HONSINGER, Welthy. Beyond the Moon Gate. Being a Diary of ten years in the interior of the Middle Kingdom. New York and Cincinnati: The Abingdon Press. [1925].
8vo. Publisher’s cloth-backed illustrated boards depicting a Moon Gate and a traditional Chinese garden, lettered in gilt to upper and spine; pp. 176, with 10 black-and-white photographic plates including a frontispiece; corners a little bumped and slight pushing to spine ends; very good; contemporary ownership inscription of ‘E. [?] Bayard’.
First edition, second impression, scarce in commerce; a vivid memoir of Welthy Honsinger’s years as a missionary and educator in China, where she arrived as a young woman in 1906.
Hosinger was an American educationalist and missionary. Originally intending to become an opera singer, she abandoned that ambition after hearing a missionary speak at her college, and sailed to China in 1906. She became the headmistress of the Bao Lin School in Nanchang, where she remained until 1917. After choosing a local Chinese woman to succeed her, she was dismissed by the (Methodist) Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society.
Her memoir offers an intimate and sympathetic portrait of life in China at a period of profound political and social change. Hosinger opens her diary in Shanghai where she observes ‘the city was unmistakably Western’, noting in particular the shops, food, and luxury of the city. However, her account of Jiujiang [Nine Rivers] presents a markedly different experience, rooted in local customs, relationships and traditions. Through these contrasting impressions, Hosinger captures a China negotiating the legacies of the imperial era alongside the changes brought by the establishment of the Republic.
Hosinger’s missionary and educational work extended beyond China. She later spent many years in India, where she established charitable and educational initiatives including the Literacy House in Lucknow. Before Gandhi passed away, he urged her to help improve literacy rates in the rural villages of India.
SKU: 2121790