In the 1890s, a series of anti-missionary riots swept through Hunan province. While the disturbances were promptly quelled and the instigators brought to justice, missionaries found themselves in heated debates about the origins of the riots. One of them was Welshman Griffith John who singled out the Sacred Edict as one root cause of anti-Christian sentiment and argued for its amendment. This talk examines the context behind the debate and what it can tell us about endurance of and contradictions within imperial ideology in late imperial China.

Pär Cassel is an associate professor of modern Chinese history at the University of Michigan. He is strongly committed to multi-lingual and multi-archival research and is especially interested in historical problems where international relations, jurisprudence, institutional history, and linguistics intersect. He is currently working on a book length project about the Sacred Edict.