Hampden Coit DuBose

Hampden Coit DuBose (Chinese name Du Buxi 杜步西; 1845–1910) was a missionary sent to China by the Southern Presbyterian Church (Presbyterian Church in the United States) and the founder of the Anti-Opium League in China.

Life

DuBose was born in South Carolina, United States, and graduated from Columbia Theological Seminary. In 1872 he and his wife Pauline were sent to China as missionaries by the Southern Presbyterian Church and settled in Suzhou, on the Beijing–Hangzhou Grand Canal.

Having seen the devastation that opium caused in China, he joined William Hector Park (柏乐文) and other missionaries and Christian medical workers in founding the Anti-Opium League in China, with DuBose as its first president. In 1899 the League published the influential book Opinions of Over 100 Physicians on the Use of Opium in China. The book set out the League's aims and the harm done by opium, and in the end turned public opinion against the trade. DuBose eventually won the support of US President Theodore Roosevelt, the US Congress and the International Anti-Opium Association. On May 30, 1906, the British House of Commons passed a resolution reaffirming that the Indo-Chinese opium trade was “morally indefensible” and asking the government to bring it to a speedy close. DuBose gathered a petition signed by more than 1000 missionaries in China and submitted it to the Guangxu Emperor. In 1906 the Qing court issued an imperial edict ordering the cultivation, trade and smoking of opium to be eliminated within ten years; the edict is said to have corresponded closely to the petition DuBose had drafted. In a letter to US Senator John McLaurin, he called on the United States to take responsibility for the opium trade, because it had profited, together with Britain, from harming the Chinese people.

In 1891 he was elected in the United States as moderator of the General Assembly of the Southern Presbyterian Church. DuBose's missionary career in Suzhou lasted 38 years, until his death there in 1910.