The Evangelistic Imperative and the Modernity of Knowledge Production: Tibetology at the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1857–1952

Abstract

The Tibetological research of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (NCBRAS) traces a historical process by which a missionary-led membership drove shifts in Tibetological knowledge production and research paradigms, thereby exposing the constitutive tensions of its modernization. In the nineteenth century, the Society operated under a triad of aims—evangelization, empire, and scholarship—and oriented its output toward the Western world. Its Tibetology bore a marked Orientalist imprint. After 1900, missionary members such as J. H. Edgar and T. Torrance introduced modern disciplinary methods, including anthropology, into Tibetological study, placing the field on a more scientific and professional footing. Yet this transformation was simultaneously shaped by colonial politics and the Christian missionary enterprise. Even as the Society secularized in the 1920s, missionary research continued to serve evangelistic ends. Taken together, the trajectory of NCBRAS Tibetology offers a microcosm of missionary knowledge production in modern China and illuminates the interplay among mission, empire, and scholarship.

1. Introduction

In 1857, in the Shanghai foreign settlement, Western missionaries Elijah Coleman Bridgman, Samuel Wells Williams, and Alexander Wylie met at Freemasons’ Hall and resolved to found the Shanghai Literary and Scientific Society (Y. Wang 2005, p. 11). The establishment of this institution not only served the religious aims of evangelization and the promotion of exploration in the Far East but was also influenced by 19th-century Western colonial expansion and Orientalism. Two years later, the society was recognized by the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and, joining it, took the name the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (NCBRAS); it was later described as ”the oldest cultural institution established in China” (Anonymous 1938). Over NCBRAS’s century-long history, as a major Western institution for knowledge production and circulation in China, its missionary members pursued Tibetology and produced a substantial body of work on Tibetan religious life, ethnicity, and social and cultural practices. Within the Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JNCBRAS), established by the NCBRAS1, topical articles by missionaries or members linked to Christianity constituted 64%, and book reviews 25%. Over time, this Tibetological output not only reinforced the evangelistic imperative within Christian communities but also helped shift Tibetological research paradigms in the modern West.

Research on the NCBRAS has grown substantially, covering the development of the Society and its auxiliary institutions (J. Li 1983; Otness 1988; Y. Wang 2005; Lin 2009; Wu 2015; S. Liu 2020), as well as its contributions to Chinese traditional music (M. Liu 2012), classical literature (Zou 2017), intellectual history (Y. Wang 2016; Y. Wang 2018), Yellow River expeditions (Y. Wang 2018), and surveys in Sichuan (L. Wang 2017). One crucial area, however, has received scant attention: how Tibetological knowledge was produced and disseminated under the leadership of NCBRAS missionary members, and how it shifted with changes in missionary strategy and global context2. Unlike the West China Border Research Society (WCBRS), founded by missionaries in 1922 (Z. Li 2020), NCBRAS’s Tibetological knowledge production underwent a protracted transition—from amateur to professional researchers and from traditional textual collation to the adoption of modern disciplinary approaches such as anthropological fieldwork. Moreover, the WCBRS directly followed NCBRAS’s developmental trajectory: of its six founders, five were NCBRAS members (Y. Wang 2005, p. 157)3.

The transformation of NCBRAS Tibetological knowledge production can be situated within an analytical framework of modernity. Giddens argues that a core manifestation of modernity is a fundamental shift in the nature of authority: traditional authority—exemplified by religion—gives way to expert systems constituted by distinct disciplines (Giddens 1991, p. 195). At the same time, from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, the modern disciplinary system took shape as anthropology, history, and sociology became institutionalized: universities created departments (or at least chairs) bearing these names; national scholarly societies were established bearing these names; and major libraries classified books in systems organized around these names (Wallerstein 1991, pp. 218–19). Accordingly, in this article, “modernity” denotes a shift in knowledge production from amateur pursuit to a professional field, characterized by the deployment of modern disciplinary theories and methods, the formation of expert systems, and the gradual differentiation of the religious, the colonial, and the academic.

This transformation in knowledge production—marked by expert systems and disciplinary institutions—shaped the investigations and research of missionaries in modern China. In the twentieth century, missionaries working on China’s western borderlands affirmed the importance of science and applied methods from botany and archeology, together with modern photographic techniques, to studies of frontier environments, ethnic communities, and histories (Glover et al. 2011). Steven Harrell argues that the motivational narratives of these studies were oriented toward universalism rather than being directly constrained by colonialism (Glover et al. 2011, p. 6). At the same time, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Paul W. Harris emphasize that missionary knowledge production bore traits of cultural imperialism, serving to maintain a Western-dominated cultural order (Schlesinger 1974; Harris 1991)4. However, the “cultural imperialism” framework risks simplifying the relationship between missionaries and Chinese society into a static binary opposition. As Ryan Dunch has argued, this framework overlooks indigenous agency and fails to provide a concrete analysis of the process of cross-cultural exchange (Dunch 2002). Xi Lian notes that many missionaries shifted from disparaging indigenous culture to engaging in cooperative participation, reflecting a phase of adjustment (Xi 1997). Even during the surge of anti-Christian movements in the 1920s, some segments of the Chinese population continued to support missionary educational and medical projects (Laamann 2021).

This article argues that the Tibetological research of the NCBRAS offers a key case for understanding the relationship between modern Western missionaries and the modernity of knowledge production. On the one hand, compared to existing studies focusing on the period after 1910 (such as Harrell), NCBRAS’s Tibetology spans from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, allowing for a longer-term examination of the evolution of the relationship between religion, colonialism, and scholarship. On the other hand, NCBRAS’s Tibetological research was influenced by multiple factors, including Western policies toward China, the Society’s objectives, the missionary community, and Chinese indigenous society, offering an entry point for overcoming the singular “cultural imperialism” framework of interpretation. More specifically, early NCBRAS Tibetological research bore a pronounced Orientalist imprint and pursued a triad of aims—evangelization, imperial politics, and scholarly exploration5. The 1858 preface to JNCBRAS made clear that the Society’s purpose was not narrowly academic; rather, it set knowledge production alongside “the onward progress of Christian civilization,” holding this advancement as its principal task and maintaining that Chinese materials could remedy the “lacunae” in Western theory (JNCBRAS Editorial Board 1858). The 1864 preface likewise indicates that the NCBRAS sought to leverage knowledge production to further the Western colonial enterprise—aiming at “the demolition of those barriers which now alike oppose the spread of western civilisation” (JNCBRAS Editorial Board 1864, p. 5)6. Over the ensuing century of change, NCBRAS sloughed off its religious and imperial trappings, reoriented itself toward academic work, and in so doing became a distinctive conduit for modern scholarly exchange between China and the West. Through this case, we can analyze NCBRAS’s pathways of knowledge production amid the dynamic tensions among evangelization, colonial politics, and scientific research, thereby demonstrating that the “modernity” of knowledge production is not a linear process of “decolonization” or “secularization,” but rather a complex process—shot through with internal tensions—negotiated among various forces.

This article draws primarily on JNCBRAS and on Chinese and foreign newspapers and periodicals and reconstructs the trajectory of Tibetological knowledge production at NCBRAS along three lines. Situated within the nineteenth-century context of the eastward expansion of Christianity and competition among modern Western states, this article first examines how NCBRAS pursued Tibetan studies prior to the institutionalization of the discipline and the characteristics that such work exhibited. Second, against the early twentieth-century backdrop of the heightened geopolitical salience of Tibet and the institutionalization of academic disciplines in the West, this article analyzes how missionary members propelled a turn toward professionalization/paradigmatization (role specialization and the adoption of anthropological fieldwork methods). Finally, focusing on NCBRAS’s Tibetological work after the 1920s, it analyzes how, amid surging Chinese nationalism, the Society fostered secularization and catalyzed Tibetological knowledge production, and how missionary and non-missionary members participated in that process. Together, these developments make visible tensions between religiosity and scientificity in Tibetology. This study aims to show, on the one hand, that NCBRAS’s work in Tibetan studies underwent a modern transformation—from an orientalist vantage oriented toward philological collation of texts to a pursuit of objectivity and scientific rigor employing modern disciplinary methods; on the other hand, that the modernization of this knowledge production was by no means a purely methodological advance, but rather the outcome of the interplay and constitutive tensions among power, faith, and scholarship.

2. Interplay of Religion, Politics, and Scholarship: Tibetology at NCBRAS in the Nineteenth Century (1857–1900)

In the nineteenth century, Western missionaries and explorers ranged across much of the globe, yet on Western maps, Tibet still stood out as a “forbidden land,” a place that captured the Western imagination while remaining largely inaccessible to outsiders. Although missionaries occasionally entered Tibetan communities, longstanding restrictions prevented the formation of a systematic program of Tibetological research (Michael 1999, p. 110). In the mid-nineteenth century, under the influence of international political circumstances, this situation underwent a profound change. On the one hand, competition among Western states in Central Asia in the nineteenth century stimulated interest in Oriental studies within the West and thereby gave rise to research on the peoples and regions of Asia, among which Tibet—long perceived as mysterious and closed—drew particular attention (Michael 1999, p. 110)7. On the other hand, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, Western states concluded a series of diplomatic treaties with China that facilitated Western missionaries’ travel to, and activities within, China. The 1858 Treaty of Tientsin (《天津條約》) and the 1860 Treaty of Peking (《北京條約》) granted missionaries the right to reside in the Chinese interior and to carry out evangelization there. The 1876 Chefoo Convention (《煙臺條約》) stipulated that Britain could dispatch a “mission of exploration” into Tibet via Gansu (甘肅), Kokonor (青海), and Sichuan (四川) (Hevia 2003, p. 152). Accordingly, compared with the period prior to the nineteenth century, opportunities for the Western world to enter Tibet increased markedly8. Western attention to Tibet consequently intensified; by the 1880s, The Times was carrying more frequent reports on Tibetan affairs (Han and Guo 2017).

Against this backdrop, the NCBRAS—functioning as a missionary outpost in China—subsequently redirected its attention to Tibet in the 1870s. As one of the earliest NCBRAS members to initiate knowledge production in Tibetan studies, the missionary Ernest John Eitel (German: Ernst Johann Eitel) produced research that clearly reveals the close connections between his knowledge production and colonial expansion as well as the missionary enterprise. In 1862, E. J. Eitel arrived in Guangdong to engage in missionary work. During his years in China, he studied Chinese intensively and carried out numerous studies on the Hakka, Buddhism, and translation (Huang 2006). However, E. J. Eitel’s research consistently bore colonialist and orientalist inflections. He held that Britain—“Marching at the head of civilization”—through its colonial rule over Hong Kong inaugurated its “individual mission in Asia” (Eitel 1895, pp. vi–vii). Moreover, E. J. Eitel sought, by disparaging Chinese Buddhism, to demonstrate the value and significance of Christian missionary work in China: “Christianity is more universal in its character and more adapted to the peculiarities of all nations than Buddhism” (Eitel 1873, p. 28). This likewise meant that he was not truly studying Chinese culture but rather attempting to reshape Chinese thought in accordance with Christian doctrine (Xu 2024).

E. J. Eitel’s research on Tibet’s Lake Manasarovar exhibited a Christian-centric orientation. In his 1870 article “The Fabulous Source of the Hoang-ho,” published in JNCBRAS, Eitel, on the basis of collating Chinese and Indian sources, argued that the claim that the Yellow River originates in Manasarovara—a sacred lake on the northern slope of the Himalayas (i.e., Tibet’s Lake Manasarovar)—was a deliberate construction by Buddhists. In his view, this notion was a product of Chinese Buddhist fabrication—a “pia fraus” intended to gratify the “national vanity” of Chinese Buddhists (Eitel 1870, p. 51).

This evaluative framework that takes Christian civilization as its standard was likewise evident in JNCBRAS’s first book review pertaining to Tibetan Buddhism, published in 1900. This review introduces Mythologie des Buddhismus in Tibet und der Mongolei by the German Tibetologist Albert Grünwedel. The book read Tibetan Buddhism through a pronounced Orientalist lens: lamas were dismissed as “a lot of ignorant fellows” (Forke 1900, p. 61); images were said to “look like Greeks or Romans”; and Tibetan myths were criticized for “a striking poverty of imagination” (Forke 1900, pp. 61–62). This was hardly an isolated case. At the time, Western missionaries and scholars often treated scientific study as a prelude to evangelization. Studies of Tibetan Buddhism were frequently animated by an evangelistic imperative (Wan 2025, p. 180). By deliberately casting Tibet as a form of civilizational “otherness”, such work ultimately served to buttress claims about Christianity’s superiority and universality9.

A research paradigm oriented toward a comprehensive critique of Asian religions and cultures was highly consonant with the nineteenth-century mission of NCBRAS. As one study notes, Western residents’ intellectual curiosity and missionary aims in China—framed by an Orientalist scholarly backdrop and expatriates’ spiritual needs—combined to form the immediate context for NCBRAS’s founding (Y. Wang 2005, p. 12). From the outset, then, the Society carried a tripartite orientation—religious, political, and scholarly.

First, advancing the spread of Western Christian civilization in China stood at the center of the NCBRAS’s knowledge program. As stated in the 1858 and 1864 JNCBRAS prefaces, the purpose of scientific research was oriented toward advancing Christian civilization and disseminating Western civilization to China (JNCBRAS Editorial Board 1858; JNCBRAS Editorial Board 1864, p. 5). For E. C. Bridgman—the Society’s first president and the first American missionary to China—Chinese civilization ultimately originated from the West; “the highest antiquity of this nation is really its brightest period” (Bridgman 1858, p. 2). In this reading, China served as a favored comparator for charting the rise inof Western Christian civilization, its society cast as a higher stage of human development prior to Christian revelation (Bridgman 1858, p. 8). Hence, many missionaries argued that dismantling China’s ancient institutions and instituting a new order grounded in Christian civilization would best serve Chinese interests (Fairbank 1978, pp. 543–44).

Secondly, NCBRAS’s knowledge production consciously served the Western colonial enterprise. On the one hand, modern Western powers sought to replace the Sinocentric, hierarchical tributary system with a treaty system, thereby integrating China into a Western-dominated international order (Fairbank 1968, p. 258; Hamashita et al. 2008, pp. 15–20; Kang 2010, p. 81). In one of his speeches, E. C. Bridgman argued that Western nations should ensure China’s compliance with “the most simple and just demands for international rights” (Bridgman 1858, p. 8). Under these conditions, research on China acquired a political mandate. As Bridgman noted, rivalry between the West and China was not merely a contest of military force but also one of scientific research; this contest unfolded through two modes of knowledge production: first, Westerners’ understanding of China’s political institutions, and second, Chinese audiences’ understanding of the West’s “just rights of man.” Accordingly, NCBRAS’s knowledge production moved along two channels—communicating knowledge of China to the West and transmitting Western universalist values to China (Bridgman 1858, p. 10). In addition, Anglo-Russian rivalry provided an additional spur to NCBRAS’s knowledge production. Noting the activity of the Russian Spiritual Mission in Beijing, Bridgman observed that “The Russian government, by early establishing a college in Peking, has prudently and easily secured to itself and its subjects great advantages” (Bridgman 1858, p. 21). In the nineteenth century, NCBRAS paid close attention to China’s internal affairs. Between 1858 and 1875, JNCBRAS published significant political news annually. In 1865, NCBRAS took note of Tibet’s strategic value, observing that “the conquest of these tribes (i.e., Bhutan) will advance the British boundary in India to the tableland of Tibet, and will give a frontier conterminous for 200 miles with Chinese territory. Relations will probably be opened with the court of the Dalai Lama, and a hitherto sealed country opened in some degree at least to foreign intercourse” (Kingsmill 1865, p. 160).

Finally, at the scholarly level, the NCBRAS, through the establishment of its journal (JNCBRAS) in 1858, actively promoted knowledge production in the Far East and disseminated it to Western audiences. As the Society itself declared, “we may add our own literary and scientific contributions to the list of new publications, which characterize and make illustrious the remarkable age in which we live” (Bridgman 1858, pp. 13–14). JNCBRAS was an early venue for Tibetological scholarship on Tibetan communities. As noted above, JNCBRAS published a research article on Tibet in 1870, which predated comparable coverage in two contemporaneous journals—the Chinese Recorder and the China Review10. As reflected in the studies of E. J. Eitel and Albert Grünwedel, NCBRAS’s nineteenth-century scientific work bore a marked Orientalist imprint. This research orientation aligned closely with NCBRAS’s developmental trajectory, which was oriented toward missionary and imperial interests. Bridgman further judged China to lag far behind Western Christian nations in the literature and science; thus, despite its abundant natural resources and rich human past, China’s value, in his view, lay chiefly in furnishing research materials for Western missionaries and scholars (Bridgman 1858, pp. 1–6). Thus, although JNCBRAS styled itself as an academic journal devoted to promoting “literature and science,” its knowledge production was deeply embedded in the nineteenth-century Western colonial–Orientalist imaginary.

Although E. J. Eitel first initiated NCBRAS’s Tibetan studies from the field of religious studies, in the 1870s the Society’s research on Tibet placed greater emphasis on mapping the geographical settings of Tibetan communities. Early JNCBRAS pieces foregrounded physical geography, consistent with the outlet’s overall profile—according to a speech by President Francis Blachwell Forbes, geographical articles ranked first in JNCBRAS prior to 1874 (JNCBRAS Editorial Board 1874, p. xxvi). One reason was the late-eighteenth-century rise inof natural history within missionary and exploratory science, which made topography and observations of flora and fauna standard textual themes (Pratt 1992, pp. 27–28). Another was the limited command that early missionaries had of Chinese and of neighboring languages, channeling attention toward the natural sciences (Y. Wang 2005, p. 115).

The second Tibetological research article published in JNCBRAS presented findings from Armand David—a French priest of the Congregation of the Mission—based on his surveys of natural resources in western and northern China. David repeatedly visited the mountainous fringes of the Tibetan Plateau to collect botanical specimens (Yuhai Zhu 2014) and noted the distinct ecology of western Sichuan. He observed that north–south-trending mountain ranges and river systems separated western Sichuan from the Chengdu Plain, producing two sharply contrasted natural and social formations (David 1872, p. 207).

Moreover, Thomas William Kingsmill became a principal advocate for deeper Tibetology within the Society. A geologist by training, he conducted geological surveys in Central Asia and on the Tibetan Plateau. During his presidency, he twice underscored the West’s scant knowledge of Tibet and called for expanded scientific investigations and exploratory expeditions there (Kingsmill 1877, p. 9; Kingsmill 1878, p. xxiii)11. In short, Kingsmill cultivated a distinctive interest in Tibet and sought to fold Tibetology into the Society’s research.

Thereafter, the Society’s attention to Tibetology increased visibly. The library expanded its Tibetology holdings, and the JNCBRAS carried more related pieces.12 As Western residents gained proficiency in the local language, production of knowledge on China’s humanities and social life expanded13. NCBRAS’s Tibetological research gradually came to address the history and questions of ethnicity within Tibetan communities. In 1885, JNCBRAS published two Tibetological pieces in the “Notes and Queries” category, authored, respectively, by the American Tibetologist William Woodville Rockhill and the French sinologist Camille Clément Imbault-Huart. Drawing on textual sources, they investigated the origins of “tale-lama” and of the “Pu-lu-k’o-pa (布魯克巴)” (Rockhill 1885, p. 277; Imbault-Huart 1885, p. 282)14.

However, between 1880 and 1899, NCBRAS’s production of Tibetological knowledge displayed two salient features. First, its research methods were dominated by textual collation and compilation. For example, British diplomat Edward Harper Parker’s reconstruction of the history of Tibetan polities and the German sinologist Friedrich Hirth’s discussion of the Ssu-yi-kuan both relied on classical Chinese sources (Parker 1886, p. 300; Hirth 1887, pp. 203–14). Second, these seemingly “objective” scholarly activities were in fact closely intertwined with Christian missionary work and the political imperatives of colonialism. E. H. Parker’s status as a British official should not be overlooked; he served in several British consulates in China (Anonymous 1926a). Closely connected with missionary circles, Parker visited Shanghai churches several times and regarded himself as a supporter of missionary work (Q. Li 2019, p. 39). In addition, the German sinologist F. Hirth—president of the NCBRAS in 1886–1887 and a friend of E. J. Eitel—acknowledged that his scholarly career owed much to assistance from missionary communities in China (Gong 2021, p. 117). F. Hirth’s study focused on the Ssu-yi-kuan (四夷館), a key government office for translation and tributary relations in nineteenth-century China. His scholarly work, in turn, supplied knowledge that directly facilitated the diplomatic efforts of Western powers in their dealings with China. In 1894, under Kingsmill’s chairmanship, the Society produced the collective article “Inland Communications in China” (1894), detailing routes from Chengdu to Lhasa (Anonymous 1894, p. 58). The article met late-nineteenth-century Western needs for knowledge of China’s interior; the Japanese landings during the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) highlighted how little was known about inland communications—“the question among all interested in or watching the struggle now is, on both sides, what is the direction and the condition of inland communications in China” (E.J.E. 1895, p. 422). As stated by The China Review, the value of the paper lies in serving the activities of Westerners in China, including missionaries: “We would counsel every would-be travelertraveller in China to study this volume for his profit” (E.J.E. 1895, p. 422). This illustrates that Tibetological research not only provided missionaries and diplomats with knowledge to access the inland regions of China but also facilitated the expansion of Western powers in Asia during the late nineteenth century.

Taken together, NCBRAS’s Tibetological knowledge production was the outcome of the interplay among religious mission, political imperatives, and scientific research. Leveraging the knowledge produced in JNCBRAS as an instrument, NCBRAS used “science” to argue for the superiority of Western Christian civilization—on the one hand reinforcing the religious mission of missionaries in China, and on the other providing a knowledge base for Western states in formulating policy toward Asia. The very process by which NCBRAS transmitted Tibetological knowledge to the Western world constituted a concrete expression of imperial politics and evangelization on the plane of knowledge production. In terms of production, constrained by linguistic capacity, early NCBRAS Tibetology focused on surveying and recording the natural environments of Tibetan communities; by the late nineteenth century, research in the humanities and social sciences gradually emerged, but it was conducted entirely in the mode of textual collation. These studies assembled basic profiles of the Tibetan region’s natural environment, political institutions, and religious culture, and they often bore colonialist and Orientalist inflections. Disseminated via JNCBRAS to Western readers, these results, in this sense, effectively constructed a putatively “objective” foundation of knowledge for Western colonial expansion and civilizational conquest15.

3. From the Study to the Field: The Humanities Turn and Paradigm Shift in Tibetological Research at NCBRAS (1901–1919)

In the early twentieth century, shifts in two realms had a profound impact on NCBRAS’s Tibetological research, driving transformations in its research agenda and paradigms. The first of these was academic. From the late nineteenth century onward, the Western disciplinary system underwent major reconfiguration from the mid- to late nineteenth century, as anthropology, history, and sociology became institutionalized (Wallerstein 1991, pp. 218–19). As specialization increased, nineteenth-century “generalists” gradually gave way to scholars systematically trained and single-field focused. The second shift was driven by political developments in Asia. As Tibet’s strategic weight within Britain’s “Great Game” increased, the Viceroy of India, George Nathaniel Curzon, pursued aggressive policies intended to make Tibet a British buffer (Lv 2016, p. 168). During the British Expedition to Tibet, British forces entered Lhasa and compelled the Tibetan government to sign the Lhasa Convention and the Anglo-Chinese Convention, renewing the Tibet-India arrangements (Sun 2024, p. 15). Academic professionalization and geopolitical competition shaped the transformation of Tibetological knowledge production at the NCBRAS: the former oriented NCBRAS Tibetological research toward professionalization, while the latter gradually shifted the Society’s research agenda toward the humanities and social sciences. Within this process, the role of the missionary member J. H. Edgar was especially important; he directly drove a paradigm shift in NCBRAS Tibetological research from text-based philological work to field investigation.

In the scholarly realm, the NCBRAS began to exhibit a trend toward professionalization in the early twentieth century. The NCBRAS reflected this trend in the early twentieth century. At the 1909 annual meeting, Pelham Laird Warren—British Consul-General at Shanghai and NCBRAS president—noted that, as Western scholarship deepened its understanding of China, simple studies no longer met the needs of the time (JNCBRAS Editorial Board 1909, p. 130). In 1911, the missionary and vice-president John Calvin Ferguson, in his annual address, echoed this view: “Each now devotes himself to some department in which he may hope to become a specialist” (JNCBRAS Editorial Board 1911, p. 257). The emphasis that P. L. Warren and J. C. Ferguson placed on research specialization reflected the Society’s growing commitment to professionalism and objectivity in knowledge production.

NCBRAS’s practice of circulating the latest scholarly developments was one way in which it sought to advance the professionalization of Tibetological research. To promote the professionalization of Tibetology, the NCBRAS also sought to circulate the latest scholarly developments. Between 1901 and 1920, the JNCBRAS published five Tibetological book reviews, covering four scholarly areas—Tibetan politics, frontier administration, Tibetan language, and Tibetan Buddhism—compared with only a single review on Tibetan Buddhism in the years before 190016. This points to an expanding and deepening of the Society’s scholarly horizons. On the other hand, the journal issued brief scholarly notices to keep the field informed. Upon the death of W. W. Rockhill—the noted American Tibetologist and an honorary member of the NCBRAS—in December 1914, the Society promptly published an obituary that summarized his career and rated his Tibetological achievements highly (Hinckley 1915, p. 117).

At the same time, the NCBRAS was also shaped by realpolitik. Geopolitical dynamics not only reshaped its research agenda but also delimited the geographical scope of its work. Against this backdrop of international disputes, Western attention to Tibet shifted markedly: studies of Tibet’s social structure, ethnic composition, and historical context moved from curiosity to practical necessity. This shift was corroborated by articles published in the JNCBRAS in the early twentieth century. In 1903, W. C. Haines Watson, Commissioner of the Chongqing Customs, and British botanist Ernest Henry Wilson undertook an expedition to areas such as Songpan 松潘 [Tib. Zung chu] (Wilson 1929, p. 157). The findings of their expedition were published by Watson in 1905 in the JNCBRAS, where he provided a detailed record of local social customs and commercial trade information (Watson 1905). In addition, the JNCBRAS published two book reviews in 1907 and 1916 that dealt with Tibet and international politics. The first was Western Tibet and the British Borderland, authored by Charles Atmore Sherring, an official in the British Indian administration, together with several collaborators. The book also underscored the political uses of scientific research, being read as a post-1904 expedition report on Tibet: “This is one of the most agreeable issues of the expedition of 1904” (Kingsmill 1907, p. 229). The second reviewed Notes from a Frontier. The book was written by Thomas Martland Ainscough, an official of the British Board of Trade in China. In particular, following the Younghusband Expedition in 1904, Ainscough argued that Tibet’s ties with Britain had become closer, while China had lost its buffer zone along the western frontier (Porter 1916, p. 143). From this we can see that officials responsible for Far Eastern affairs gradually came to recognize the importance of Tibet and began to investigate it from political, economic, and social perspectives. This turn toward the humanities and social sciences even influenced T. W. Kingsmill, a former president of the Society best known as a geologist, leading him to take up research on Tibetan history (Kingsmill 1906).

Meanwhile, Western countries’ policies toward China also shaped the production of Tibetological knowledge at the NCBRAS in the early twentieth century. On the one hand, the British government, in the realm of diplomacy, stressed China’s suzerainty over Tibet and therefore exerted only limited influence on Tibet through the British Trade Agent stationed at Gyantse. On the other hand, because the Tibetan government refused to allow Western missionaries to penetrate deeper into Tibet, the British government deliberately restricted missionaries’ entry into Tibet in order to avoid diplomatic risks. As a result, missionaries had to withdraw from Tibet’s interior and turn instead to the Tibetan frontier—border regions administered by the Chinese government, including Amdo 安多 [Tib. A mdo] and Kham 康區 [Tib. Khams] (Bray 2014, p. 27), thereby establishing these areas as focal points for Western Tibetological research.

However, in the process of the NCBRAS’s shift toward professionalization in Tibetology, it was those missionaries, who turned to the periphery of Tibet due to political restrictions, who played a crucial role. Among them, the missionary J. H. Edgar, who joined the Society in 1910, was especially significant. J. H. Edgar applied anthropological fieldwork methods to the investigation and study of Tibetan communities, thus transforming the traditional literature-based approach of NCBRAS members in the 19th century and reversing the Society’s colonial and Orientalist research perspective.

J. H. Edgar held a dual role as missionary and scholar: a member of the China Inland Mission and of the NCBRAS.17 Although no evidence attests to J. H. Edgar’s early systematic anthropological training, he consciously applied anthropological methods in the observation of local societies as early as the 1910s.

In the 1910s, J.H. Edgar’s application of anthropological fieldwork methods is evident in the papers he published in JNCBRAS18. As mentioned earlier, missionaries at this time found it difficult to gain access to the interior of Tibet; thus, Tibetan communities on the periphery became the primary focus of missionary work and research. After arriving in China in 1898, J. H. Edgar established himself in Kham to carry out missionary work. His long-term residency in Kham and firsthand observations of Tibetan communities yielded a rich body of ethnographic material. In 1914, he published his first research on the Kham Tibetans in JNCBRAS. On the basis of direct experience, he offered fine-grained observations on religion and ethnicity, noting that the “Lakong Ssu” monastery exercised not only religious authority but also deep social influence by controlling water resources: “The lamasery in its halcyon days ruled over the Pehtu region, and by an artful irrigation system controlled many families in the Batang principality” (Edgar 1914b, p. 36).

From this we can see that, in matters of religion, J. H. Edgar had already abandoned the earlier text-based approach of E. J. Eitel and Albert Grünwedel in favor of a form of religious inquiry grounded in fieldwork, through which he was able to observe the role played by Tibetan Buddhism in local society. At the same time, it was precisely on the basis of his fieldwork in Tibetan communities that Edgar was able to discern more clearly the processes of local ethnic fusion. He highlighted a key shortcoming in earlier scholarly work on Kham Tibetan society—namely, the tendency to subsume a complex, ethnically fused society under the single rubric “Tibetan”: “This confusion of tongues and tribes, although showing no uncertain signs of origin, has been fused into one great amalgam which anthropologists would not hesitate to include under the term Tibetan” (Edgar 1914b, p. 41). This shift in research trajectory not only helped to enrich Western understandings of the complexity of Tibetan society but also underscored the need for Tibetological scholarship to move beyond sole reliance on textual collation and to incorporate modern anthropological field methods.

In addition, J. H. Edgar’s research trajectory set him apart from certain contemporaneous Western officials whose observations of Tibetan society were marked by colonialist and Orientalist overtones. In the Songpan region, under the influence of Han Chinese culture, local Tibetans developed the custom of inscribing auspicious phrases on door scrolls (for example, “Magnificent Prosperity await you” and “Wealth and Happiness to him who rests beneath this roof”). Yet in the early twentieth century, the British official W. C. Haines Watson characterized these scrolls as “hundreds of high-flown sentiments of a like nature, for the benefit of those who can never hope for anything of greater value than the opium pipe” (Watson 1905, p. 69). This suggests that his observations of Kham Tibetan society still bore a pronounced Western-centric cast, reducing local social customs to a mere sign of “degeneracy.” In contrast, J. H. Edgar, drawing on long-term residence and participant observation, sought to understand the internal logic of Tibetan social life from a local perspective. On the basis of his fieldwork, J. H. Edgar underscored how the natural environment shaped local transportation and religious beliefs, and he documented the practices through which Tibetans adapted their everyday life to the high-altitude plateau environment (Edgar 1917, pp. 50–52)19. Especially noteworthy, Edgar’s reflections on the environment-society nexus resonate with post-1950s cultural-ecological theory in anthropology, which examines how humans adapt to environments and, in so doing, shape their cultures (Steward 1955, p. 31). Thus, on the one hand, J. H. Edgar had already begun to apply modern anthropological theory to the study of Tibetan communities; on the other, his work was diverging from Tibetological research shaped by colonialism: whereas the latter’s observations of Tibetan society were permeated by the Orientalist and colonial imaginary, he emphasized entering the everyday life of Tibetan society through fieldwork and explaining it through modern disciplinary frameworks.

It should also be pointed out that although J. H. Edgar’s Tibetological research, compared with that of nineteenth-century scholars, was marked by fewer Orientalist and colonialist presuppositions, J. H. Edgar, as a missionary, never abandoned his desire to spread Christianity. As he stated in The Marches of the Mantze, the purpose of missionaries engaging in scientific research was to promote the spread of Christianity so as to supplant Buddhism’s local standing (Edgar 1908, p. 42). This understanding of scholarship as serving Christian mission ran through J. H. Edgar’s entire academic career: he sought to understand Tibetan society by means of anthropological methods and to bring salvation to Tibetans through Christian “civilization” (P. Li et al. 2024). Thus, Edgar’s contribution lay in enhancing the professionalism and objectivity of Tibetological knowledge production through anthropological fieldwork, whereas his research remained ultimately subservient to the goal of disseminating Christianity.

In summary, in the early twentieth century, Britain’s involvement in Tibet intensified the Western world’s need to “understand” Tibet from the standpoint of its own strategic interests, prompting the NCBRAS to shift its research focus toward systematic investigations of local society, ethnic groups, and history. At the same time, the British government’s policy toward China and the Tibetan government’s resistance to missionaries meant that this demand for knowledge faced the practical difficulty of gaining access to the Tibetan interior. It was in this context that missionaries and scholars were forced to turn to Tibet’s border regions (such as Kham), using them as a proxy for gaining knowledge about Tibetan society.

J. H. Edgar’s Tibetological research offers a paradigmatic case of the pursuit of disciplinary professionalization under the influence of geopolitics. The research paradigm he developed on the basis of long-term, systematic fieldwork in Kham differed sharply from the textual-philological work of E. J. Eitel and Kingsmill and went beyond Kingdon-Ward’s exclusively botanical collecting and W. C. Haines Watson’s travel writings marked by colonial bias (Kingdon-Ward 1916). Integrating perspectives from geography and anthropology and starting from the interactive relationship between environment and culture, his work not only anticipated later cultural-ecological approaches in a pioneering way but also broke with the stereotyped observations and reductive understandings of Tibetan society that had been advanced from nineteenth-century colonial and Orientalist vantage points. The case of J. H. Edgar thus presents the complex lineaments of Tibetology’s early “modern” turn: on the one hand, his methods pushed NCBRAS knowledge production toward greater professionalization; on the other hand, the fundamental core of his work remained driven by missionary purposes. Accordingly, the modern transformation of Tibetological knowledge production did not take the form of a linear substitution of “scientificity” for “colonial-religious” commitments but rather crystallized as an enduring field of tension among religious mission, colonial context, and academic research.

4. Unfinished Transformation: Tibetological Research at the NCBRAS Amid the Tension Between Science and Religion (1920–1952)

From 1920 onward, nationalist sentiment in China surged; the Anti-Christian Movement (1922–1927) swept the country, provoking criticism of and resistance to Westerners and Christianity across both the academy and civil society (Yang 2005, p. 382). In 1933, an archeological excavation in Pengshan County led by Thomas Torrance of the American Bible Society and David Crockett Graham of the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society was denounced by angry locals as “grave-robbing,” and the antiquities they collected were seized by the authorities (Anonymous 1933). In response, Western research organizations in China moved to localize—many Christian universities were folded into the Chinese state system (Yang 2005). At the same time, amid the rise inof Chinese nationalism, British- and American-run missionary presses and periodicals began to promote anti-colonial and anti-imperialist discourse to court Chinese readers and expand their market (Zhang and Li 2011, pp. 182–83).

From the late 1920s, the NCBRAS also accelerated secularization, shifting from a body with a Christian background to a professional research institution. First, the earlier aim—pitting Christian civilization against “Eastern” civilization—was gradually displaced by academic interests. In a 1932 lecture, J. F. Brenan, the British Consul-General at Shanghai and a member of the Society, declared in his speech, “The object of the society is to study Oriental, and especially Chinese history, art and civilization, and to make possible a common meeting-ground for intellectuals of the East and West” (JNCBRAS Editorial Board 1932, p. i). The religious and political overtones so prominent in the nineteenth century had thus faded, and the Society was redefining itself as a bridge for Sino-Western scholarly exchange. At the same time, the reorientation of the NCBRAS did not entail a wholesale rejection of religious elements. After 1930, at least 33 missionaries continued to join the Society (Y. Wang 2005, pp. 209–403).

Second, the NCBRAS gradually emerged as an important institution for knowledge production, linking China with the wider world of scholarship. On the one hand, as specialization deepened, scholarly journals became a conduit linking research institutions. Via journal exchange, the JNCBRAS circulated worldwide; beyond exchange, the journal was also purchased by institutions in Europe, the United States, and China, which directly boosted its print run (Y. Wang 2005, p. 96; JNCBRAS Editorial Board 1928, p. vii). This reality echoed the Society’s self-positioning at its 80th-anniversary meeting: “For a considerable part of this long period the Society was the only cultural institution in China, and it holds the proud position of being the oldest such institution in this country” (JNCBRAS Editorial Board 1937, p. iv). On the other hand, the Society reoriented its research and collecting toward a broader scholarly community. The 1922 annual report observed that “popular opinion throughout the world is realizing that the Far East is no longer the hobby of a few sinologues, and that the present era of intercommunication is creating relationships of interdependence unthought of a few years ago” (JNCBRAS Editorial Board 1922, p. viii).

Third, the NCBRAS shifted away from a strategy oriented primarily toward serving the Western world and undertook localized reforms. On the one hand, the Society actively incorporated Chinese intellectual elites. It actively recruited Chinese intellectual elites: after 1920, scholars such as Sung William (沈嗣良) of St. John’s University, Wu Chenfu (胡經甫) of Yenching University, and Hu Shih (胡適) and Cai Yuanpei (蔡元培) joined the Society (Y. Wang 2005, pp. 209–403), enhancing its standing in China. By this stage, Chinese members were participating in the Society’s work by publishing papers and delivering lectures. It was not until 1951, when Li Chao-huan (黎照寰), president of Shanghai Jiaotong University, assumed the presidency of the NCBRAS, that a Chinese first entered its core leadership (Y. Wang 2005, p. 31). On the other hand, the Society opened its resources to Chinese society at large—breaking with the member-serving norm—by making the library, museum, and other facilities accessible to the Shanghai public and to schools (JNCBRAS Editorial Board 1929, pp. viii–xix). As a representative of the Chinese press, Shun Pao repeatedly reported NCBRAS activities in the 1920s and 1930s (Anonymous 1926b; Anonymous 1936b; Anonymous 1937), indicating that the Society’s knowledge production was becoming part of Chinese intellectual life20.

The NCBRAS’s secularizing, professionalizing, and localizing turn found an echo in its Tibetological knowledge production. With respect to secularization, in order to enhance the general public’s understanding of Tibet, the NCBRAS adopted more diverse and public-facing channels of knowledge dissemination, most notably public lectures and museum displays21. In terms of lectures, between 1920 and 1952 the Society hosted sixteen Tibetology lectures; missionaries delivered at least six of them (including Theo Sörensen, Hubert Gordon Thompson, J. H. Edgar, R. F. Fitch, and D. C. Graham), across such fields as religious studies, botany, anthropology, and archeology (Y. Wang 2005, pp. 197–207; Yaling Zhu 2018, p. 19). Moreover, advances in photography enabled new visual modes of Tibetological presentation. On 23 May 1935, the NCBRAS screened a Tibetan travel film by Sinica; shot by the German explorer Dr. Wilhelm Filchner in Central Asia, India, and elsewhere, it showed Tibetan daily life and religious activities (JNCBRAS Editorial Board 1935, p. 132). On the other hand, the NCBRAS Museum increased its collection of Tibetan specimens and artifacts. By 1934, the museum had added animal specimens, with three large cases devoted to Tibetan bharal and brown bear (JNCBRAS Editorial Board 1934, p. xvi). In 1937, it added specimens of the giant panda from Kham and the Tibetan brown bear; at the same time, Mr. and Mrs. Jack T. Young donated three pairs of minority footwear from Kham (JNCBRAS Editorial Board 1937, pp. vi–vii). Through public lectures and museum activities, the NCBRAS transmitted Tibetological knowledge to a wider lay audience.

In this process, missionaries played an important role as the NCBRAS promoted the public dissemination of Tibetological knowledge. Of the sixteen Tibetology lectures, missionaries delivered at least six of them (including Theo Sörensen, Hubert Gordon Thompson, J. H. Edgar, R. F. Fitch, and D. C. Graham), across such fields as religious studies, botany, anthropology, and archeology (Y. Wang 2005, pp. 197–207; Yaling Zhu 2018, p. 19). This fact suggests that the secularizing transformation by no means signaled the withdrawal of religious elements. On the contrary, it illuminates how missionaries strategically made use of public lectures to convey Tibetological knowledge and thus continued to exercise a distinctive and important influence within the framework of modern scholarship.

This feature is evident in the case of the British missionary T. Torrance22. T. Torrance—both an NCBRAS member and an important scholar of China’s frontier ethnic groups (Chi 2012)—developed, partly through his research on the Qiang ethnic group, a comparative approach across ethnic groups23. On 18 January 1923, he delivered a lecture at the Society entitled “The Religion of The Chiang” (JNCBRAS Editorial Board 1923, p. xiv). The content of this lecture was subsequently published in the JNCBRAS as a separate article. It is clear that Torrance did not confine himself to the Qiang; he used them to explain the origins of certain Tibetan cultural elements. In particular, he proposed that prayer flags derived from the white banners of ancient sacrificial rites and posited that “Monotheistic cults once held sway over all Western China and Tibet” (Torrance 1923, p. 165). He also expressed respect for frontier ethnic groups, praising them as “an industrious, well-meaning, decent living people” (Torrance 1923, p. 167); in doing so, he moved beyond the “savage” narrative paradigm that had been common in the Society’s early work.

However, it should be noted that T. Torrance consciously situated scientific research within the broader mission of disseminating Christian civilization. On the one hand, his focus on religion stemmed largely from an evangelical imperative; seeing affinities with Christianity, he argued that frontier ethnic groups held a preferential claim to evangelization (Torrance 1923, p. 167)24. On the other hand, working within a linear-evolutionist frame, he cast frontier ethnic groups as living remnants of ancient human types, characterizing their ideas as “primitive” and maintaining that their religion “is purely monotheistic and has remained so from time immemorial” (Torrance 1923, p. 151). His case reflects how missionaries’ modern scholarly practice was the product of the interplay among faith commitments, Western-centered cognitive frameworks, and modern disciplinary methods.

In research, after the 1920s, the Society’s work on Tibetan religion and social customs matured. J. H. Edgar remained a leading contributor, publishing three Tibetological articles in the JNCBRAS between 1920 and 1930. The NCBRAS retained its function of relaying the latest developments in Tibetological research to the scholarly community. During this period, the JNCBRAS published six book reviews in the field of Tibetology. The works reviewed covered a strikingly wide range of topics, including missionary ethnographies and field reports (Mason 1920, pp. 192–93; Anonymous 1921, p. 210), specialized studies in botany and Buddhist studies (Anonymous 1924, p. 258; MacLeod 1924, p. 258), as well as historical travelogues and art-historical writings (Roberts 1933, pp. 166–68; Millican 1938, p. 99). Crucially, these reviews did not merely promote the books but adhered to a critical academic ethos. For example, while acknowledging Hans Wolfgang Limpricht’s contributions to botany, one review nonetheless questioned the scientific character of his work in terms of its recording methods and the completeness of its illustrations (Anonymous 1924, p. 258). Through such reviews, the JNCBRAS sought to bring Tibetological research into alignment with modern disciplinary norms and to steer the field in a more professional direction.

J. H. Edgar remained a leading contributor, publishing three Tibetological articles in the JNCBRAS between 1920 and 1930. First, J. H. Edgar sustained a fieldwork-based methodological trajectory in Tibetological research and consciously integrated field data with textual sources. For example, he drew on traditional texts to investigate the origins of the ethnonym “Kham,” while at the same time incorporating findings from fieldwork. Drawing as well on field experience, he drew scholars’ attention to the value of the Gyalrong 嘉戎 [Tib. rgyal rong], remarking that “The Gya-Rung remain to-day one of the most virile, numerous, and interesting elements in Frontier ethnology” (Edgar 1922, p. 64). Second, J. H. Edgar continued to emphasize the formative role of environment in shaping culture. Building on his research from the 1910s, he further argued that Tibetan customs and religion were shaped by the local natural environment: dietary habits and everyday dress met the needs of high-altitude pastoral mobility, and endogamy was an adaptation to geographic conditions—“but the geographic conditions demand that they approximate closely to the requirements of endogamy” (Edgar 1926, p. 43). Third, in his work on Tibetan Buddhism, J. H. Edgar’s reflections displayed a twofold character, highlighting the internal tensions that marked missionary scholars’ participation in the modernization of Tibetological knowledge production. Edgar further criticized the Orientalist biases of early Western scholarship on Asian religions: Tibetan Buddhism operated as a connective institution among tribes across regions, and monasteries served economic roles (Edgar 1926, pp. 34–37). At the same time, his study revealed a distinctly Christian-centered interpretive framework, treating Manichaeism as “a combination of heretical Christianity and Persian Magianism with Buddhist accretions later” (Edgar 1929, p. 115). Taken together, this indicates that, on the one hand, Edgar’s post-1920 research further propelled the shift in Tibetology from philological compilation toward modern knowledge production informed by contemporary disciplinary theories. On the other hand, the commitment to placing scholarship in the service of faith remained a driving force behind his work. This in turn underscores the tension between religiosity and scholarship that characterized NCBRAS Tibetological knowledge production after the 1920s.

In the course of the NCBRAS’s localized transformation, missionary members played a pivotal role. They not only promoted the production of Tibetological knowledge but also systematically introduced this knowledge into the Chinese academic system, thereby helping to advance the professionalization of Tibetological research in China. J. H. Edgar was among the earliest missionary-scholars to popularize anthropology in West China, delivering lectures on cultural anthropology at West China Union University (P. Li et al. 2024, p. 6). At the same time, J. H. Edgar and T. Torrance (a faculty member of West China Union University) donated valuable materials and artifacts obtained through fieldwork and archeological excavations to West China Union University, thereby laying the groundwork for the establishment of its modern museum (Rodriguez 2016).

Meanwhile, after 1920 the NCBRAS became increasingly open to Chinese society, and Chinese scholars began to participate in the Society’s Tibetological knowledge production. This marked a further deepening of the field’s localization. The Chinese linguist Wen Yu (聞宥) was a key figure in this process. In his early years, Wen studied in the Faculty of Letters at the church-run Aurora University, where he received training in modern linguistics and conducted research on the languages of frontier ethnic groups. In 1938, Wen Yu published a paper in the JNCBRAS titled “The Influence of Liquids upon the Dissolution of Initial Consonant Groups in the Indo-Sinic Family,” marking the journal’s first Tibetology article by a Chinese scholar. Wen Yu employed theoretical approaches from modern linguistics to examine the phonetic features of Tibetan and other minority languages. Analyzing the phonology of Tibetan and other minority languages, Wen identified extensive consonant clusters as a salient feature of Tibetan (Wen 1938, p. 86). Moreover, he did not stop at applying linguistic theory to describe Tibetan linguistic phenomena. Wen Yu also critiqued the theories of the Swedish linguist Klas Bernhard Johannes Karlgren. He argued that Karlgren’s account of phonetic series was flawed and, drawing on phonetic evidence from the Sino-Tibetan languages, advanced the view that Old Chinese may have contained two distinct types of liquid consonants (Wen 1938, p. 90).

Wen Yu’s case indicates that, at the moment of the NCBRAS’s localized turn, Chinese scholars began to use this international platform to bring modern disciplinary theories into conversation with Tibetological research and to participate in global knowledge production in the mode of academic dialogue. This development exemplified a shift in NCBRAS Tibetology after the 1920s: it was no longer the exclusive preserve of the Western academy but gradually took shape as a knowledge network in which both Chinese and foreign scholars participated. This shift marked the entry of local voices, fostered a diversification of scholarly perspectives, and weakened the Eurocentric and colonial features of NCBRAS Tibetological research, enabling it to move beyond a singular regime of cultural domination toward a more open and inclusive form of international academic exchange.

However, the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War disrupted the NCBRAS’s localized transformation. After the Battle of Shanghai in 1937, Japan quickly occupied Shanghai, making it difficult for Chinese scholars to continue participating in the Society’s academic activities there. Consequently, after publishing Wen Yu’s article in 1938, JNCBRAS carried no further articles by Chinese scholars in either 1939 or 1940. With the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, when Japan declared war on Western powers such as Britain and the United States, the activities of the NCBRAS likewise came to a halt. It was not until 1946 that the NCBRAS resumed its operations.

In summary, after 1920, in the face of shifting political and social conditions in China, the NCBRAS adjusted its development strategy, moving away from a trajectory oriented primarily toward serving Western society and toward a more secular, professional, and localized orientation. This broader reorientation directly reshaped NCBRAS Tibetological knowledge production: knowledge about Tibetan communities was disseminated to publics around the world in diverse forms, Tibetological research became increasingly professionalized, and Chinese scholars began to participate in this knowledge production. Yet this transformation was by no means a linear or one-directional process of “modernization.” On the one hand, the NCBRAS sought, amid the broader tide of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, to fashion an image of itself as a learned society centered on scholarly research. On the other hand, leading figures in NCBRAS Tibetology, such as J. H. Edgar and T. Torrance, even as they advanced the professionalization of Tibetological knowledge production through anthropological methods, were deeply shaped by a religious teleology. Accordingly, although the Society as a whole moved in the direction of “academicization,” Tibetological knowledge production, still dominated by missionaries, remained marked by a constitutive tension between religiosity and scientificity.

5. Conclusions

After the Second World War, NCBRAS never recovered its prewar vigor: only the 1946 and 1948 volumes appeared, lectures and other activities were repeatedly suspended, and the Society closed in 1952. Yet before the war, it had become a major Western institution of knowledge production in China and even described itself as a key medium for Chinese knowledge production and Sino-Western scholarly exchange (JNCBRAS Editorial Board 1940, p. xi). This trajectory indicates that the Society’s missionary and imperial character was ultimately displaced by a scientific self-definition. However, this study shows that this process was not a simple transition from religious and colonial attributes to a secularized, professional “modernity,” but rather that knowledge production remained situated within complex tensions in which religiosity, coloniality, and scholarship were persistently intertwined.

To begin with, missionary-led Tibetological knowledge production at the NCBRAS underwent a modernizing shift toward a more scientific and professional footing. This transformation was reflected in three respects: first, a decolonizing shift in the motivations driving research. In the mid-nineteenth century, missionary members of the NCBRAS were the first to recognize the value of Tibetological research—for demonstrating the superiority of Christianity and for advancing Western natural history—and to undertake preliminary investigations of the geographical environment of the Tibetan regions. Meanwhile, the Society combined religious and political aims, and JNCBRAS targeted a predominantly English-speaking Western readership. Consequently, its output diverged from the contemporaneous “intellectual apostolate” directed at Chinese society (Mo 2021) and instead sought to legitimize Christian universalism and Western civilizational superiority within the West itself. After 1900, amid disciplinary professionalization and the rise inof Chinese nationalism, the NCBRAS turned toward secularization and scientization. For example, missionary members increasingly sought scientific objectivity; the disparaging perspectives of Western officials such as W. C. Haines Watson—casting Tibetans as “barbarous” or “degraded”—became targets of critique, and they advocated approaches grounded in sympathy and understanding. Second, the researchers engaged in NCBRAS Tibetological research became increasingly professionalized. Early contributors were largely “amateur” scholars for whom Tibet was only one among many interests; as modern disciplines were institutionalized, more JNCBRAS papers came from specialists long engaged in the field. This path of professionalization echoed a missionary strategy for recalibrating knowledge production under the challenge of modern science—namely, a strategy that emphasized the adoption of modern disciplinary theories (Glover et al. 2011, p. 13). Third, NCBRAS Tibetological research became integrated with modern disciplinary theory. In its early phase, the NCBRAS Tibetological work relied entirely on the collation of traditional textual sources. In the early twentieth century, J. H. Edgar and T. Torrance, veteran missionaries, introduced anthropological and archeological approaches into Tibetology and used fieldwork in local society to correct earlier Western prejudices. Although missionaries still found it difficult to enter central Tibet (Michael 1999, p. 202)25, their evangelization and field investigations remained concentrated in Kham; even so, this turn to the fieldwork presaged the adoption of modern research methods in Western Tibetology.

Moreover, in the course of the transformation toward modern forms of knowledge production, NCBRAS Tibetological research remained marked by internal tensions among scholarship, coloniality, and religiosity. On the one hand, NCBRAS Tibetology arose in the context of Western colonial expansion into Asia and the spread of the Christian gospel, and its emergence was closely tied to Western powers’ policies toward Asia and to Orientalist imaginings of Tibet among Western publics26. Shifts in Western powers’ China policies and Tibetan resistance to missionaries in the modern era meant that NCBRAS Tibetological research became geographically concentrated on the Tibetan borderlands of Kham and Amdo. On the other hand, during the Society’s shift toward secularization and scientization, Tibetology remained led by Western missionary members, and figures such as J. H. Edgar continued to write in ways that served religious ends. The divergence shows that changes in institutional aims did not translate into corresponding shifts in individual research trajectories, which demonstrates the resilience of Christian knowledge production under secularizing pressures. Missionary Tibetology presented itself as breaking with nineteenth-century “armchair” Orientalism and as approaching Tibetan life more “truthfully.” Yet this claim sat uneasily with its ultimate purpose, which remained the advancement of Christian missions, and it ultimately reinscribed Tibetan society and history within a Western-centered narrative.

Finally, the weakening and stagnation of NCBRAS Tibetology signaled a westward re-centering of missionary research on Southwest China—especially Chengdu. Before the 1920s, the NCBRAS was the chief research center for the margin areas; after missionaries founded the West China Border Research Society in 1922, J. H. Edgar and T. Torrance joined as honorary presidents (Y. Wang 2005, p. 139) and shifted their principal publications to the Journal of the West China Border Research Society. This transfer of personnel and outlet drove a sharp decline in Tibetological papers in the JNCBRAS from the 1930s. Carrying forward the NCBRAS tradition of the research of frontier ethnic groups, the West China Border Research Society gradually separated missionary from scholarly roles and further pushed Christian institutions in China from religiously framed inquiry toward more scientific research (P. Li et al. 2024).

Taken as a whole, NCBRAS Tibetological research not only records the long transformation in Western missionary Tibetology between 1857 and 1952—from coastal to inland regions, from amateur engagement to professional scholarship, and from textual collation to fieldwork-based investigation—but also reflects how, amid shifting configurations of mission, colonialism, and scholarship, missionaries used the concrete field of “Tibetology” to fashion a form of epistemic “modernity” marked by religiosity and coloniality27. In this sense, NCBRAS’s Tibetological research offers an important case for understanding that the modernization of knowledge production was not a neutral process of academic progress but rather a historical process tightly entangled with evangelization, colonial politics, and the institutionalization of academic disciplines.