Page 301 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

287.

estimated that the Chinese constituted "at least one-fourth of
7
the human race." Knowledge that Imperial law forbade missionary

work in the Celestial Empire and restricted foreign merchants
1
to Canton failed to diminish the Board s or the missionaries•

enthusiasm for spreading the gospel to China.

After only a few months of working among the seamen at

Whampoa, David Abeel became a missionary for the American

Board of Commissioners. One can only assume his religious

activities did not have much effect on the sailors. Soon there­

after, Abeel sailed to Batavia (Java) to study the Chinese lan­

guage while surveying for the American Board the possibilities

for establishing missions elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Already,
the missionaries realized that they could not proselytize openly

and freely in China. They therefore joined with the English

missionaries in efforts to reach the Chinese indirectly while

simultaneously gaining fluency in the language. The missionar­

ies had some contact with Chinese in the areas of Canton sur­

rounding the Foreign Factories. Neverthelessu efforts at Canton

were severely limited. An alternative field of activity lay in

the Chinese settlements scattered throughout the East Indies.

Although Imperial law prohibited emigration from the Celestial

Empire, by the nineteenth century thousands of southern

7
These instructions were printed in the Board's monthly
magazine, the Missionary Herald, XXIX, 9 (September 1833), 273.
Begun in 1805, the Board's magazine was known variously as the
Panoplist (1805-08), the Panoplist and Missionary Magazine (1808-171
the Panoplist and Missionary Herald (1818-20), the Missionary
Herald (1821-1951), the Advance (1951- ) .