ABSTRACT
A suspicion that Christian converts, and even the native clergy, were not to be trusted to maintain the nicer points of dogma was one of the chief reasons why western missionaries were so noticeably reluctant to resign posts of authority in the Church into Chinese hands, and given their point of view their hesitation was justified. In the winter of 1867, when the French explorers arrived on the scene, the rebellion still showed no sign of coming to an end, and the situation was anything but advantageous to the government side. Even in the middle of China, a region that lay on the frontier between one province and another tended in times of unrest to become a kind of no man’s land, with each provincial authority passing the responsibility of enforcing law and order to its neighbour.
