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Article
Get access Volume 47, Issue 1March 2014 , pp. 1-29
Ernst Faber and the Consequences of Failure: A Study of a Nineteenth-Century German Missionary in China
Albert Wu (a1)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938914000600Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 May 2014
Extract
In 1898, the year before his death, the German missionary Ernst Faber reflected on his forty-year career in China. The account of his early missions work was suffused with a tone of failure and disappointment. He wrote openly about his difficulties in adjusting to the climate and environment of southern China, the diminutive numbers of converts to Christianity, his frustrations with learning Mandarin and the local dialects used in Guangdong, and the overwhelming feeling of loneliness that he encountered working in rural parishes.
