Monkey King's Amazing Adventures

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Wu Cheng'en. Monkey King's Amazing Adventures

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Timothy Richard traveled to China in 1868 as a Baptist missionary. When other missionaries were attempting to stamp out the popular local tales of gods and heroes such as Journey to the West, Timothy Richard championed them for the universal messages of spiritual challenge and growth they contain. He is also the author of Forty-five Years in China.

Daniel Kane is the Head of Chinese Studies at Macquarie University. He has a BA in Chinese from the University of Melbourne and a PhD from the Australian National University. He was visiting scholar at the Department of Chinese at Peking University in 1988 and 1993 and Cultural Counselor at the Australian Embassy in Beijing in 1996.

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These comments are by no means meant to belittle Timothy Richard. Along with Hudson Taylor, he is regarded as one of the most influential and prolific missionaries of the non-conformist Christian tradition in China. Richard was closely involved with famine relief in North China as early as the 1870s. During the Boxer Rebellion (1900) some two hundred missionaries and their families were massacred in Shanxi. When the question of reparations was raised, the Prime Minister, Li Hongzhang, asked Richard for his advice. Richard suggested an indemnity of $500,000 be spent on establishing the Taiyuan University College (later Taiyuan University, now Taiyuan University of Technology). Richard was its Chancellor and Moir Duncan its first Principal. The Chinese government also instructed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to consult with Richard and the Catholic Bishop of Peking on the improvement of relations between the government and the missionaries. Both men were awarded the title of First Grade Officials of the Qing Empire.

Though essentially forgotten because the things he found important and the intricacies of the political situation in China in which he was involved are now history, and rather obscure history at that, that does not diminish his status in the eyes of specialists in the history of the Christian missions in China. His heart was in the right place. It may well be that his translation of The Monkey King’s Amazing Adventures might well be the work for which he is most remembered so many decades after his death.

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