User:CWH/Isaac Taylor Headland

Isaac Taylor Headland (b. 16 August 1859, Freedom, Pennsylvania- 2 August 1942, Alliance, Ohio), was an American Protestant missionary and educator known for his work in China and introducing Chinese painting to the United States. Headland was associated with the Education Association of China, the Peking Missionary Association, and the YMCA. From 1901 to 1904 he served as president of the Anglo-Chinese College 鶴齡英華書院 in Fuzhou. He also published influential articles and books, such as The Chinese Mother Goose (1900) and The Chinese Boy and Girl (1901).

After he returned to America in 1907, he taught comparative religion at Mount Union College until 1937.

Biography

Isaac Taylor Headland was born on August 16, 1859 in Freedom, Pennsylvania. In 1888 he graduated with an A.B. from Mount Union College, and in 1911 he was also awarded an honorary Ph.D. In October 1890, he arrived in China as a missionary under the auspices of the American Methodist Episcopal Mission. He was posted to Beijing, and worked as professor of science at Peking University.

After the death of his first wife, on June 11, 1894 he married Marian Sinclair, a Canadian doctor and missionary. She relinquished her position as head of the Presbyterian Womens Hospital in Beijing to become professor of hygeine at Peking University. As a woman, she could be physician to the women in the imperial family and high official, including the Empress Dowager Cixi, then effectively the political ruler of China. Headland drew on his wife's associations with these families for his Court life in China. Headland supplied the Guangxu Emperor with translations of texts in science and technology. While the Headland family was on leave in the United States in 1900, all of their goods were destroyed in the Boxer Uprising, except his diplomas. He was forced to return to the United States in 1907 when he contracted Celiac disease, or "Sprue," a painful intestinal condition. He continued to travel and lecture in the United States, however, and mounted exhibitions of Chinese paintings from his collection..

When he took the chair in Missions and Comparative Study of Religions at Mount Union College he specified that he would take no salary. He taught there from 1914 to 1937. He died on August 2, 1942 in Alliance, Ohio.

Study of Chinese Children and play

Headland joined a group of Chinese and foreign scholars formed the Child Study Association for the scientific study of play in China. The general impression among foreign observers of Chinese children had been that they were studious and industrious, but Headland observed children after school hours, which showed another side. He published his observations in The Chinese Mother Goose (1900) and The Chinese Boy and Girl (1901) Headland wrote that his book would "show that the same sunlight fills the homes of both East and West." He said that the book's "mission will have been accomplished" if it leads their "faraway playmates" in the West to "look upon the Chinese Boy and Girl as real folk, human like themselves, and thus think more kindly of them."

Hung Chang-tai, a recent historian of Chinese folklore studies, commented that foreign scholars like Headland gave an important impetus to Chinese folklore stdies. Headland's richly illustrated books "exerted considerable influence on the subsequent study of children's literature." The historian John Dardess, characterized Headland's views as "sunnier and more ebullient" than some of his colleagues, who thought the Chinese child studious and morose, but was less charitable in his assessment of The Young China Hunters (1912), which he called a "peculiar work, or so it appears now". The book is an imaginary visit of American children to Beijing, who explain to each other the strange sights they encounter but never engage with any Chinese, either children or adults. The book ends with Headland's verse translations of two primers used by well-off Beijing families. Dardess added that Headland's evident purpose was to interest American children in supporting China missions or to become China missionaries.

Collector and proponant of Chinese art and culture

Headland wanted the Western public to see Chinese and Western culture as of equal value, views that resembled what we would now call Cultural relativism. One later Chinese scholar commended him for writing "it is a mistake to suppose that any one nation or people has exclusive right to Mother Goose. She is an omnipresent old lady. She is Asiatic as well as European or American". In his exhibition catalogue he wrote, "The Chinese landscape tends to have a perspective "taken from a hilltop instead of from the level," a perspective which, Headland commented, is "as accurate as our own although based on different conventions."

He collected some 500 paintings. He bought The Peach Festival of the Queen Mother of the West from an imperial duke in 1908, and Pavillion of Rising Clouds, traditionally attributed to the Song dynasty painter Mi Fu, (1052-1107). He sold both to Charles Freer in 1919, and they are among the most important and oldest paintings in the collection of the Freer Gallery. Headland brought them to Freer's door in Detroit. Headland sold Chinese paintings and other work to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Selected writings

Those indicated are online at Hathi Trust and linked at Isaac Taylor Headland at The Online Books Page

• China's New Day: a Study of Events That Have Led to its Coming (West Medford, Mass.: Central Committee on the United Study of Missions, 1912) (HathiTrust)
• The Chinese Boy and Girl: (New York, Chicago: Fleming H. Revell, [1901]) ( HathiTrust) illustrated HTML at Virginia; Gutenberg text
• Chinese Heroes: Being a Record of Persecutions Endured by Native Christians in the Boxer Uprising, (New York, Eaton & Mains; Cincinnati, Jennings & Pye, [1902]) ( HathiTrust)
• Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes (New York, Chicago [etc.] Fleming H. Revell company, [c1900]) (HathiTrust) (Gutenberg ebook)
• Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes [music]: music based upon Chinese themes / (New York: C. Fischer, c1917), also by Bainbridge Crist ( HathiTrust)
• Court Life in China: the Capital, its Officials and People (New York et al.: F. H. Revell Co., c1909) (Gutenberg text)(HathiTrust)
• Home Life in China (New York; London: Macmillan, 1914) (HathiTrust)
• How to Use: a Handbook to Accompany China's New Day ([S.l.]: Central Committee on the United Study of Missions, [191-]), (HathiTrust)
• Midnight Items and Spare-moment Scraps (Cincinnati: Central Publishing House, 1886) (HathiTrust)
• Our Little Chinese Cousin (Boston: L.C. Page & Co., [1903]) ( HathiTrust)
• Some By-products of Missions (New York, Cincinnati: The Methodist book concern, [1924] (HathiTrust)
• The Young China Hunters: A Trip to China by a Class of Juniors in 1912 (West Medford, Mass., Central Committee on the United Study of Missions, [c1912]) (HathiTrust)

Sample articles

• Queer Chinese Trees, Scientific American Volume 86, Issue 21 | More Science, May 24, 1902
• The Unscientific Character of Chinese Play, Scientific American Volume 84, Issue 7 | More Science, February 16, 1901
• The Unscientific Chinese, Scientific American Volume 83, Issue 17 | More Science, October 27, 1900
• The New Ruler of China, The Century Magazine, April 1909, pp. 805-817

Exhibition catalogues

• "Exhibition of Chinese Paintings: Part of the collection of Professor Isaac Taylor Headland," April 15–30 (Pittsburgh, 1908).
• "Exhibition of Chinese Paintings: Part of the collection of Professor Isaac Taylor Headland, Ph.D.", Peking University, Century Club, March 13–19 (New York, 1909).

References and further reading

• Applegate, Roger (2012), "Rev. Arthur Taylor Headland: Missionary to China", Milestones, 34 (3), Beaver County reprint accessed December 3, 2020.
• Forster, Elisabeth (2017). "Rethinking the Inferiority Complex: Chinese Opinions on Westerners' Knowledge of Chinese (1910s-1930s)". Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. 45 (6): 923–941. doi:10.1080/03086534.2017.1358534. S2CID 159646472.
• Hung, Chang-tai (1985). Going to the People: Chinese Intellectuals and Folk Literature, 1918-1937. Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies Harvard University: Distributed by Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674356268.
• (Obituary), New York Times (August 3, 1942).
• David Shavit, The United States in Asia: A Historical Dictionary (New York, 1990), pp. 225–26.
• "Isaac Taylor Headland 1859–1942 Missionary, Author, and Academic," Freer Sackler 29 February 2016.
• Shin, Kin-Yee Ian (2016). Making "Chinese Art": Knowledge and Authority in the Transpacific Progressive Era (Thesis). Vol. PhD. New York: Columbia University.
• St. Clair, Michael (2016). The Great Chinese Art Transfer: How So Much of China's Art Came to America. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. ISBN 9781611479102.

Notes

Wikimedia

External links

• Finding Aid Isaac Taylor Headland Papers The Burke Library Archives, Columbia University Libraries, Union Theological Seminary, New York
• Taylor Headland
• Beaver County History Online
• University of Pennsylvania, Online Books by Isaac Taylor Headland