The .1912-1958 Protestant Spatial Pattern And Its Evolution

After Shanghai has been opened to be the port, it quickly became the base of foreign missionaries coming into China owing to its geographic advantage of the focus of river and sea. All kinds of the protestant missions landed Shanghai in succession. Local church also vigorously developed.This paper aims to do some research in the change of distribution pattern of protestant church since MINGUO to reflect the protestant propagation process in this city. Basing on Records of Shanghai's Religion, referring to mass documents, and using GIS analysis methods, this paper recovers the protestant spatial pattern in different periods of the early part of 20 century. With the documents becoming more detailed, the research precision is improved unceasingly. This paper studies the spatial pattern and its change in the area of Shanghai city, analyzes the propagation process of main protestant missions, considers the church scale by taking Episcopal as an example, and tries to unfold the influential factors to the change of protestant spatial pattern in Shanghai.The rapid development of protestant in Shanghai benefited from the prompt urbanization of Shanghai. With the expanding of road nets, the protestant distribution became more densification and homogenization. As a metropolitan inhabited by people from all walks of life, people spoke different dialects in this city, thus the living pattern of immigrants from different places was an impotent element of affecting the protestant propagation. Moreover, two events launched by Japan during MINGUO also had great impact on the protestant distribution pattern in Shanghai.