Collecting China

Exhibition Overview

In 1835, just four years after the founding of Wesleyan University, the Missionary Lyceum student group resolved that, “at some favorable point in China,” a Methodist mission should be established. That “favorable point” came 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 their work and raise funds to sustain their mission, they sent thousands of objects home to the United States to give shape to American audiences about the idea of China from afar.

Originally part of the Wesleyan Museum of Natural History (1871–1957), these objects provide the basis for the exhibition Collecting China: Missionary Assemblages of a Distant World, 1844–1911. The exhibition invites viewers to encounter an imagined China as a 19th-century American audience might have, as well as to probe the limits of how such collecting and archival practices create meaning. After Wesleyan’s Museum of Natural History closed, its collections—once filled with cultural and natural curiosities gathered from around the globe—were dispersed across various holdings on- and off-campus. With this exhibition, a fraction of this collection is reassembled, with many of these objects being presented for the first time in over a century. Only a fraction of what missionary alumni shipped back from the East is on view—including chopsticks and ladies’ shoes to herbal specimens and a brick from the Great Wall. With their return to view, Collecting China revisits Wesleyan’s long but little-known history of engagement with East Asia, exploring how these material assemblages, and the 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. This exhibition was previously displayed earlier this year in Olin Library.

Image: Specimen bottles of Chinese imports and exports. Photo by Laura Nadelberg. Mystic Seaport Museum.