Since I returned from Sweden a few weeks ago, I've been very busy. On the one hand, I'm taking an intensive course in second-year Japanese. The precious little free time that such an undertaking leaves me has mostly been spent working with the records I was able to access from the old Swedish mission stations in Kashgar, Yarkand, and Yengisar. In Stockholm and Lund, I found a surprising wealth of information on the social and economic history of the Tarim Basin, 1890s-1930s, which I would have been wholly unable to access if not for a rather masterfully-taught year-long course in Swedish and the kindness of the wonderful people who work in Swedish archives. More on that later.
I was just reading James Gleick's piece in The New York Times about digitization of documents and the fetishization of their physical form. I'm personally a partisan of digitization: Now that money is getting tighter all across the academic world, being able to at least assess the availability of sources before risking a field visit saves time and money. It's better for the documents, which deteriorate when handled, and it helps libraries save on storage space. It's good for research, as it allows students to train with documents earlier and to plan their dissertations better. The main drawback, to my mind, is the potential for digitization to be an opportunity for censorship. Digitization is a kind of canon-formation.
Other people, as Gleick notes, lament the loss of "serendipity," which I take to mean the satisfying feeling that comes from accidental discovery, that one gets in the archives. I'm sympathetic: I remember, when I was quite small, experimentally prising open a picture frame containing my great-grandfather's World War One service record and "discovering" a stack of documents wedged behind it that no one had noticed in decades. The same feeling was revived earlier this summer, when I kept coming across interesting ephemera and misplaced sources for local history in bundles labeled "miscellaneous documents." Yet, digitization is not the enemy of serendipity.
Gleick's article led me to a little bit of luck where he links to Europeana.eu, a massive pan-European digitization effort. Whenever I run across a new digital collection, I reflexively try a series of keywords: Uyghur, Uighur, Uygur, Uigur, Xinjiang, Sinkiang, etc. Usually, the first one is "Turkistan."
In this case, "Turkistan" led me to a photograph, taken in Ghulja, of the Scheut missionaries, the members of the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, based in Scheut, Belgium, who went to minister to the Ili Catholics at the turn of the last century. The story goes that a group of Catholic converts was moved on from Gansu in the early nineteenth century, around 1814, and exiled to Ili, where they soon lost all contact with the Catholic Church and, presumably, experienced the tumultuous years of the Muslim rebellions, of Russian rule, and Qing reorganization from a unique and interesting perspective. The Ili Catholics show up here and there both in local gazetteers and in Euro-American travel writing, and I believe it was a British officer who first did them the kindness of writing to the Holy See about their long-lost flock.
The lives and times of the unfortunate missionaries sent thither by the Scheut Fathers are documented by Gorissen in his piece, "The most unfruitful mission in the world: CICM fathers Frans and Jozef Hoogers in Xinjiang: 1895-1922," published in The history of the relations between the Low Countires and Chinese in the Qing era (1644-1911). Gorissen works from mission documents, including a great deal of personal correspondence demonstrating that the missionaries really, really hated living in Ili and wanted to go home. Even Mongolia, also Scheut "territory," was considered a better assignment.
Another article, "清末民初圣母圣心会新疆传教考述（1883-1922年）" by 汤开建 and 马占军 (in 西域研究 2005, No. 2), which draws extensively on Gorissen and other European scholarship, provides a better historical overview of the mission with attention to the relevant Chinese sources. It also includes handy charts.
The Scheut mission archives contain just some of the remarkably range of European-language primary source materials still available for the study of Xinjiang history. When we think of missionaries in Xinjiang, we think of French and Cable, of George Hunter (the "Apostle of Turkestan"), and, of course, of the long-standing Swedish mission. Yet, we forget the Catholic missionaries, including the wayward Father Hendricks, and the ephemeral Norwegian mission in Ghulja. There are further works available in German that people don't read much, and I dare say there is a great deal to be read in Armenian. With the exception of the latter, taking advantage of such sources in French, Flemish, etc., would require much less of a time investment than slogging through Russian and Japanese and provide, in some cases, a much richer record and the perspective of individuals more interested in the price of grain and the rituals of life than in the raw geopolitics of the Great Game. What's more, these documents are located in friendly archives in countries that want to make them available.
