The London Missionary Society in Colonial Singapore

By Dr Sandra Hudd

Introduction

It did not take long for the London Missionary Society (LMS ) to arrive in Singapore after Stamford Raffles of the British East India Company signed a treaty with Sultan Hussein Mahmud Shah on 6 February 1819 to establish a trading post on the island. The first missionary arrived a few months later, on 18 October 1819. Samuel Milton set up a mission house on Bras Basah Road and was subsequently joined in 1822 by Claudius Henry Thomsen, who had transferred from the mission in Malacca.

Raffles had already had contact with the LMS missionaries in Malacca, describing Reverend William Milne as “a liberal, well-informed, excellent man”.¹ He thought less of several other missionaries he had met there and, presumably questioning their effectiveness, wrote, “Had I been a Missionary myself I think I could have evangelised the whole island by this time”.² He was nonetheless interested in their printing presses, seeing the potential of the presses for secular use. He engaged the LMS missionaries in Singapore to print his first proclamations – 50 copies in English and 50 copies in Malay. Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, who had been Raffles’ Malay teacher, secretary and interpreter, was now working with the missionaries and described the laborious process and the pressure they were under:

For two days I sat making types… At last at three o’clock in the morning all was finished, for the same morning, which was the first day of the new year, they wanted to publish the laws. Work went on and on and the perspiration poured off us. Eyes drooped and stomachs felt the pangs of hunger, all because the task had to be finished that night. For Mr. Raffles had insisted that it be ready by the next morning. And the next morning the notices were posted in every quarter of the town.³

By February 1823, Thomsen had written to London noting that “we are now printing in English & Malay & have a small Type-Foundery & are doing bookbinding. Government has been pleased to honour our little Press… with printing all public Documents both in English and Malay”.⁴

In this early entanglement of Empire and religion, I would like to explore the motivations of these missionary printers, the challenges they faced and their contributions to early printing in Singapore. What brought them from Britain to the other side of the world? And what did they achieve?

On a Mission

The last years of the 18th century saw a surge of evangelical Protestant revival in Britain. This was triggered by a range of complex social and economic changes, which included the rise of a comfortable middle class with money to spend on charity and good works; an aspiring working class with a desire for self-improvement through adult education; and the expansion of commerce and influence abroad, largely through the growing markets of the British East India Company.

The successful expeditions of Captain James Cook to the Pacific added to this sense of economic expansion at home and abroad, and, for Christian evangelists, an optimism about the possibilities of spreading the gospel to far-flung lands – particularly urgent for those who believed in a forthcoming millennium when Christ would return to earth and all would be judged. Several missionary societies, set up to send forth Christian missionaries, were formed within a few years of one another – the Baptist Missionary Society in 1792, the London Missionary Society in 1795, the Church Missionary Society in 1799 and the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society in 1813.⁵

The public meeting held in September 1795 to formally establish the LMS attracted such fanfare that many people started arriving an hour before the appointed time, and thousands more had to be turned away.⁶ Most were from non-conformist or dissenting churches, believing in a simple style of worship based on the scriptures. They had come to hear about plans to spread Christianity “among heathen and other unenlightened nations”.⁷

It is easy to read these words today as evidence of a sense of racial or cultural superiority. Yet we need to understand them through the evangelical prism of the time, bound up with the belief of salvation – that is, only those who believed in Christ could be “saved” and go to Heaven. Thus the duty of the evangelical Christian was to spread the gospel widely across nations, so that as many souls as possible might be saved. As one preacher put it, “Ye were once pagans, living in cruel and abominable idolatry. The servants of Jesus came from other lands… And ought you not… to send messengers to the nations which are in like conditions to yourselves of old”.⁸

Another preached that:

Possessing, as they do, the same feelings of nature as ourselves, the same moral wants, the same faculties of improvement, the same dread of misery, the same desire of happiness, and the same capacity of enjoyment, ought we not zealously to endeavour that they may also become partakers of like precious faith with us, and sharers in the same common salvation.⁹

While some individuals might have felt themselves racially superior, the evangelical doctrine was egalitarian in the belief that the gospel could save all who embraced it. Brian Stanley has argued that:

For most of the nineteenth century, if the missionary movement can be accused of racism, the racism was of a “soft” kind. It was based, not on any notion of permanent biological inequality between races, but on obstinately deep-rooted convictions about differences between “civilized” and “uncivilized” peoples, which were explained in terms of a causal connection between Christianity and the regenerative process of “civilization”.¹⁰

Translating scripture into local languages was considered crucial and for this they needed printing presses and people skilled enough to operate them. Volunteers came forward and the first mission was despatched in late 1796 to Tahiti. Although this was not a success,¹¹ further missions were sent to Africa and the West Indies, with China – and its huge population – viewed as the big prize.

A mission to China had been considered at the very first meeting of the Society. Trade with China was burgeoning during this period, with tea in high demand. In London, shops were selling Chinese silk, porcelain, lacquerware and furniture, yet it was an ambivalent relationship: David Porter has suggested that the 18th-century consumer was infatuated with Chinese and Chinese-styled goods, “even as they were amused, perplexed, or troubled by the alien aesthetic sensibility these goods embodied”, finding these Chinese objects and aesthetic ideas “at once alluring and repulsive, charming and grotesque, strange and strangely familiar”.¹²

This was also a time when Britain made new efforts to make official diplomatic connections with China – Lord Macartney had undertaken his embassy to the imperial court in China from 1793 to 1794.¹³ The Emperor’s rejection of his gifts and requests to permanently station a British ambassador in Peking, and thus open up Chinese ports to British trade, reinforced views of the differences between East and West. It also meant, as Ross Forman has argued, that China was “one place where Britain was forced to recognise… the agency of a people and culture that they were actively trying to control, classify, or otherwise contain”.¹⁴

The LMS founders were keen to get to China to preach the gospel but, besides the practicalities of getting missionaries there, it was difficult to find dictionaries or teachers of Chinese languages. William Milne, who would eventually be sent to China and then Malacca, wrote that “there were no helps in English, to assist in the acquisition of the Chinese language – England knew, and cared little about China, beyond its commerce”.¹⁵

Nonetheless, their first missionary to China, Robert Morrison, arrived in 1807, but the imperial restrictions on foreigners meant that he was limited to Canton (now Guangzhou) in the trading season and to Macao at other times. It was forbidden to teach Chinese languages to foreigners and by the time the second missionary, William Milne, arrived in 1813, an imperial edict had made it a capital offence to publish Christian texts in Chinese. Clear that the mission could not expand beyond Morrison’s presence, a decision was made for Milne to explore other locations in the region, where a base could be established while waiting for China to open up to foreign missions.

Malacca was chosen because it had a sizeable Chinese population and was along a busy trade route. Milne relocated there, together with printer Liang A-Fa, and was joined shortly after by Claudius Henry Thomsen, who concentrated on Malay, and his language tutor, Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir. This was a more successful enterprise: they established small schools, procured land for what was to become the Anglo-Chinese College and, by the end of 1820, had produced some 140,000 books and periodicals in Chinese, and over 20,000 items in Malay.¹⁶ In 1819, bases were also established in Penang, Singapore and Batavia (now Jakarta) – together with Malacca and their small China presence, they formed the Ultra-Ganges Mission.

The Singapore mission started well. Milton concentrated on translations into the Chinese and Siamese languages, while Thomsen focused on the Malay and Bugis languages. They were sufficiently well-regarded that Raffles was keen for the Society’s successful Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca to move to Singapore as part of his planned Singapore Institution, with the missionaries taking key teaching roles. Despite the laying of the foundation stone in 1823, the transfer of the College did not materialise. Nonetheless, the arrival of more printing presses in 1822 enabled Milton and Thomsen to begin printing the evangelical texts that they had been translating, as well as undertake printing for commercial firms and the government as a way of earning income for the mission. In this way, Mission Press became the printer for Singapore’s first newspaper, the Singapore Chronicle, from 1824 to 1830.¹⁷

The missionaries handed out their Christian tracts during rounds of house visits in the town and the interior of the island, with “each perambulation taking up to 6 to 8 weeks and renewed at uncertain intervals of 3 or 4 months”.¹⁸ The tracts were also distributed on ships in the harbour, partly in the hope that some would ultimately reach China. The 1830 report of the Singapore Christian Union (composed mainly of the LMS missionaries and the Anglican chaplain) described how they distributed 60 Bibles, 200 testaments and 4,000 tracts on board junks and small boats.¹⁹

There were ups and downs. Printing work in Singapore was disrupted for some years when an LMS delegation “discharged” Milton in 1825 – he had gotten carried away with grandiose schemes, offended the Resident, and his colleagues in Malacca thought him “insane” – leaving the mission without a Chinese focus for a period of more than 10 years. Another LMS delegation visited the next year and this time concluded that Thomsen was someone “destitute of missionary talent”, who had concentrated on his own commercial interests, leading to “the most complete inactivity as to all missionary duties”.²⁰ He was included in a list of “troublemakers” for the Society, described as “perpetual blisters” that the Society “seem(ed) destined to carry”.²¹

The LMS directors in London resolved at this point to abandon a permanent mission in Singapore, but subsequently rescinded the decision. Thomsen remained and produced some key works during this period, including a Malay translation of the Sermon on the Mount and the English-Malay-Bugis Vocabulary. Nonetheless, he left in 1834 after some seemingly unfounded rumours that he had taken up with local women. He maintained that he owned the presses and some of the land, and sold them to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), controversially leaving the LMS without an effective printing set-up.²² The mission was largely vacant until January 1838, except for two short periods of occupation by Samuel Wolfe.²³

The ABCFM ran the press until 1843, doing some printing for the LMS , particularly after the arrival of further, more capable members of the LMS mission: the Stronach brothers in 1838; Benjamin Keasberry in 1839 (to whom they loaned a press); and Samuel Dyer, who transferred from Malacca in 1842. When China at last “opened up” to foreigners after the First Opium War, the Board closed its mission in Singapore and the press and land were given back to the LMS . The “wait for China” was over.

By 1847, the LMS had also formally closed its mission in Singapore. Keasberry elected to remain and continue his work, with some limited assistance from the London headquarters, running a successful school for Malay boys, preaching in his Malay chapel and continuing translating and printing. He died in 1875 and the presses were sold commercially, thus ending any lingering LMS presence in Singapore.

There are some physical reminders in Singapore today of the LMS presence: Prinsep Street Presbyterian Church (where Keasberry had his Malay Chapel, now a National Monument); Glory Presbyterian Church, formerly the Bukit Timah church established by Keasberry; St Margaret’s School, which had its beginnings in Maria Dyer’s school for Chinese girls; and Zion Road, named for Keasberry’s Mount Zion mission station. To consider the intangible impacts of their time in Singapore and the region, it is useful to first look at the practical challenges they faced and how they approached their mission, before assessing their legacy.

Celebrity and Reality

By the 1840s, LMS meetings in London were still attracting large crowds of supporters, sometimes up to 4,000 to 5,000.²⁴ Susan Thorne has described the May missionary meetings as “a signal event in the Congregational social calendar, equivalent perhaps to the London season itself”.²⁵ Such public missionary meetings, held annually or biannually throughout Britain, heard reports from the foreign missions and were often addressed by missionaries themselves, who had completed their mission or returned on leave.

Thorne notes that they returned “as conquering heroes of an unchartered heathen wilderness and were greeted by receptions not unlike those that would be accorded the military heroes and monarchs later in the century”.²⁶ David Livingstone famously returned from Africa in 1856 to a celebrity reception, but missionaries such as Robert Morrison also undertook the lecture circuit. Morrison was even presented to the King in 1824, with Morrison giving the monarch a copy of his Chinese translation of the Bible and a map of Peking.²⁷

This emphasis on the heroic missionary overcoming trials in faraway lands has been described as “muscular Christianity”, a term first coined in 1857 to describe the ideal male missionary attributes of Christian virtue, physical prowess and morality.²⁸ As Anna Johnston has noted, “muscular Christianity… [provided] a masculine complement to the evangelical view of women’s innate piety: it provided men with equal opportunity for religious sanctity”.²⁹ The LMS had initially only recruited single men. Emily Mantekelow has suggested that this was for a range of reasons: “pre-embarkation marriage was extremely costly; including women in a potentially dangerous enterprise threatened the propriety of a respectable institution; and women and families were burdensome, requiring expensive and inconvenient material and physical concessions… while at the same time potentially distracting male missionaries from their spiritual work”.³⁰

There were also concerns about their financial support if they were widowed, or their children orphaned. Far better to send out single men who could potentially marry local converts. Soon, though, it was resolved that married men and their wives would be accepted, as the presence of women and children at the mission could act as a model of Christian domesticity, provide a means of outreach to local women and act as a counter to the temptations of illicit sexual liaisons.³¹ As Silvester Horne, in his history of the LMS , wrote, “the spectacle of a true Christian home [is] 26 Thorne, 1999, p. 64. 27 Townsend, W. J. (1888). Robert Morrison: The pioneer of Chinese missions (pp. 113–115, 117–120). London: S. W. Partridge & Co. (Not available in NLB holdings) 28 Johnston, 2003, p. 40. 29 Johnston, 2003, p. 41. 30 Manktelow, E. J.. (2013). Missionary families: Race, gender and generation on the spiritual frontier (p. 25). Manchester: Manchester University Press. (Not available in NLB holdings) 31 Manktelow, the most powerful, concrete argument of Christianity, and the most easy of appreciation by the common people”.³²

It was understood that the wifely role would also include running schools, taking in orphans and boarders and organising prayer meetings and Bible classes – that is, acting as an unpaid helpmate. The 1811 LMS Candidates Papers stated that the qualities of the wives would be taken into consideration and that, although the wife’s role would primarily be to take care of the household, “the time which can be spared from domestic affairs, shall be devoted to Missionary Purposes, more especially among the female heathen and their children, both in promoting their civilisation… and their religious instruction”.³³

The exciting picture painted of missionary life abroad omitted the practical challenges of life in the foreign missions. John Darch, writing about the hardships of life in the tropics for missionaries, has argued that isolation and loneliness “should be seen as the key determining factor underpinning, and to a large extent exacerbating, all the other hardships of missionary life”.³⁴ Life in Singapore was not as isolated as that of missionaries in the remote areas of Africa or the Pacific – by 1823, Raffles had written that Singapore “has become a great Emporium” and “a fine field for European speculation,”³⁵ and by the following year the population was already over 10,000.³⁶

Nonetheless, the settlement in the early years was small and not without some dangers, since “the flipside to the successful emporium was an underbelly of piracy, injustice and… secret societies, vice and opium”.³⁷ There is no suggestion that it was in this sense inherently dangerous for the LMS missionaries – unlike for the first resident Catholic priest, Father Albrand, who arrived in Singapore in 1833. His attempts to convert Chinese workers led to him being regarded by the secret societies as the “Head of the Devil” – his catechist was followed daily and converts were threatened with having their clothes removed and pigtails cut off.³⁸

Still, Singapore was a long way from England and life was very different. Europeans were vastly outnumbered by the Chinese, Malay, Indian, Bugis and other inhabitants, and learning their languages to a standard where translations of texts could be done was a major undertaking. Letters took months to send and receive, and the long delays in receiving approvals, directions and support from the LMS directors in London often caused additional stress. Samuel Milton wrote despairingly of his “great distress” that he had only received one letter from the directors in three years.³⁹ The East India Company tolerated missionaries as long as they did not interfere with trade, and realised that they could be useful in providing services such as schools that the Company did not want to fund itself.

Yet, while they were accepted in British colonial society, it was a very small community, and that of the missionaries even smaller – getting along on a personal level was crucial but sometimes difficult, and differences in opinion were at times challenging, as in the Malacca mission where some felt that there was an over-emphasis on Chinese translations and printing at the expense of Malay. Overall, it seems likely that all of the missionaries felt some measure of linguistic and cultural isolation. Johnston has suggested that missionary figures were “anomalous in a colonial environment” and “always conscious of their liminality”.⁴⁰

Along with this, there was the overarching and ongoing task of seeking converts. In Singapore, the missionaries handed out their Christian texts free-of- charge and proselytised where they could. They were consistently critical and disparaging of what they regarded as the veneration of idols in temples, but there were no instances of attempting to remove or damage them, unlike some other mission fields such as the Pacific. There, as Ann Colley has noted:

The early missionary literature is replete with passages relishing the conflagration of maraes (idol temples), the driving of large herds of pigs into sacred enclosures, the hanging of gods disrobed of their apparel, the public burning of idols, the drowning of ritual mats, the throwing of the gods made of coral into the sea, and the forced eating of food thought to contain the spirit of a god.⁴¹

Instead, Morrison and Milne, in particular, tried to approach mission through the prism of cultural exchange – opening schools on auspicious days, writing in the style of Confucian “morality books” and including Christian themes in lessons on Confucian ethics.⁴² Milne often preached in Chinese temples: on a visit to Penang in 1816, he wrote in his diary that he “went to the temple of the goddess Kwan-Yin, whither a great number of Chinese followed. I stood up on the altar, addressed them, and gave away many tracts”.⁴³

The Singapore missionaries were generally politely tolerated in the Chinese and Malay communities, with tracts being accepted and at times discussed. It seems likely, though, that at least to some extent, they were also regarded as strange beings.⁴⁴ When the Anglican church was being built in 1838, there were rumours that trespassers were being killed and their heads put into a hole in the church to feed the devils that lived there.⁴⁵ In the Malay community, Thomsen found it hard to retain pupils and believed that this was because the Sultan’s men claimed that the children were being taught English so that they could be enslaved and taken to England.⁴⁶

Despite the missionary efforts, there were no conversions in the early years. Baptisms were likely to have been of babies born to existing Christians – three from 1826 to 1830, four from 1836 to 1840 and five from 1841 to 1845.⁴⁷ Thorne, noting that the 1830s and 1840s were the high point of LMS popularity in Britain, has commented on the paradox that foreign missions enjoyed their greatest metropolitan support during their* least* successful period in the field.⁴⁸

Along with the stresses of continuing their work without seeing the conversions they sought, premature death, illness and incapacity were always risks. In Alexander Wylie’s Memorials of Protestant Missionaries to the Chinese, he lists the causes of violent deaths as being by: the Battak cannibals in Sumatra; pirates on the way from Shanghai to Ningpo; pirates on the Min river; (two) by the neen fei rebels in Shantung; and the natives in Corea.⁴⁹ Others died by a fall off a horse in Canton during a typhoon; a fall through a bridge while on horseback into a canal in Ningpo; drowned in the river Menam in Siam; drowned in a wreck off the coast of China; died during a typhoon on the passage to Hong Kong; and by the capsizing of a schooner between Canton and Hong Kong. Eight others died of natural causes while on board ships.

For wives, childbirth was another potential danger. On the voyage from Macao to Malacca in 1814, Rachel Milne gave birth to premature twins. There was no doctor on board the ship and they had no servant with them (to save money). She suffered from a severe fever after birth, but still had to nurse the twins and care for her other child.⁵⁰

By 1818, the LMS directors had introduced a series of resolutions consolidating and defining the status of missionaries’ wives, particularly what would happen to them and their children in the event of their husbands’ deaths. Given that the women were not considered missionaries in their own right, it is surprising that the directors had resolved that the engagement was not dissolved upon the death of a husband, rather “[the wife would] be expected to remain at her station, or exert herself according to her ability in the maintenance of her self and family, and generally to promote the objects of the mission”.⁵¹

These widows had to apply to leave the mission, were given one year’s “frugal maintenance”, and had to take measures to “procure a subsistence”. Orphans were not to be sent back to Europe unless friends had agreed to cover their costs. Manktelow has argued that this reflected the ongoing ambivalence in the LMS toward women in mission and their fear that women and children would be a drain on resources. Public support nonetheless eventually led to the establishment of a Widows and Orphans Fund in 1824.⁵²

In these difficult circumstances, missionary wives juggled their domestic and (unpaid) mission roles, taking on tasks such as running small schools for children, often in their own homes. In Singapore, various schools were started by LMS missionary wives. Mrs Thomsen, for example, ran a school for Malay girls in 1823. It offered both day classes and boarding, and classes in reading, writing, arithmetic and sewing.⁵³ Most schools, though, were short-lived, failing for a range of reasons, including language difficulties and, no doubt as Christine Doran has surmised (and which could apply to both genders and to their work generally), “the missionaries were intruders in a cultural milieu they did not fully comprehend”.⁵⁴

While reports from male missionaries often contained brief mentions of the number of children attending the schools, the history of LMS missions has been based on reports of male missionaries to male directors, resulting in the wives’ contributions being largely overlooked. Doran has noted the absence of women from the accounts of the Strait Settlement missions, and argued that “missionary women have been stranded in something of an historiographical lacuna”.⁵⁵ Interestingly, this lack of recognition has been countered to some extent today in Singapore with the inclusion of Maria Dyer in the Singapore Women’s Hall of Fame.⁵⁶

Maria came to Singapore in 1842 with her missionary husband Samuel Dyer, and started a small day and boarding school for Chinese girls. When her husband died the next year and she left Singapore, the school could easily have closed like so many others. In this case, the school was taken over by the Society for the Promotion of Female Education in China, India and the East and evolved into St Margaret’s School, which still exists today.

Printing Challenges

Translation of Christian texts into local languages as well as printing and distributing texts were at the core of the LMS approach to mission. Today this seems a simple matter but in the early 1800s, it was an enormous challenge. The LMS missionaries first had to learn the languages; Milne, perhaps exasperated, wrote: “To acquire the Chinese is a work for men with bodies of brass, lungs of steel, heads of oak, hands of spring-steel, eyes of eagles, hearts of apostles, memories of angels, and lives of Methuselah!”⁵⁷

Thomsen’s Malay tutor was clearly frustrated with his pupil who insisted that he knew best how to speak Malay, with Abdullah writing that “he does not want to learn the language but to ruin it”, and “people quickly recognise the work done by Mr Thomsen, the words only being in Malay, the construction in English which does not resemble Malay style”.⁵⁸ They also often published in romanised Malay which was difficult for many Malays to read, as they were used to Jawi, an Arabic language adapted for use in writing Malay. Added to this were the difficulties inherent in translating some Christian concepts, such as the Holy Spirit and Son of God, into other languages.⁵⁹

Printing presses and types had to be procured or made by hand – which was no easy task. Printing was done by xylography (carved wooden blocks), letterpress or lithography but acquiring the right equipment was a continual challenge, often requiring repeated requests to London. The press used for the printing of Raffles’ proclamations in 1823 was a small hand press that Thomsen brought from Penang – his report to the directors told them of its successful use and included the plea, “the little travelling Press is merely provided with a small quantity of Malay types & old Engl. Types barely enough to set up 4 pages smo [sic] which will be nearly worn out in 12 months – regular Bookprinting must be deferred ’till the Directors supply our wants”.⁶⁰

It also meant that the missionaries had to be resourceful and innovative. Samuel Dyer, who worked in Malacca, Penang and Singapore, pioneered the printing of Chinese characters by metallic types, rather than xylography. This was a major undertaking. He first prepared a list of the most common characters, then a list of how many would be needed for missionary printing, and finally, through trial and error, determined the best way to make the metal types, eventually using punches and matrices. He is acknowledged as being the first to create a Chinese font of useful cast type.⁶¹ Despite these challenges, it is estimated that between 1810 and 1836, the combined output of the Ultra-Ganges Mission was 751,763 books and tracts (of which 66,000 were printed in Singapore) – almost eight million pages.⁶²

Yet, even when material was successfully printed, was it read? In early colonial Singapore, literacy levels were low and it is unknown just how many of the printed tracts, books and magazines could be read or were read. Low literacy levels, problems with translation, the use of romanised Malay – all of these factors added to difficulties. Many of the works were fragile, with paper covers and held together by cotton thread. They were also free until Keasberry later insisted on distributing them only to those who were literate. The writer of a letter published in the Singapore Chronicle in 1830 complained that “I occasionally observe these said Tracts used for the purpose of protecting the Fruit on the Vines in some of the Chinamen’s gardens”.⁶³

It is also possible that some were taken for subsequent sale – Thomas Beighton in Penang complained that he sometimes met his own books for sale at the door of the mission, and Milne discovered that a Catholic missionary was gathering up his books and burning them.⁶⁴ Some could have also been read with interest. Beighton had developed a friendship with Sultan Ahmad of Kedah and gave him a copy of the New Testament, writing that the sultan had “so far sanctioned it as to say that part was received by the Islams but not the whole”.⁶⁵ Similarly, Walter Medhurst was asked by the Sultan of Trengganu to explain “what our books said about the judgement day and the world to come”.⁶⁶ Significantly, several students at Keasberry’s boarding school were members of the Johore Royal family, including Abu Bakar, who later became the Sultan of Johore.

Printing Legacies, Imagined Communities

There had been some isolated early printing in the region before the arrival of the LMS. In 1545, the Catholic priest Francis Xavier translated several prayers and commandments into Malay in Malacca.⁶⁷ Later, in 1629, the Dutch East India Company financed a Malay translation of the Bible.⁶⁸ It is the LMS, however, that has been credited with having introduced mass communication to Peninsula Malaya and Singapore through its book and journal publishing, and through its dictionaries and school texts that were used long after its formal demise in Singapore.⁶⁹ In the early period, there were key achievements, particularly from the Malacca mission.

The Chinese Monthly Magazine (1815–21) was the first Chinese magazine produced in Malaya and, besides evangelical material, contained articles on general knowledge and science. It has also been credited with being the beginning of modern journalism in China as it inspired writers there.⁷⁰ The Indo-Chinese Gleaner (1817–21) was the first completely Western periodical produced in the peninsular, and included “miscellaneous notices relative to the philosophy, mythology, history, and literature of the Indo-Chinese nations; drawn chiefly from the native languages”.⁷¹ Milne and Morrison’s 1823 translation of the Bible into Chinese was the first in Southeast Asia and the second anywhere.⁷² In Singapore, Thomsen produced Bustan Arifin from 1821 to 1822, the first Malay magazine to be published in the peninsula, and he has been described as “a forgotten pioneer of Bugis translated works”.⁷³

Significantly, too, although printing in Jawi had been done earlier by Medhurst in Batavia, Keasberry perfected the technique of lithographic printing in Jawi. Among these were Keasberry’s magazine, the Cermin Mata (The Eye-Glass), “crafted in beautifully decorated multi-coloured lithography”, and Abdullah’s books, considered to be the first printed works that could be comfortably read by literate Malays.⁷⁴ This has been described as a major initiative in Malay publishing. Ian Proudfoot has been critical of earlier missionary efforts that he considered as difficult for Malay readers to read or understand, being often printed “in clumsy jawi typefaces” or “in an alien Roman script”, and in “sometimes nonsensical Malay idiom”. In contrast, he admired Keasberry’s works as “beautifully decorated multicoloured lithographs, giving a creditable imitation of the rubrication and illumination found in superior manuscripts”.⁷⁵

Yet, Proudfoot also contrasted these printed works, designed for individual reading, with the practice of the Quran schools where texts were read aloud. He described this transition from recitation to individual silent reading as “the silencing of texts”, so that printing turned texts into products.⁷⁶ He argued that the publication of material in Malay and the fact that many missionary works were printed in roman script, was “able to influence Malay literate culture, drawing it in the direction of the West”, so that “the new printing technology… had, in the Muslim world, an impact comparable to that of Gutenberg’s typography in the West”.⁷⁷

Benedict Anderson famously proposed that nations are a social construct, that they are “imagined communities”.⁷⁸ He argued that this was historically brought about by the introduction of the printing press, which enabled the circulation of many copies of books and other printed works at an affordable cost. As newspapers were developed and widely disseminated, people read the same information and in the process, came to think of themselves as part of a broader shared community. I suggest that this is part of the larger significance of the introduction of the printing press into the region by the LMS. As missionaries, they would have liked to have seen an “imagined” Christian community – but that was not to be. Yet perhaps they did help to bring about a more literate community with new ideas of the larger world, and one that could begin to think of “Singapore”, and the region, and its place in that world.

Agents of Empire?

Historians are still debating the role of missionaries in the British Empire: were they insensitive agents of empire, imposing their views of civilisation, or did they improve people’s lives with their values, schools and medical programmes – or both?⁷⁹ I argue that the LMS missionaries in the Straits Settlements were not overtly imperialistic, but it is fair to say that, through their evangelical efforts, and by undertaking government and commercial printing, they helped to enforce colonial rule and ideas of modernity.

Interestingly, there has been a similar debate about Abdullah, who was Muslim but worked closely with Raffles and then the LMS missionaries (as well as Alfred North of the ABCFM). He admired western technology such as the camera and wrote favourably of Raffles and Farquhar – although neither mentioned him in print or in their letters⁸⁰ – and neither Milne nor Thomsen referred to Abdullah by name in their reports to the directors.⁸¹ Abdullah has been described as both the “Father of Malay literature” and as a mouthpiece for the British, invoking, as Amin Sweeney put it, “the double-headed formula of Father vs Stooge”.⁸²

John Roxborogh has argued for a balanced evaluation of the LMS in the region, which neither undervalues nor overestimates their work. He noted that it was the missionaries who published Abdullah’s writings, who recorded aspects of local religious practice and culture that might otherwise have been lost, and argued that “if some missionaries were not especially competent, others like Milne and Keasberry were able and sensitive”.⁸³

Amid this debate, what is clear is that the LMS missionaries were an important part of the early history of colonial Singapore and the region, and made a significant contribution to early printing in the Straits Settlements.

About the Author
Dr Sandra Hudd is a University Associate at the School of Humanities, University of Tasmania. In 2016, she published a book on Chijmes called The Site of the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus in Singapore: Entwined Histories of a Colonial Convent and a Nation, 1819–2015. Her research focus is Southeast Asia, particularly Singapore. She has also previously worked as a humanitarian aid worker in Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand and Kosovo.