The Prayer Book in Nineteenth-Century China

Ever since the race to produce the first complete translation of the Bible in Chinese was won by Joannes Lassar (b. 1781) and Joshua Marshman (1768-1837) in 1822, Protestant translations of the scriptures have been a focus of research interest. A spate of recent volumes has demonstrated the continuing debate provoked by the terminologies and personalities of Bible translation in the nineteenth century.1 In contrast, almost nothing has been written on liturgical texts such as the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) in China, and yet this work was translated around the same time as the first single Gospel imprints in the 1810s and 1820s, and appeared in numerous versions across the century.2 Most missionary figures known