Calvin Wilson Mateer, forty-five years a missionary in Shantung, China : $b a biographyFisher, D. W. (Daniel Webster)
Religion
Calvin Wilson Mateer, forty-five years a missionary in Shantung, China : $b a biography
Fisher, D. W. (Daniel Webster)
Mateer, C. W. (Calvin Wilson), 1836-1908; Missionaries -- China -- Biography
and then conceive of each player carrying on an independent
enterprise, and you may know something about the Chinese native
band. It is too rare for words. Large bunches of firecrackers
fastened on tripods, and cannon crackers, were used all through
the festivities, so that it seemed exactly like the Fourth of
July. A Chinese feast was given to all the invited guests, and
the rabble from the villages near by encamped on the compound
and ate the lunches they had carried about with them all
morning in their handkerchiefs. It was a great day for the
college, and a great occasion for the village people; but most
demoralizing to language study. The gold-embroidered, scarlet
banners were so many and so immense that since that one day in
the church no place has been found sufficiently large to hang
them.”
In the general section of China where he lived he made many journeys.
Over that part of Shantung situated to the east of the Yellow River he
traveled often, and far and wide. Several times he visited Peking. Once,
as we have seen, he went down the Grand Canal, to Nanking, and the lower
Yangtse. Frequently he steamed up and down the coast to Shanghai, and
once as far south as Ningpo. But those immense and populous provinces
situated in the west and south of China he never visited, not because he
was not interested in them, or could not afford the expense, but because
he could not spare the time. In the spring of 1868 the “Shenandoah,”
an American war steamer, came to Tengchow on its way to Korea, where
search was to be made for any survivors that might remain from the
“General Sherman,” lost there two years before. The “Shenandoah” wanted
an interpreter, and by general consent the duty seemed to fall on Dr.
Mateer, so that he fell constrained to accept, though the health of his
wife and other affairs rendered this very inconvenient. The cruise lasted
about six weeks, and carried them to several places on the west coast
of Korea, and among these to the river Pyeng Yang, since so familiar to
readers of missionary journals, and to those who followed the Japanese
troops on their march against the Russians in the recent war. That was
then a “forbidden land” to foreigners, and the expedition found it
difficult to get into peaceable or forcible communication with officials
or other natives, and accomplished almost nothing. In the light of the
fuller present knowledge of that politically unhappy but religiously
hopeful country the observations of the interpreter or of any of the
other persons belonging to the expedition are now of little interest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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