INTRODUCTION

The study of either modern or western architecture in China is in its infancy. Beginning in the 1980s Chinese scholars began to turn their attention more seriously to the buildings of "modern China" (in China, periodized as 1840-1949), and certain western scholars similarly focused on this remarkable period characterized by cataclysmic cultural, political and architectural transformation. Western technological imports, such as reinforced concrete and raft foundation solutions, were critical to the dynamics of architectural change and yet we are only beginning to understand their details. Other shifts in China's building trades, such as the effects of other new building materials, the implications of western architectural office practices, or the role of Chinese architects returning from study abroad are no less important and yet no less elusive to pinpoint. However, certain conclusions can be drawn by analyzing case studies where documentation survives. One such case involves the architecture associated with missionaries in early 20th century China.

The most significant conclusion derived from an examination of missionary architects and clients in republican China (1911-1949) is that many were consciously trying to make their buildings superficially appear more "indigenous" and less western. As they sought to educate, proselytize and convert Chinese, they tried to strike a culturally harmonious chord with their buildings. This chord resonated throughout the world of China's missionaries, at first faintly at the beginning of the republican period and then more resoundingly during the 1920s, when construction activities by missionary organizations were intensifying. The chord continued to be heard until construction work by foreign missionaries ceased in 1949 due to the establishment of the People's Republic of China.

Missionary architecture in China exemplifies a western architectural intervention in a non-western cultural context. Especially during the past two decades, architectural historians have sought to characterize the social, aesthetic and political dynamics associated with transferring one architectural culture or technology across another architectural border. ^Ref.1 This study of changes in Chinese missionary architecture, although by no means comprehensive, further illuminates these dynamics and suggests the need for further study of Chinese examples and for comparative analyses elsewhere.

Throughout early 20th century China, industrial and residential sites were developed by western and Asian commercial clients with alacrity. During the 1920s, for example, businesses from Europe, North America and Japan architecturally transformed Shanghai's Bund and developed commercial sites in the concession areas of Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Tianjin, and Xiamen. Entrepreneurs erected mills, factories and port facilities to handle increased industrial demand, and they built westernized residential areas. ^Ref.2 Although arguments sometimes arose about the propriety and cost of these new creations, the architectural faces of many Chinese cities were changed until approximately 1937, when Japan's political control of China and a concomitant plummeting of economic investment brought new construction to a halt. ^Ref.3

Architecturally, missionary clients operated largely in contrast to commercial entrepreneurs. Beginning in the 1910s they grappled with the question of how to incorporate the architecture of new institutions into educational reform programs they were implementing, and in the 1920s they began to integrate a fresh outlook about architecture into what was termed the "indigenous church movement." ^Ref.4 When missionaries began building churches and missionary schools with a stylistic deference to Chinese tradition, (Fig. 1). they were doing so in the context of a new kind of approach to education in China that emerged after 1911, one characterized in part by an attempt to bring western scientific methods to Chinese students. ^Ref.5 Some critics believed that adaptations needed to be created that would take their cues from China's past and point optimistically toward the future. ^Ref.6

Fig. 1: "A Modern Church Building in China": the Church of Our Savior, Shanghai, ca. 1918. Source: Chinese Recorder 59 (1918).