毕敬士 · 1900 – 1985 · American
Claude L. Pickens, Jr. (毕敬士) was born in 1900 in Alexandria, Virginia, in the United States. He and his wife, Elizabeth Zwemer Pickens, were both American missionaries working in northwest China, members of the Episcopal Church (some sources say they worked with the China Inland Mission). The most important thing he left behind in his life was not writing but photographs: in 1933 and 1936 he made two expeditions deep into Hui and Tibetan areas, taking a great many pictures that formed a highly important photographic collection.
In the 1930s, northwest China was almost a blank to the outside world. Written accounts always pass through the writer's choices, whereas photographs preserve the forms of the mosques of the time, scenes of mosque-based religious education, the styles of the gongbei (Sufi shrine tombs), and the markets and people's clothing and expressions. For those who later studied Chinese Islam and Tibetan society, the value of these images goes far beyond mission history itself: they are a first-hand visual archive.
In the 1920s and 1930s, a group that was small in number but quite serious formed around treating Chinese Muslims as a subject needing dedicated study and dedicated writing. This database includes, in the same batch, an entry on Isaac Mason, who systematically collected Chinese Muslim texts in Shanghai and in 1921 translated Liu Zhi's (刘智) Tianfang Zhisheng Shilu (The True Record of the Utmost Sage of Islam) into English; the key figure who prompted this wave of attention was Samuel M. Zwemer, who visited China in 1917–1918. Pickens's wife bore the surname Zwemer, so a connection with this line is easy to imagine, but the available records do not state the specific relationship between the two, and no inference is made here.
In 1985 Claude L. Pickens, Jr. died in Annisquam, Massachusetts, in the United States. Reliable records about him are indeed thin: the years and places of his birth and death, his wife's name, his mission, and the years and subjects of his two expeditions are broadly all there is. This database includes him because each of these points can be verified in itself, and the photographs he left carry considerable weight in the study of northwest China. Should fuller material come to light in future, this entry should be supplemented.