The Study Of The Secular Life Of Visiting Missionaries In China In The Late Ming And Early Qing

By the late Ming and early Qing, the European missionaries came to China to preach Catholicism. For this purpose, they settled down in China, preaching till death. Once they set foot on China, they faced lots of problems of survival:language was the first one they encountered. It was so hard that almost every missionary in China had a miserable experience of Chinese learning. In the learning progress, they not only focused on the difference between mandarin and dialect, but also learned Manchu language to serve the Qing government. In the respect of economy, the funds offered by church, suzerain and Vatican were limited, which were not only unbalanced, but also lacked guarantee. Some missionaries lived an embarrassing life because of not receiving funds for a long time, and thus harmed their preaching. As a result of the Chinese resistance to foreign religions, the missionaries had to hide their destination in the guise of secular culture. They played the roles of a Confucian scholar, a doctor, a machinist, a painter and etc. Meanwhile, their secular identity also had effects on every aspect of their daily life. Especially for those missionaries in royal court, their secular job brought them high income, which increased wealth gap between them and other missionaries. The same goal of preaching Catholicism made them try to decrease the gap. On the one hand, some missionaries having high status and income provided other poor ones financial aid:on the other hand, when a missionary died, his property belonged to the church, or was given to others. Through these ways, wealth was flowing among missionaries. Since the method of "adapting policies" and "relying on the imperial court" successfully adopted by Matteo Ricci in the missionary work in late Ming, most of the missionaries followed "the rule of Matteo Ricci" in the Chinese way, such as associating with glitterati and establishing a secular network, thereby they could maintain their missionary work in China. Besides, they helped each other and kept a place for the Europeans in China. Countering the hardship of living in a foreign land, they had mode the precious friendship beyond factions and across living and death. From the late Ming to the early Qing, the missionaries associated more with scholar-officials rather than nobles and bureaucrat of the Qing government. In the course of Chinese history, the social status and mentality of the missionaries waned, for they were too busy coping with the secular world. Finally, their secular work didn't protect their religion. The emperor Yongzheng implemented "Prohibition against the Catholicism" and thoroughly expelled missionaries, which lead to the failure of the expedition of the Catholicism during late Ming and early Qing.To this day, the studies about history of preaching and cultural exchange through missionary have been plentiful, however, the study on missionaries themselves are rare. This thesis tries to fill in the blanks. From the perspective of the secular lives of the visiting missionaries in China, based on the "common situation", and taking advantages of the theories and methods of comparative linguistics, Social Psychology, and Comparative Study on History, the present thesis will study the existence of this foreign ethnic group from the respects of language learning, secular status, material life, social relationship and social psychology.