This collection of microfiche on Church History and Biographies comes under Section E of the Harvard-Yenching Collection produced by IDC. The National University of Singapore possesses the entire microfiche collection. (Inventory of the entire Collection). The IDC Guide: China and Protestant Missions. A Collection of their earliest Missionary Works in Chinese is available in the Mcrofilm Room in the Library.

Church history and Christian biographies are integral to the question of identity, of who we are as a Christian community. In this collection of forty works that spanned from the mid 1830s (E4-E8), through the period of Taiping Movement (E23) and Boxer Rebellion (E24-27, E29-31), to the time of the Sino-Japanese War (E36, E40), we observe how missionaries and local Christians grapple with their self-identity and develop history-writing as an apologetic tool for evangelistic purposes. The Christian Occupation of China (E22) is a detailed compilation of missionary “advances” in China in the early twentieth century. Reader would find there lists of Protestant institutions in China in the period.

Readers would benefit from close attention on the use of terminologies, i.e., on the Chinese terms that the early Chinese Protestants and missionaries devised in the writing of their own stories. Their frameworks of interpretation and what they chose to remember (and not remember) became part of own heritage.

For further reading:

Barnett, Suzanne Wilson and John King Fairbank, ed. Christianity in China : early Protestant missionary writings. Cambridge,Mass.: Published by the Committee on American-East Asian Relations of the Dept. of History in collaboration with the Council on East Asian Studies/Harvard University, 1985.

Lai, John Yung-Hsiang, ed. Catalog of Protestant missionary works in Chinese. Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University. Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall, 1980.