel preacher to the sinologist, and realized the values in the overseas sinology.