"Pauvre Xen Jang, sans vie, sans foi": numbers that measured Catholic Faith in Northeast China

Abstract

This is a study of a bilateral dialogue between contradictories: Christians and pagans, missionaries and converts, foreign and native, male and female, and above all the sacred and the profane. In this dialogue, missionaries not only took pains to record numbers in their annual statistical reports in order to measure Catholic faith in local communities but also took an effort to translate such numerical local experience into religious explanations. Focusing on the Manchuria Mission founded by the Mission Etrangères de Paris (MEP) in the height of missionary expansion in the nineteenth century, I examine how the MEP translated and disseminated the universality of the Christian message into the particular context of northeast China. In particular, this paper focuses on systematic parish reports that measured and assessed the success of local religious experience. The dissemination of Christian faith included translations of literal languages such as French and Chinese as well as of numerical languages that observed and measured the “faith” of local converts: how often must a convert confess to become a “good” Christian? How many times must communion be conducted in a village to turn it into a “good” Christian community? I seek to probe this 'numerical translingual practice' in the broader context of historical methodology, using it as an approach to explore the relation between historians and historical numbers, asking how historians’ understanding and interpretation structure disparate sets of discourses within their field.