In the early nineteenth century, ordinary Americans knew precious little about China. Marco Polo and the Catholic missionaries of the sixteenth century were still cited as authorities. To imagine China, Americans looked to Chinese landscapes on blue and white porcelain, pictures on tea chests, and some of the fabulous tales of the Arabian Nights, such as “Aladdin and the Lamp,” which were set in China. You mix this imagery all together and you get a pleasing Oriental stew, containing some fact, some myth, and plenty of fantasy. By the late nineteenth century, we see radical change: a few American universities are making an effort to subject Chinese language and civilization to serious study. What genealogy can we give to the emergence of American Sinology?  

The life and works of Samuel Wells Williams (1812-1884), an American missionary, may perhaps be imagined as a proto-Sinologist or as a bridge figure between the two historical moments described above. Before Williams was a missionary, he harbored a passion for science. Plants, animals, and bugs—not scripture—were his hobby, his passion, and the focus of his college training. In the 1830s, Williams arrived in China with an intellect patterned by the classification schemes of what we might call Enlightenment or Pre-Darwinian science. Influenced by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, Williams believed one could understand the world by describing, naming, and classifying all that was in it. In Canton, Williams applied this highly structured epistemological approach to Chinese civilization, generating in the process a vast reservoir of knowledge. During a furlough in the 1840s, he poured his knowledge into the Middle Kingdom (1848), a single text that ambitiously covered—or tried to cover—all of China, past and present, in encyclopedic fashion.

 

This essay suggests that science played a crucial role in shaping the structure of The Middle Kingdom, America’s first authoritative study of Chinese civilization. Science altered the way Williams perceived the Chinese. Unlike other American missionaries, who maintained a single-minded focus on sin, souls, and scripture, Williams was compelled by his scientific method to venture outside of an evangelical framework and to explore Chinese civilization more broadly—to look at Chinese art, philosophy, and statecraft, among other topics. In this way, he acquired an appreciation for the Chinese, so much so that, later in his life, he became a sort of missionary in reverse: someone who attempted to explain the ways of China to Americans. He held the utopian belief that total knowledge of China could be both attained by a single scholar and compressed within a single text. As this unrealistic goal proved frustrating, the field of China studies fragmented into the modern discipline of Sinology in the United States.