In 1818, Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary to China, established the Anglo-Chinese College (Yinghua Shuyuan 英華書院, ACC) in Malacca with the help of his colleague William Milne. According to the deed of the ACC, its objective was ‘the cultivation of English & Chinese Literature in order to the spread of the Gospel of Jesus Christ’ (Morrison 1820). During its years of presence in Malacca,¹ the ACC not only offered an opportunity to Chinese youths to receive a general liberal education, it was also a school for Europeans and Americans to study Chinese regardless of whether they were missionaries or not, the alma mater of pioneer Chinese Protestant evangelists, and a press printing Chinese Bibles and Christian tracts as well as sinological works (Harrison 1979; Daily 2014). Shaped by a missionary approach concerned with cultural reconciliation or adaptation, the ACC’s activities and achievements were part of the beginnings of Chinese Protestant Christianity and laid the foundation for its subsequent development, as illustrated in this special issue of Studies in World Christianity, which consists of the revised versions of selected papers presented at ‘Sino-Western Cultural Exchange and the Development of Christianity in China: A Conference in Celebration of the Bicentenary of Ying Wa College’, which was held at Hong Kong Baptist University, 12—13 October 2018, co-organised by the Centre for Sino-Christian Studies of Hong Kong Baptist University and Ying Wa College, and sponsored by Tin Ka Ping Foundation.

The ACC was no doubt Morrison’s brainchild. In the first article of this special issue, Ching Su (Su Jing 蘇精) reminds us that Morrison was not merely the ACC’s founder. He was also its fund-raiser, a decision-maker with respect to its daily operations and a sometime teacher there. Morrison’s dedication to the ACC was an important factor in its steady development in his lifetime, as well as in its functioning as a means to propagate Protestantism to the Chinese people when China still closed its door to the religion.

Nevertheless, as Su also points out, the ACC was built on the land of the Malacca station of the Ultra-Ganges Mission of the London Missionary Society (LMS), using its manpower, facilities and other resources. While nominally independent from each other, Morrison insisted that they should be integrated as one concern, which contributed to a relationship between them that ‘nearly stifled each other’.

In the second article, the late R. G. Tiedemann, whose obituary is also included in this special issue, illustrates the problem in further detail, highlighting that Morrison’s fellow missionaries of the Ultra-Ganges Mission were alienated by such a relationship between the ACC and the mission, Morrison and Milne’s leadership styles, their focusing the mission on the ACC rather than preaching the Gospel – and their emphasis on the mission to the Chinese at the expense of the Malay mission. With the case of the ACC as a bone of contention, Tiedemann’s article shows that ‘murmurings and disputings’ caused by different attitudes to missionary work were a feature of the early history of Chinese Protestant Christianity.

Christopher Daily (2014: 76, 81—2) argues that the ACC was founded by Morrison under the influence of his education at the Gosport Academy, in which he was instilled with a three-step mission strategy culminating with the establishment of a seminary for training local converts. As Tiedemann’s article concluded, although the number of Chinese being converted to Protestantism was ‘rather meagre before 1843, men such as Liang Fa, He Jinshan and Song Fojian were to play important roles in the churches in China and in Singapore’. It is noteworthy that all three of these Chinese converts were educated at the ACC.

One of the key Chinese converts, Liang Fa, is the subject of P. Richard Bohr’s article. After exploring how Liang’s experience at the ACC prepared him to become a pioneer Chinese Protestant evangelist, Bohr argues that Liang’s evangelistic strategy, which was adapted to the circumstances of his times, helped win converts to Protestantism, despite their small number. Also, Liang’s Quanshi liangyan 勸世良言 (Good Words to Admonish the Age, 1832) ‘was the fullest presentation of Evangelical principles by a Chinese Christian in print by that time’, although Hong Xiuquan’s 洪秀全 unique interpretation of Liang’s book paved the way for the Taiping rebellion and its tragic consequences, including its adverse effects on the prospects of Christian culture in China. Bohr shares Tiedemann’s view of Liang’s legacy, concluding that Liang’s foresight to transmit the Christian message in a medium accessible to Chinese popular culture and religion initiated a process that would bear fruit in the longer run.

The ACC in Malacca was also relevant to another step of the Gosport mission strategy, namely the production and printing of Chinese Christian texts (Daily 2014: 131), which provided, in Tiedemann’s words, ‘the essential tools for future work in the Chinese empire’. While Ching Su (1996; 2000) has conducted in-depth studies on the LMS’s printing presses among the Chinese and Morrison’s Chinese printing activities, Ryan Dunch pinpoints in his article the ACC’s importance as a centre for translation and publishing of Chinese Protestant books and tracts in the formative decades of the Protestant missions among the Chinese. According to Dunch, evidenced by the extant Chinese publications from the ACC, its missionaries and their Chinese collaborators experimented on how to make books that would appeal to Chinese readers so as to attract them to Christianity. This was carried out through, for example, adaptations and innovations in layout and format, the adoption of Chinese literary pseudonyms and decontextualising the use of classical Chinese sentences on title pages as visual hooks. Dunch also argues that whereas the number of works published at the ACC was not large, they represent many of the major themes and genres that would shape missionary publishing in Chinese over the succeeding decades.

In the final article of this special issue, Archie C. C. Lee deals with an influential Chinese Protestant publication of the ACC, namely the literary Chinese version of the Bible produced by Morrison in collaboration with Milne, which was published in 1823 and known as Shengtian shengshu 神天聖書 (Zetzsche 1999; Tong 2016). With examples from the creation account of Genesis and passages related to the rendering of the biblical ‘sea monster’ in the Old Testament, Lee argues that lexical choices in the Morrison—Milne version show a certain degree of sensitivity to the Chinese cultural context, which coheres with Dunch’s view that the ACC’s publications reflect an experiment in making Christian messages acceptable to the Chinese. The use of hai zhi yaoshou 海之妖獸 (the monster of the sea) instead of long 龍 (dragon) in Isaiah 27: 2 to indicate the object of God’s eschatological act of killing is not only a notable example, it also problematises the view that the Morrison–Milne version had an intention of demonising Chinese culture. Lee’s article also brings out how the Morrison—Milne version impacted Chinese Protestant Christianity through examples such as chuangzao 創造 as the Chinese translation of the Hebrew word bārā in Genesis 1: 1, which was followed by subsequent Chinese Protestant Bible translators.

All in all, this special issue shows that the ACC was more than a mission school. Considering its multifaceted pioneering contributions to Protestant missions among the Chinese, it is no exaggeration to say that the ACC played an integral part in the beginnings of Chinese Protestant Christianity.