This book is not really aptly named, since Mormons didn't really "unlock" anything related to China in the major period covered by the book until they established a mission presence in Hong Kong in the 1950's. Nevertheless, the author is an excellent historian and establishes and contextualizes the cross section of Mormon history and east Asia very well. Because the history is rather sparse, the author is able to flesh out what history there is with plenty of detail and historical perspective, including sociological reasons why the Mormons were so successful in the islands of the Pacific and not elsewhere in east Asia.
The writing is easy to follow and the book is well-footnoted (including some notes I wish were in the main text) and references a valuable collection of sources one may go to for further research into the topics it covers. It also contains transcriptions of many of the central events and documents the book covers in its several appendices.
The only major place I would say the author stumbles is where he veers into devotional, rather than scholarly, territory. This, unfortunately, includes the "highlight", or main focus of the book -- dedicatory prayers. The author tries to turn the practice into an "ordinance" with a recognizable and unchanging core. Fortunately, this problem is mostly isolated to chapters 4 and 5, and also in spite of his rhetoric, he marshals enough sources to basically make the opposite point he is trying to make.
It can be frustrating when misguided religiosity turns otherwise sound scholarship into slop. However, given that a big part of the audience is going to be active Mormons, this is probably a selling point rather than the opposite for a lot of folks.
I asked for a digital copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes, but did not receive any cash or discounts or other incentives to influence my opinions stated here.
Additional notes:
errata / corrigenda:
- page 16, "A decade ago" is referring to 15 Mar 2013. See https://web.archive.org/web/20130318012517/https://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/china-website-mormons
- page 16, www.mormonsandchina.org -- this is no longer active. It redirects to https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/China?lang=eng, which is also wrong and the capitalization of "China" will give a 404 error at the moment. The correct url to visit is https://china.churchofjesuschrist.org/ which will redirect to https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/china?lang=eng. The content has mostly not changed since 2013
- page 16, "sixty" should have been "fifty"
- page 22, footnote 5, "1901" should be "1921"
- page 28, "traveled in Utah" should read "traveled to Utah"
- page 51, footnote 13, "See" has a weird superscripted "S"
- page 51, footnote 26, "Foreign Kingdom" should actually read "A Foreign Kingdom"
- page 51, footnote 47, spurious comma in ",."
- page 57, "true claims" should read "truth claims"
- page 79, footnote 5, "Stepehn" should read "Stephen"
- page 79, footnote 10, "Neil" should read "Niel"
- page 79, footnote 51. "The Wilford Woodruff Papers" needs consistent formatting
- page 99, "China were the scenery" should read "China where the scenery"
- page 110, "three priesthood quorums". the author fails to contextualize what Seventies were and how many quorums there are and which quorum presides
- page 123, "Granted noted" should read "Grant noted"
- page 152, footnote 24, "on page that" -- page number is missing
- page 225, "Gunson, Neil" should read "Gunson, Niel"
other notes:
Chapter 1 details the first mission to China, which took about 15 months to fully conclude although only two months were actually spent (fruitlessly) in Hong Kong. It highlights the sociological reasons the Mormons were completely out of their depth in spite of the successes of other Christians, and in contrast to the success of the Mormons in the Pacific islands.
Research opportunity: He identifies a meaningful hole in the scholarly record -- who wrote what, and plagiarized what, in the periodicals of the era?
Chapter 2 continues the author's contextualization and summary of scholarship related to the east asian presence and the scant attention paid to it by the Mormon church in Hawaii, California and Utah in the nineteenth century.
Research opportunity: He identifies a meaningful hole in our understanding of the Japanese presence in Utah between circa 1890 and 1920.
Page 71, the author says "the US government sent 2,500 troops to Utah to take control of the territory by force" and uses the words "federal assault". It's unfortunate the author didn't contextualize this more -- the 1856-7 "Reformation" and the apocalyptic attitudes that were a precursor to the tension and violence. David Bigler's "Forgotten Kingdom" makes it clear that Brigham Young cast the first stone, as it were, by interfering with the federal mail long before the US contemplated sending troops in to restore order.
Chapter 3 details the opening of missionary efforts in Japan in the early 20th century. It again contextualizes the various sociological reasons why Mormon missionaries met with much less success than their Protestant counterparts. The words rigid, inflexible, uneducated, racist and unadapting come to mind. Furthermore, the author points out that the opening decades of the century were a "golden age" for Christian missionary work in China, and it was almost entirely overlooked and missed by the LDS. The book uses Alma O. Taylor's journal entries to narrate his trip into Korea and China in 1910 to prospect for future missionary opportunities, and while detailed and enjoyable, for some reason it focuses mainly on a two week period in the interior of china, despite Taylor's 9 weeks total spent traveling. It highlights his negative assessment of China and the lack of church resources to build necessary missionizing infrastructure as a major factor behind the church's failure to do anything about China in this period.
Footnote 6 is disappointing in that the author calls the authors of religiously motivated speculative books "researchers" and affords them the same credibility and space as the much more legitimate research and researchers that fill most of the footnotes and part of this one.
Footnote 35, noting that the grain the church sent to China in 1907 came too late to be useful, totally should've been in the main text. Kind of sad but funny.
Research opportunity: So far as I know, Alma O. Taylor's japanese language efforts haven't been evaluated by any modern expert, so while his accomplishments are listed here, their evaluation is not and this is another opportunity for future research. The author does mention that the Japanese mission only had 35 converts after roughly a decade of labor.
Chapter 4 veers into a ridiculous devotional tone as it covers the topic of dedicatory prayers (frequently devotionally referred to here as a "dedicatory ordinance"). The author not only fails to separate the devotional from the scholarly in his words and choice of sources, but the quality of his work degrades. Page 112, "by inspiration", and page 114, "most profound", are not scholarly words. Footnote 20, the author notes that he will be ignoring at least 5 occasions of 'dedicatory prayers' that don't follow the pattern that he claims (1850 hawaii, 1853 south africa, 1854 australia, 1886 canada, 1905 greece). "Evangelism began to move steadily forward in Mexico" (page 121) following a dedicatory prayer -- the author gives no footnotes or numerical evidence to make this case. This is, quite unfortunately, a common problem when active mormons touch on sensitive topics such as priesthood organization and authority. Assertions about priesthood function have taken the place of historical rigor.
Another instance is that the author claims some very specific, priesthoody things about the general structure of the dedicatory prayer -- in spite of this structure not existing for the many early prayers that he proceeds to quote and outline. It seems (see work on similar processes by Jonathan Stapley and Kristine Wright, for instance) that the formalization and institutionalization of the meaning and purpose of dedicatory prayers and their association with the concept of ordinances, has a long and stuttered developmental history. The author interpolates and inserts his framework into his descriptions of the primary sources he works with, in spite of much of the framework not being found in the primary sources he quotes. His best example of a dedicatory prayer following the pattern of Orson Hyde's first 1841 prayer is Heber Grant's 1901 prayer, which was given shortly after Grant explicitly read a copy of Hyde's 1841 prayer. Grant also explicitly stated that he had never read Hyde's prayer before, so clearly there wasn't a pattern to these prayers in the 19th century. This is also the only real hint we get about the extent of membership-wide and apostolic-wide awareness of a dedicatory prayer tradition. The author's documentation of Francis Lyman's frequent dedicatory prayers in 1902-3 (alongside footnote 46) seems to make it clear that Lyman's approach was innovative and inspired by a bit of wanderlust, rather than necessarily following previously established patterns (he seemed to make the process of "turning the key" and opening gospel doors more aspirational than effort-based compared to his predecessors).
The author presents, by his count, 19 "dedicatory prayers" as his bedrock evidence - 9 in europe and the near east, 1 in mexico, 1 in japan, and 7 in palestine. By my count from the book, we had 1 prayer in Palestine by Orson Hyde in 1841, 3 suspect prayers by Erastus Snow and John Taylor in 1850 (Denmark, France, Italy) and 1 in 1851 (Switzerland) that do NOT sound like dedicatory prayers as defined by the author, a 6th prayer in Mexico in 1881 that sounds like a dedicatory prayer but doesn't follow the wording pattern that might warrant calling it an "ordinance", and 4 additional not-specifically-documented-here prayers in Palestine. Then we get Heber Grant's 1901 (Japan) prayer modeled after Hyde, and Francis Lyman's rush of 8 dedicatory prayers in 1902-3 (Belgium, Palestine twice, Finland, Russia twice, Poland. maybe the author is also counting Norway?). The 1921 prayer by David McKay makes for the 20th such prayer. After all this the author jarringly asserts, "Offering prayers over different nations has long been an important part of the work of Latter-day Saint apostles" (page 129). Um, didn't the author just exhaustively demonstrate that it was often more an after-thought? Also, the only places they prayed over were non-anglophone mission fields (not including the 35% before 1922 that were over Palestine and not really mission-field dedications).
"live until the Second Coming, like John the Beloved according to the New Testament" (page 123). This assertion is a Mormon belief, not a common Christian one and not what the New Testament / John 21:23 actually says.
Chapter 5 describes David McKay's dedication of China. To me this represents the further solidification of patterns that were once much more fluid -- the "institutionalization" of earlier charismatic and more spontaneous behaviors described in chapter 4. Although the author's framing is unfortunate (including carryovers from the previous chapter -- eg, on page 152 the quoted text uses the phrase "dedication services" to describe the dedicatory prayers performed by Cannon and McKay, but the author again changed this to "dedicatory ordinance" when describing it himself), it nonetheless provides an excellent overview and contextualization of the experience.
Chapter 6 describes the rest of the McKay's tour around the world and some later events that reflect the theme of the book. It ends on a high note regarding Russell Nelson's aspirational announcement of a future temple in Shanghai.
The chapter opens with some questionable language -- the author describes the visit to Tahiti as brief but "profound" (page 153) -- without justifying his use of that word. The book also neglects to mention that the Tahitian mission president wasn't able to meet with them during their brief stay at that time. Sounds less, profound, and more, disappointing.
More suspect language appears on pages 161 and 163 where the author describes Matthew Cowley's dedication of China as rededication, even though the passages he quotes clearly suggest this is a dedication and opening of China "for missionary work" (page 163), not a rededication or reopening, in spite of their awareness of McKays 1921 dedication. Clearly some historical dedicatory prayers had a more aspirational function, but by this point in LDS church history they seem to largely have had a routine ecclesial function, as further demonstrated by the book's description of Joseph Fielding Smith's assignment to dedicate several lands for missionary work in 1955. It was only in 1959 that Mark Peterson dedicated Formosa and in his prayer used the words "rededicate" and "rededication" for apparently the first time (page 164). James Faust performed another aspirational rededication prayer in Beijing in 1979.
Appendix A is a delightful transcription (from Pitman shorthand) of Hosea Stout's Christmas 1853 tabernacle recitation of his experience going to China and back. It makes for a good addendum to chapter 1.
Appendix B contains about half of Alma Taylor's lengthy report of his 7 weeks in China. It makes for a good addendum to chapter 3.
Appendix C contains David McKay's 9 Jan 1921 prayer text (as reconstructed on 23 Feb that year from Hugh Cannon's notes). It makes for a good addendum to chapter 5. Of note is his phrase that "the time has come" (page 198) for the gospel to come to the nation, and that "we implore thee" to "open the door for the preaching of thy Gospel from one end of this realm to the other" (page 199).
Appendix D contains Hugh Cannon's widely published account of the event in 1921. Another good addendum to chapter 5. Church members would have read of "The horde of ragged and revolting mendicants, grimy porters and insistent jinrikisha men" (page 200) and how "at no very distant day the light of the gospel may penetrate to present overwhelming darkness" (page 203).
Appendix E contains David McKay's Sept 1921 "Ah Ching" improvement era article, describing the Chinese-Samoan convert he met as described in chapter 6. Would've been nice if the author had included additional biographical information about "Tagaloa" Hiau Ah Ching. On family search (record KW8W-4F8) you can find that he was born 19 Jan 1854, married Fa'aoso around 1890, had son Afa / Arthur on 4 June 1896 (widowed around maybe that time -- 1-2 years before second marriage), baptised Sunday 3 April 1898 (already as local chief) after being "converted" the day previous, married Fa'atupu on 4 April 1898 (family search currently records this as 5 April, but a journal entry shows this is wrong), and died on 19 Jan 1923.
Appendix F contains a chronology that includes events from this book and whole bunch of events relating to the church in east Asia not really covered in the book.
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