Exhibition Collecting China: Missionary Assemblages of a Distant World, 1844–1911 Opens

Thursday, February 26, 2026 at 12:00pm
Wesleyan Library, Lower Level Corridor, 252 Church Street, Middletown, Connecticut

Free and open to the public.

In 1835, just four years after the University’s founding, the Missionary Lyceum student group at Wesleyan resolved that “at some favorable point in China” a Methodist mission be established there. That “favorable point” came soon enough in the 1840s, when opium and gunboats forced China’s doors wide open. Under protections freshly codified by unequal treaties, Wesleyan graduates began arriving along Chinese shores, convinced of a calling to bring forth social and spiritual transformation. As Methodist missionaries, they founded schools, opened medical clinics, and preached the gospel of Christ across cities and provinces. And to generate public interest in and sustain funds for their work, they also sent home thousands of objects that gave shape to how Americans imagined China from afar.

The exhibition Collecting China: Missionary Assemblages of a Distant World, 1844–1911 invites viewers to encounter China as a 19th-century visitor might have in the long-defunct Wesleyan Museum of Natural History (1871–1957), a space once filled with cultural and natural curiosities that University graduates gathered from around the globe. After the museum’s closure, its materials were dispersed across various locations on- and off-campus and remain in storage cabinets to this day. Collecting China presents only a fraction of what missionary alumni had shipped back from the East. From chopsticks and ladies’ shoes to herbal specimens and a brick off the Great Wall, most of the objects displayed are appearing publicly for the first time in over a century. With their return to view, Collecting China revisits Wesleyan’s long but little-known history of engagement with East Asia and places questions of collecting and archival practices at its center. Through material assemblages, missionary alumni of the 19th century helped produce a knowable “China” that became the basis upon which evangelical Christianity and Western modernity worked to reform, relay, and remake a world across the Pacific.

The exhibition was curated by Sida Chu ’26 and Nancy Li ’28 as part of a tutorial in curatorial practice led by Assistant Director of Exhibitions and Assistant Curator of Education Rosemary Lennox and Associate Director and Curator of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee ’00. Exhibition support provided by the College of East Asian Studies.

Exhibition on display through Monday, August 31, 2026.