The Shaping of Modern China: Hudson Taylor’s life and legacy
ISBN 978 1909281 42 4
1760 pages.
Published 27/10/2014
£9.99
Kindle
This edition includes BOTH volumes (2) of the hardcopy edition of this book. China is poised to play a definitive role in the third millennium. The author traces the parallel influences of Chinese and Western secular history, trade and diplomacy, including the Opium Wars, and Catholic and Protestant missions and Bible translation, with dissemination of the Christian Scriptures in Chinese under the auspices of the United Bible Societies. A J Broomhall, a great-nephew of Hudson Taylor, worked as a medical missionary in southwest China and the Philippines.
China is poised to play a most significant role in the third millennium. This authoritative history by Dr Broomhall traces the influence of Protestant and Catholic missions and the work of the United Bible Societies during the nineteenth century on the development of modern-day China. Whereas previous historians in this field had worked mainly from secondary sources, Dr Boomhall drew on the first-hand observations, most significantly by his great uncle, James Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission, who was described by the historian K.S. Latourette as ‘one of the four or five most influential foreigners who came to China in the mid-nineteenth century’. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
A J Broomhall was a careful historian, and he has left a unique and authoritative work, originally published in seven volumes under the overall title ‘Hudson Taylor and China’s Open Century’. Broomhall served in China himself, among the Nosu (Yi) peoples until 1951. As a direct descendant of Hudson Taylor’s sister, he is able to draw on family sources in a way other historians of the period could not. In short, this is an important study.
Julia Cameron