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Funding from the Fulbright Commission, the Academia Sinica in Taipei, and the ACLS/Mellon supported the research for this article. I am grateful to members of the 18th German Historical Institute Transatlantic Doctoral Seminar for their incisive comments. Special thanks to Ken Ledford and the anonymous reviewers at Central European History, who helped to sharpen the piece. I am particularly indebted to Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Jeremy Best, John Connelly, Andrew Jones, Stephen Milder, and Michelle Kuo, who read early drafts and offered invaluable feedback.
In 1898, the year before his death, the German missionary Ernst Faber reflected on his forty-year career in China. The account of his early missions work was suffused with a tone of failure and disappointment. He wrote openly about his difficulties in adjusting to the climate and environment of southern China, the diminutive numbers of converts to Christianity, his frustrations with learning Mandarin and the local dialects used in Guangdong, and the overwhelming feeling of loneliness that he encountered working in rural parishes.1
Yet upon his death, Faber was regarded by his missionary colleagues as one of the most important Western missionaries working in China. Faber's obituary in the Chinese Recorder, the most widely read missionary organ in China, hailed Faber as "one of the very highest authorities in regard to the history, literature and religions of China."2Gustav Warneck, the founder of Protestant missiology (Missionswissenschaft) in Germany, called Faber "the most important missionary of Chinese affairs, who grasped the central problems of mission work with a steady and brilliant hand."3
The nineteenth-century world that Faber navigated was filled with seeming contradictions. Considered by his peers as one of the most influential missionaries in China, Faber described his own work in terms of failure. He lived a life that was simultaneously provincial and cosmopolitan, national and international, particular and universal. His original life aspirations were to become a provincial blacksmith, but he ended up working the most productive years of his life in cosmopolitan Shanghai. Educated in a conservative Protestant milieu, Faber later broke with the Pietist establishment, earning most of his recognition from the literary work that he produced for the liberal Christian General Evangelical Protestant Missionary Society...