James Huston Edgar

A Church That Did Not Look Like a Church

James Huston Edgar was born in Australia in 1872, later became a New Zealand national, and was a missionary of the China Inland Mission. In 1905 he arrived at Dajianlu (打箭炉), called Tatsienlu or Tachienlu in Western sources of the time and Dartsedo in Tibetan; it is today's Kangding City in Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan. On Yanhe West Road he built a church and named it the "Gospel Hall" (福音讲堂). The building followed the traditional western Sichuan style: apart from a plaque at the door with the hall's name written vertically, it could hardly be told apart from any Buddhist or Daoist temple of the time. This was not a makeshift measure but a choice: in a frontier town where Han, Tibetans and Hui lived side by side, a place of worship that did not look like a foreign building was itself a statement.

Dajianlu

The China Inland Mission's work in Dajianlu did not begin with him. In 1897 five CIM missionaries, among them Cecil Polhill (宝耀庭), who is included in this database, had already started work there, using this gateway between Sichuan and Tibet as a base for work into Tibet. Theo Sørensen, included in this database in the same batch, was also in Dajianlu from 1899, and the two worked together for many years; in 1918 Sørensen founded a Tibetan religious book society there. In 1907 the CIM sent Robert Cunningham (1883–1942), a Scottish former gymnast, to be Edgar's assistant; he went on to serve as pastor of that church until his death in 1942. Cunningham had a saying that well represents the style of these men: "Even the Archbishop of Canterbury cannot do nothing but meditate and pray day and night." He brought Western games such as tiddlywinks, ludo, draughts and snap to the Tibetans, and called this "preaching the gospel in an enjoyable way."

The West China Border Research Society

On 24 March 1922 the West China Border Research Society was founded at West China Union University in Chengdu, in the home of Dr. William Reginald Morse, who became its first president. Most of the founding members were Protestant missionaries, and Edgar was among them, representing the China Inland Mission. The Society's aims were clearly stated: to study "the mountains and rivers, peoples, customs and environment of West China, especially as they relate to non-Han peoples," and to promote research on "the life and customs, religion and society, ethnology and anthropology, and other related questions of the various indigenous peoples of the West China borderlands." It also set its members a firm rule: at least once every three years they had to make a field trip deep into tribal areas.

The Society's journal, the Journal of the West China Border Research Society, was published irregularly from 1922 to 1945, printed by the Canadian Methodist Mission Press, and was the first English-language academic journal published in Sichuan. Its focus was at first the borderlands between western Sichuan and Kham, and the tribal areas of southern Sichuan; later, as banditry grew worse and reaching the borderlands became ever harder, the Society widened its scope to all questions concerning West China. The journal's articles fall roughly into seven categories: archaeology, ethnology, geography and geology, medicine, religion, history, and zoology and botany. Among its many contributors, Edgar is listed as one of the most important, having "written a large number of articles, especially on Tibetan areas." Listed alongside him are David Crockett Graham, who studied the Chuan Miao; Thomas Torrance (陶然士), who focused on the Qiang; and Vyvyan Donnithorne, who investigated the tradition of the Church of the East in Guanghan. The journal also published articles by scholars who were not missionaries, such as Joseph Rock and Alexandra David-Néel.

The Two Things He Left Behind

Edgar died in 1936. What he left were two things that look unrelated but are really one: a church deliberately built not to look like a church, and a body of articles that wrote the mountains, rivers and peoples of Kham into a scholarly journal. The first was meant to make the gospel seem less foreign in Tibetan lands; the second was meant to make the outside world take the people of this land seriously. His Gospel Hall's later fate was this: in 1954 it was merged into the Three-Self church; in 1958 it moved to its present site on Guangming Road, and the old hall was demolished not long afterwards for municipal works; in 1995 it was rebuilt in white brick in imitation Gothic style and renamed Kangding Christian Church. It is a rather plain building, squeezed between residential blocks, and were it not for the cross on its gable it would be easy to walk past without noticing.

About His Chinese Name

His Chinese name was Ye Changqing (叶长青), as given in the translator's preface to the Chinese translation Yiyu Shenchu Yi You Guang (异域深处亦有光) ("the author, Ye Changqing (葉長青), 1872–1936"). The "Ye Changqing" (叶长青) on Chinese Wikipedia is a Republican-era political and educational figure from Fujian, a different person.