The Middle Kingdom
I am not mistaken as to some of the motives which induced me to undertake a book upon the Chinese, and one of them was to increase an interest among Christians in the welfare of that people, & show how well worth they were of all the evangelizing efforts that could be put forth to save them from disorganization as a government, depradation as a people thro’ the effects of opium, and eternal ruin to their souls. Ignorance is a cause, an explanation, & a motive for indifference to a subject, and to remove this ignorance removes some of those reasons for inaction.[30]This letter encapsulates Williams’s overall view of the Chinese. Though he did not approve of Chinese society in its present state, he believed that its glaring flaws in the areas of government, religion, and morality were manifestations not of biological inferiority but rather of the pernicious influences of opium, inept government, and the devil. Even with Satan locking the entire nation in a stranglehold, the Chinese still could boast a rich intellectual tradition. Thus if a book could teach American readers about the truth of this civilization, and eradicate crude stereotypes, the once-mocked Chinese could be embraced as a worthy, oppressed people in desperate need of Christ’s liberating power. Then a truly wonderful transformation could take place: American people and dollars would flow into the Protestant missions, allowing them to save a quarter of humanity.
Fortunately for Williams, he did not begin such an enormous literary task with a blank page. His articles for the Repository and his recent lectures acted as drafts for the planned book.[31] Still, the goal was ambitious. He intended to consolidate everything he knew about China into a single work, without either resorting to summaries or omitting details. “I find my manuscript stretches on like a long-standing account of lawyer’s fees,” he joked, “and I wish ‘twere clipped.”[32] Apparently, nothing was clipped. The final work, completed in 1848, was comprehensive to the point of being encyclopedic: it consumed two large volumes and stretched to a length just over twelve hundred pages. Williams had not just written about China, he had endeavored to reproduce China in textual form.
The work was in fact so long that Williams felt compelled to justify the length in his preface. “If…the volumes seem too bulky for a general inquirer to undertake to peruse,” he wrote, “let him remember the vastness of the Chinese Empire…and he will not, perhaps, deem them too large for the subject.”[33] With these words, Williams equated his book with the country itself; since China was large, the book should be long as well. And if the book stood as a textual reproduction of the country, than the act of reading the book necessarily became tantamount to taking an armchair tour of China. With this theme of virtual travel in mind, Williams arranged for an illustrator to draw a large Chinese gateway that, when situated both on the book’s cover and frontispiece, acted as a portal to China. This gateway was complete with ornate dragons and Chinese characters that, when translated into English, tellingly stated: “Among Westerners there are wise people. Kind people love all people, strangers as well as relatives.” With this inscription, Williams issued a challenge to his readers to open their minds and modify their view of China. In this sense, The Middle Kingdom was as much about Americans as it was about the Chinese.
Of course, the overarching purpose of his book was religious—to advance the cause of Protestant missions in China. Williams makes this point abundantly clear in his preface. “Respecting the origin, plan, and design of the present work, I may be allowed to express the humble hope that it will aid a little in advancing the cause of Christian civilization among the Chinese.”[34] However, if religion provided the official impetus for the book, science offered a modus operandi. Williams gathered, arranged, and presented his information by following a scientific model. In this way, the religiously-inspired The Middle Kingdom bears the distinct imprint of the Rensselaer Institute.
To understand the role of science on Williams’s mind, one need only scan the chapter titles and sub-headings. Williams categorized all aspects of Chinese life just as a naturalist trained in the Linnaean system would classify species. He devoted the first four chapters to China’s geography, covering the provinces, the colonies (Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet), and a general overview of the topographical features of the empire. He next moved on to China’s natural history, covering mineralogy, botany, zoology, herpetology, ichthyology, and entomology. Shifting to the human sphere, he composed two chapters that explained the government, the legal system, the administration of the laws throughout the provinces, and the treatment of criminals. He also discussed at length both the education system and the examination system, which produced the scholar—officials who ran the government. Not surprisingly, one chapter describes the Chinese written language, a subject Williams knew well. The two chapters on Chinese literature explore the Five Classics and the Four Books; the significance of Confucius and Mencius; and the nation’s histories, fictional novels, ballads, and poetry. Williams also studied the state of the arts and sciences: math, astronomy, military science, anatomy, astrology, music and painting.
Indeed, almost no category was safe from Williams’s exhaustive inquiry. He examined Chinese architecture, the manner of dress and the diet. His study of Chinese social life offers depictions of ceremonies, festivals, marriage (including the custom of polygamy), naming practices, and the various pastimes of the people, such as gambling. In addition, Williams devoted space to Chinese commerce (complete with statistics of China’s imports and exports), agriculture (including tea production), and the mechanical and industrial arts (metallurgy, glass, porcelain, lacquer, silk, and carvings in ivory). Not surprisingly, Chinese religion consumes an entire chapter, as does the role of Christian missions in China, past and present. The book also contains a thorough history of the Chinese empire, one that stretches from antiquity to the present, with the more recent history centering on China’s intercourse with the outside world. Finally, The Middle Kingdom concludes with two full chapters that focus exclusively on the conflict with England and the opening of China. In sum, Williams made sense of China – its vastness and complexity—by imposing a rigid system of classification over it.
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[30] Letter to Sarah Walworth, August 23, 1847. Box 1. Series 1. SWWFP.
[31] Samuel Wells Williams, The Middle Kingdom vol. 1 (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1848), xiii-xiv. A perusal of the work’s footnotes reveals that the Chinese Repository was one of the more frequently cited sources for information.
[32] Letter to Sarah Walworth, November 11, 1847. Box 1. Series 1. SWWFP.
[33] Samuel Wells Williams, The Middle Kingdom vol. 1 (1848), xiv.
[34] Samuel Wells Williams, The Middle Kingdom vol. 1 (1848), xvi.
