The first Evangelicals
For approximately 600 years the Roman Catholics were the only representatives of Christ in Tibet. This finally changed in 1877 with the arrival of the first Evangelical missionaries. Earlier that year, the magazine China’s Millions, published by Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission (CIM), had prepared readers for news that some members of the organization were about to penetrate the closed land of Tibet:
Tibet has been, and still is, left undisputed in the hands of the destroyer, so far as Protestant Christians are concerned. Shall it continue so? . . . We are thankful to say that two of our number are looking forward to Chinese Tibet as their future sphere of labor. But not without our prayers will the long-closed walls of Jericho fall down.1
James Cameron
The honor of being the first Evangelical in Tibet belongs to James Cameron, a shipbuilder from the town of Jarrow in north-east England. After quickly becoming proficient in the Chinese language, Cameron relocated to Sichuan Province, where he joined George Nicoll, until a riot caused the duo to flee the town in March 1877. Cameron, Nicoll, and an American Presbyterian named Charles Leaman traveled toward Chengdu. Nicoll and Leaman fell ill from exhaustion, but Cameron refused to turn back, and set his sights on entering eastern Tibet.
Cameron traveled mostly on foot, only riding his mule for short distances. He sold Christian literature as he went, and kept a journal of his travels, filled with detailed observations of people and places. When he reached Litang in the Kham region, Cameron asked, “When shall ‘Christ and Him crucified’ be preached to the multitudes who speak Tibetan?”2
Cameron continued to Batang, which for centuries had been considered the gateway to central Tibet. He crossed a pass 16,570 feet (5,050 meters) above sea level, which left him out of breath. As he sank into deep snow, the Englishman’s shoes fell apart, but he pressed on.
Having finally reached Batang after weeks of grueling travel, Cameron was turned away by innkeepers. Faced with the choice of heading further west into sparsely populated areas of central Tibet, or turning south toward Yunnan Province, Cameron chose the latter option, as “ignorant of the language, and therefore unable to preach to the people or to make the best of the situation, any such attempt would have been as useless as dangerous.”3 He was also keen to get a sense of how far Tibetan influence stretched to the south.
When he reached the Tibetan town of Deqen in northern Yunnan, Cameron fell seriously ill with a high fever, and for weeks he was close to death. Believing it was better to keep moving, he mounted his mule and continued his journey. The further south he went, the more he was able to communicate in Chinese, and he preached in teashops along the way. He finally exited China into Burma (now Myanmar), and made his way back to south China by sea.
The Evangelical world rejoiced to hear that one of its number had finally set foot in Tibet. His journey was seen as a great breakthrough, and many others were encouraged to follow in his footsteps.
In August 1882, after seven years of doing little else but traveling in unexplored parts of China, James Cameron left for England for a much-needed break. During his extensive travels he had failed to visit just one Chinese province—Hunan. Amazed by his tenacity, people began calling Cameron the “David Livingstone of China.”
Although he was just 38 years old, Cameron was exhausted from his journeys, and in 1883 he moved to New York to study medicine. After earning his degree he returned to China, where he died from cholera in 1892, having lived his 47 years to the full.
Kham ཁམས་
The 1880s saw the first Evangelical missionaries arriving to reside in Kham areas, following James Cameron’s visit in 1877. Many of the early pioneers were surprised to discover how deeply the Catholics had already put down roots in the region. They had established churches and schools in most of the main towns, and many of their priests had already laid down their lives on Tibetan soil.
Jean-Baptiste Brieux was one of several French missionaries murdered in the Kham region in the 1880s. The leader of the mission, Alexandre Biet, investigated the incident and concluded:
The murder is not a simple act of banditry. The plot was woven in advance and I do not hesitate to believe that our dear brother poured out his blood for his faith, and that his assassins were paid by the Tibetan lamas. They committed this mortal sin not because we are foreigners, but because we preach a religion that is not Buddhism . . .
The assassins were only instruments of the real culprits: the lamas and monks of the Batang monastery . . . The death of Brieux is a terrible blow for our poor Mission, so frequently and harshly tested. I relied much on this excellent missionary . . . This apostle has sprinkled the ground of Batang with his blood. May this invaluable sacrifice advance the hour of God’s merciful visitation, when Tibet opens its arms to us and the gospel!4
The murder of Brieux and the subsequent Chinese retribution added to the problems in Kham. The first resident Evangelical missionaries arrived in the area in the middle of this conflict, and quickly had to learn how to live and minister amid the tension.
Although many people think of Tibetans as respectful of all life, especially human life, murder was commonplace in Tibet, with violent men regularly plundering, raping, and killing the innocent. One nineteenth-century visitor was appalled to discover the cheapness of life on the Tibetan Plateau:
In Tibet nearly every crime is punished by the imposition of a fine, and murder is by no means an expensive luxury. The fine varies according to the social standing of the victim . . . 80 bricks for a person of the middle class, 40 bricks for a woman, and so on down to two or three for a pauper or a wandering foreigner. There is hardly a grown-up man in the country who has not had a murder or two to his credit.5
Amdo ཨ་མདོོ་
Further north, in the Amdo region, Evangelical missionaries traveled vast distances on horseback throughout the 1880s, exploring the land and learning all they could about the people of the vast territory, much of which had been depopulated by a Muslim rebellion which ravaged Amdo from 1861 to 1870.
Incredibly, one reputable source estimated:
During those terrible years a considerable part of the population was wiped out and the whole country was overrun and laid waste. A Chinese authority states that in this Muslim rebellion the population of Gansu [which then included Qinghai] was reduced from 15 million to one million inhabitants.6
Although the dispute was chiefly between Hui Muslims and the Han Chinese, Tibetans were inevitably caught up in the atrocities. Countless Tibetan communities were completely obliterated, with hundreds of corpses piled up and set on fire by the rebels. It is believed that this and subsequent massacres in later decades are why so many Amdo areas remain sparsely populated to the present day.
Thanks to a Christian organization that pledged to send free Tibetan Gospel tracts and Scripture to any missionary who needed them, literature distribution was a focus of most missionary activity. On one journey, a missionary sold or gave away hundreds of Tibetan and Mongolian Gospel tracts as he rode around the perimeter of Qinghai Lake. After stopping at one town, he reported:
I showed a Tibetan gospel to a lama on the street. He wished much to possess it, but had no ready cash. Later on I showed a copy to one of the chief lamas of a neighboring temple; he was so pleased with something he read that he bought it at once, and warmly thanked me for it. I had previously sold five copies to a shopkeeper, who wanted to give them as presents to his best customers. There was now a rush for them . . . I had to part in the end with even my own copy to a lama who came rather late, so that I was sold out. If all the monasteries are visited a very large number will be required.7
George Parker and the mission uproar
In 1876, George Parker of the China Inland Mission had become the first Evangelical to live in Gansu Province. Although he had a full schedule reaching out to the unreached Han Chinese and Hui Muslims in the city of Lanzhou, he nevertheless found time to conduct extensive journeys throughout the Amdo area.
Parker had come to China as a single man, and he fell in love with a teenage Chinese girl named Shao Mianzi, whom he had met while she was studying at the CIM school in Yangzhou. Their relationship erupted into a furore in the mission community.
Hudson Taylor was in London when a batch of letters arrived from distraught missionaries, urging him to interject himself into the situation and stop the relationship. The missionaries were afraid that if Parker married the girl, the ramifications would be widespread, and Chinese parents would be reluctant to send their daughters to Christian schools.
George and Shao Mianzi Parker
Parker and Shao were determined to marry, however, and they rebuffed all attempts to stop them, including strenuous efforts by Taylor to help Parker “see the error of his ways.” Missionaries were divided down the middle; some thought Parker should be allowed to make his own decisions, while others threatened to resign from the ministry if the marriage went ahead.
Many Chinese believers, meanwhile, struggled to understand what the fuss was about, and suggested the controversy smacked of racism, as the rules pertaining to a Westerner marrying a local appeared starkly different from those applied to marriage between two Westerners. In the end:
It was Mianzi’s father who volunteered an acceptable solution: compensation for his expenditure on her since her birth. He willingly signed a document agreeing to the marriage, and absolving George from all claims. Eight months later, in February 1881, “Miss Minnie Shao” married Parker, thus becoming the first Asian member of the China Inland Mission. Later that year the Parkers had their first child, Johnnie, and soon there was hardly a lane or courtyard where they were not known and welcomed.8
In 1883, the Parkers set off on a 2,000-mile (3,240-km) exploratory journey through southern Gansu, riding through regions under the control of the Choni Tibetan prince. Minnie proved a great asset to the ministry, while her dark complexion helped her easily fit in with the local Tibetan women. A report of their trip said:
Parker was able to take his wife and Miss Hannah Jones to the Tibetan town of Choni, and leave them there while he went on to Labrang. Till we come to Lhasa there is no Tibetan town of equal importance to Labrang, and it has never before been visited by a missionary.
At Choni, Mrs. Parker and Miss Jones mixed freely with the Tibetan women, and also visited the wives of some of the principal residents who were in positions of authority. These and many other opportunities were had on the journey to and from Choni for reaching Tibetans and Chinese women, to whom previously the words of life had never been spoken.9
The Parkers remained deeply committed to the Lord and to one another for the rest of their lives. George finally passed away in China in 1931, shortly after he and Minnie had celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Minnie Shao Mianzi and her son Johnnie returned to England, where he became the Chief Electrical Engineer of the Greater London Underground.
Only eternity will reveal the impact that the early ministry of the Parkers and other missionaries had for the kingdom of God among the Amdo Tibetans. In the same town of Choni that they frequently visited, a strong church emerged a few decades later, which grew to become one of the largest Evangelical fellowships of Tibetan believers anywhere in the world to the present time.
Parker served in China for 55 years
Notes
1 China’s Millions (January 1877), p. 5.
2 A. J. Broomhall, Hudson Taylor and China’s Open Century, Book Six: Assault on the Nine (London: Overseas Missionary Fellowship, 1988), p. 148.
3 “Through Eastern Thibet,” China’s Millions (August 1879), p. 101.
4 My translation of the Jean-Baptiste Brieux Obituary in the Archives des Missions Etrangères de Paris, China Biographies and Obituaries, 1800–1899.
5 “What It Costs to Murder in Tibet,” Chinese Recorder (August 1891), pp. 358–9.
6 Milton T. Stauffer (ed.), The Christian Occupation of China (Shanghai: China Continuation Committee, 1922), p. 183.
7 G. Parker, “Notes of a Journey in Kan-suh,” China’s Millions (September 1885), p. 114.
8 Broomhall, Hudson Taylor and China’s Open Century, Book Six, pp. 248–9.
9 China’s Millions (July 1883), p. 78.