Welsh Baptist missionary to China Timothy Richard (1845-1919) was once widely regarded as ""one of the greatest missionaries whom any branch of the Church, whether Roman Catholic, Russian Orthodox, or Protestant, has sent to China."" Today, few have heard of Richard and his remarkable lifetime of ministry in China. As the first critical examination of Richard's missionary identity, this groundbreaking historical study traces the narrative of Richard's early life in Wales and his formative first two decades of service in China. Richard's adaptations to the common evangelistic techniques of his day, his interest in learning from grassroots Chinese sectarian religions, his integration of evangelism and famine relief during the North China Famine (1876-79), his strategic decision to evangelize Chinese elites, and his complicated relationships with Hudson Taylor and other China missionaries are all explored through the writings and personal letters of Richard and his contemporaries. The resulting portrait represents a significant revision to existing interpretations of this influential China missionary, emphasizing his deep empathy for the people of China and his abiding evangelical identity. Readable and relevant, Encountering China provides a new generation with an introduction to this lost legend of China mission. ""Encountering China takes the forty-five year missionary career of Timothy Richard in the late nineteenth century as the focus for this book. It is a fascinating and readable study of a crucial period in Protestant, Evangelical China mission. . . This book is must reading for anyone contemplating work in China or elsewhere today. The roots of contemporary balanced ministry are clearly found in the work and life of Timothy Richard."" --Michael Pocock, Dallas Theological Seminary ""Kaiser's work is a major contribution to the study of Timothy Richard, a towering figure in modern mission history of China. It gives us a much more nuanced narrative and interpretation of Richard's famous missiological adjustment, and points to the complex dynamics of Protestant missionary movement in the nineteenth-century China. The future scholarship of China mission history would benefit from this outstanding work."" --Kevin Xiyi Yao, Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary ""Andrew Kaiser's Encountering China contributes to mission reflection today by walking the reader carefully through the development of Timothy Richard's thought."" --Thomas Harvey, Oxford Center for Mission Studies, St. Philips and St. James Church Andrew T. Kaiser is the author of The Rushing On of the Purposes of God: Christian Missions in Shanxi since 1876. He and his family have been living in Shanxi since 1997, serving the people of the province through professional work and public benefit projects.

The most disastrous famine in recent Chinese history took place between 1876 and 1879, afflicting all five provinces of North China [Shantung, Chihli, Honan, Shensi, and Shansi] and claiming no fewer than nine and a half million human lives . The hunger, pestilence, and violence brought about by the famine presented an overwhelming challenge to government and foreign relief efforts. Despite these obstacles, however, Timothy Richard of the Baptist Missionary Society succeeded in organizing an effective, systematic scheme of relief distribution in several districts of Shantung and Shansi. His work on the scene in turn stimulated the foreign community to organize the China Famine Relief Fund Committee, and his method of rendering aid set the pattern of foreign almsgiving which did much to ease the suffering of thousands. This study analyzes Richard’s role in the North China famine and evaluates his contribution to the relief effort. It concentrates on Richard’s initial distribution attempts in Shantung, 1876-1877, and his more extensive activities in Shansi, 1877-1879. By comparing Richard’s relief measures with those of the Ch’ing government as well as with those of the foreign distributors supported by the China Famine Relief Fund Committee, the study attempts to describe the various approaches to the problem of famine relief and to illuminate the many difficulties encountered by Chinese and foreigners in the relief work. Richard emerged from the calamity convinced that he must urge China’s leaders to eradicate the basic causes of famine and similar natural disasters and to elevate the physical as well as the spiritual welfare of the rural masses.

In the third volume of this popular series, leading experts provide fascinating and unexpected insights into critical issues of culture, economy, politics, and society in today's China. This world, outside the reach of state control and either misunderstood or unreported in Western media, gains clarity and dimension from the fresh insights of a prominent group of activists, investigative journalists, lawyers, scholars, and travelers, who share a common interest in lessening the profound information gap between China and the rest of the world. In sixteen new essays, they address such key topics as civil society, consumerism, environmental adversity, ethnic tension, the Internet, legal reform, new media and social networking, nationalist tourism, sex and popular culture, as well the costs of urban gigantism to portray the complexity of life in contemporary China—and how, increasingly, it speaks to the everyday experience of Americans. Contributions by: David Bandurski, Susan D. Blum, Timothy Cheek, Gady Epstein, Andrew S. Erickson, Lionel M. Jensen, John Kamm, Wenquing Kang, Katherine Palmer Kaup, Travis Klingberg, Orion A. Lewis, Benjamin L. Liebman, Jonathan S. Noble, Tim Oakes, Jessica C. Teets, Alex L. Wang, and Timothy B. Weston.

The Mongol takeover in the 1270s changed the course of Chinese history. The Confucian empireÑa millennium and a half in the makingÑwas suddenly thrust under foreign occupation. What China had been before its reunification as the Yuan dynasty in 1279 was no longer what it would be in the future. Four centuries later, another wave of steppe invaders would replace the Ming dynasty with yet another foreign occupation. The Troubled Empire explores what happened to China between these two dramatic invasions. If anything defined the complex dynamics of this period, it was changes in the weather. Asia, like Europe, experienced a Little Ice Age, and as temperatures fell in the thirteenth century, Kublai Khan moved south into China. His Yuan dynasty collapsed in less than a century, but Mongol values lived on in Ming institutions. A second blast of cold in the 1630s, combined with drought, was more than the dynasty could stand, and the Ming fell to Manchu invaders. Against this backgroundÑthe first coherent ecological history of China in this periodÑTimothy Brook explores the growth of autocracy, social complexity, and commercialization, paying special attention to ChinaÕs incorporation into the larger South China Sea economy. These changes not only shaped what China would become but contributed to the formation of the early modern world.

During the nineteenth century, Christian missionaries vied for the Chinese souls they thought they were saving. But many things held them back: Western gunboat diplomacy, unequal treaties and their own prejudices, which increased hostility towards Christianity. 'One more Christian, one less Chinese,' has long been a popular cliche in China. Guns and Gospel examines the accusation of 'cultural imperialism' levelled against the missionaries and explores their complex and ambivalent relationships with the opium trade and British imperialism. Ambrose Mong follows key figures among the missionaries, such as Robert Morrison, Charles Gutzlaff, James Hudson Taylor and Timothy Richard, uncovering why some succeeded where others failed, and asks whether they really became lackeys to imperialism.

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China, Buddhists and Confucians alike flooded local Buddhist monasteries with donations. As gentry numbers grew faster than the imperial bureaucracy, traditional Confucian careers were closed to many; but visible philanthropy could publicize elite status outside the state realm. Actively sought by fundraising abbots, such patronage affected institutional Buddhism. After exploring the relation of Buddhism to Ming Neo-Confucianism, the growth of tourism to Buddhist sites, and the mechanisms and motives for charitable donations, Timothy Brook studies three widely separated and economically dissimilar counties. He draws on rich data in monastic gazetteers to examine the patterns and social consequences of patronage.

From 1807, when the first Protestant missionary arrived in China, to the 1920s, when a new phase of growth began, thousands of missionaries and Chinese Christians labored, often under very adverse conditions, to lay the groundwork for a solid, healthy, and self-sustaining Chinese church. Following an Introduction that sets the scene and surveys the entire period, Builders of the Chinese Church contains the stories of nine leading pioneers--seven missionaries and two Chinese. Here we meet Robert Morrison, the heroic translator; Liang Fa, the first Chinese evangelist; missionary-scholar James Legge; J. Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission; converted opium addict Pastor Hsi ("Overcomer of Demons"); Griffith John and Jonathan Goforth, both indefatigable preachers; and the idealistic advocates of education and reform, W. A. P. Martin and Timothy Richard. Readers will be inspired by their courage, devotion, and sheer perseverance in arduous work, and will gain an understanding of the roots of the two "branches" of today's Chinese Protestantism.

After the collapse of the Han dynasty in the third century CE, China divided along a north-south line. This book traces the changes that both underlay and resulted from this split in a period that saw the geographic redefinition of China, more engagement with the outside world, significant changes to family life, developments in the literary and social arenas, and the introduction of new religions.

The Ming dynasty was the last great Chinese dynasty before the Manchu conquest in 1644. During that time, China, not Europe, was the center of the world: the European voyages of exploration were searching not just for new lands but also for new trade routes to the Far East. In this book, Timothy Brook eloquently narrates the changing landscape of life over the three centuries of the Ming (1368-1644), when China was transformed from a closely administered agrarian realm into a place of commercial profits and intense competition for status. The Confusions of Pleasure marks a significant departure from the conventional ways in which Chinese history has been written. Rather than recounting the Ming dynasty in a series of political events and philosophical achievements, it narrates this longue durée in terms of the habits and strains of everyday life. Peppered with stories of real people and their negotiations of a rapidly changing world, this book provides a new way of seeing the Ming dynasty that not only contributes to the scholarly understanding of the period but also provides an entertaining and accessible introduction to Chinese history for anyone.