ABSTRACT
One day towards the end of April, 1862, a Chinese visitor presented himself somewhat out of breath at the office of the London Mission Press in Shanghai and asked to have a word in private with Mr Wang T’ao of the editorial department. The gentleman in question was at his desk, and so far from showing any resentment at the interruption he seemed genuinely pleased at the prospect of a talk with a fellow countryman. In the fourteen years during which he had been in the employment of the missionaries, he had grown used to being snubbed by his own people as a turncoat. Not that he had ever manifested the faintest leanings towards Christianity. It was enough that a Chinese scholar should stoop to work for the foreigners. And what work! For hours at a time one or other of the barbarians would dictate, in a jargon which was always uncouth and often incomprehensible, the gist of some handbook of evangelical doctrine or western knowledge, and Wang had to try and put the gibberish into correct Chinese. Even when this was done, he got no credit for it, and the text would appear with the foreigner’s name as translator.
