Professor Yuanchong Wang (University of Delaware)
Yuanchong Wang is an associate professor specializing in late imperial and modern China and East Asia in the Department of History at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Remaking the Chinese Empire: Manchu-Korean Relations, 1616–1911 (Cornell University Press, 2018) and the Chinese-language book Zhong Mei Xiangyu: Daguo waijiao yu Wanqing xingshuai, 1784–1911 (“The Meeting of China and the United States: Power Diplomacy and the Rise and Fall of Late Qing”; Wenhui chubanshe, 2021). He is currently working on a book manuscript exploring state building in modern China, alongside several other research projects on late imperial China and East Asia. Since July 2024 he has been serving as editor-in-chief of The Chinese Historical Review.

Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, The University of Hong Kong

As European East India companies and American merchants engaged in a growing volume of business in Guangzhou (Canton) in the early nineteenth century before the First Opium War, many European and American missionaries arrived in Macau, which had been leased and de facto colonized by the Portuguese since 1557, where they began to contact Chinese society. After the war, with the establishment of Hong Kong as a British colony and the opening of treaty ports to Western countries in a group of coastal cities, more missionaries arrived in these ports to preach gospel. In addition to publishing modern newspapers and magazines and distributing them among local followers, these missionaries edited Chinese native almanacs known as “Tongshu” (“book of myriad things”) by combining Western and Chinese calendrical data and other temporal information. These missionary Tongshu had a distinctly religious character, introducing Chinese readers to the Bible and to Christian stories, along with knowledge on world geography, natural history, modern science and technology, Sino-Western treaties, contemporary news, and much else. This presentation reveals the important role of Western missionary Tongshu in promoting literacy in local Chinese society and contributing to the modernization of the country in a crucial era when the imperial court in Beijing initiated a self-strengthening project.