Maps, Numbers and Texts: Constructing the God’s Empire in Asia

Abstract

Catholic missions initiated a bilateral dialogue between contradictories: Christians and pagans, missionaries and converts, foreign and native and above all the sacred and the profane. Within the framework of imperialism and colonialism, this dialogue became a mission of constructing the God’s empire that blurred the boundaries of the terrestrial and heavenly conquests. Missionaries, as religious workers on the front of empire expansion, not only drew maps and recorded numbers but also took an effort to translate such visual and numerical representation into religious explanations. Focusing on the Catholic Manchuria Mission in the height of missionary expansion in the nineteenth century, this paper examines how the church produced and used maps, numbers, and texts to measure the local religious experience into the global religious imagination. The process included representations and translations of literal, visual, and 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? How many chrétientés must be established to illustrate the mission’s success? I seek to probe this visual and numerical translingual practice in the broader context of empire construction and historical methodology, using it as an approach to explore the relation between religion and empire, between historians and historical visuals and numbers, asking how historians’ understanding and interpretation structure disparate sets of discourses within their field.