Hallock’s Gods
It’s unusual to be able to date old Chinese woodblock prints – the same designs were often used for decades, and the cheap paper that they’re printed on ages badly. But it is possible to pin the prints below to around 1930, thanks to the Reverend Henry Galloway Comingo Hallock (aka He Xianli, 赫显理). Born on 31 March 1870 at Holidays Cove, West Virginia, he was educated at Princeton Theological Seminary (where he was known as “Happy Hallock”), and in 1896 joined the American Presbyterian Mission at Shanghai.
Hallock was to remain in China for over fifty years, installed briefly as a professor and Dean of Theology at Shanghai’s prestigious St John’s University, pioneering Sunday Schools for underprivileged children, serving as pastor of the red-brick Endeavourer’s Church for Eurasians on the corner of Range and Chapoo roads, and publishing all manner of religious works in Chinese – including some 1,812,000 copies of his annual Hallock’s Chinese Almanac.
But none of this singled Hallock out from the hundreds of other Christian missionaries in China at the time, and he would have been forgotten if, in 1905, he hadn’t resigned from his mission. Now unfunded, he looked around for other ways to raise money and became a prolific writer of what today would be condemned as spam mail – enough to get him banned from any social media platform.
雙龍戲珠, Twin Dragons Play with a Pearl
Hallock would buy woodblock prints of Chinese deities at the markets in Shanghai, write letters describing their folklore, and then send them to potential donors in the US. The letters always ended with an appeal for funds, claiming these prints were proof that the Chinese worshiped heathen gods and needed converting to Christianity. Many of the prints and letters survive, creased from being folded to fit inside the distinctively narrow envelopes that he used.
From left: Stove God Zao Jun; Martial deity Guan Yu and his halberd-bearer, Zhou Cang; Huode, the fire deity
Continuing his missionary work at Shanghai through the following decades, Hallock celebrated the abolition of foot binding in China while lamenting that the country still showed no sign of converting to Christianity, remaining a place where “millions of idols are yet worshipped”.
Two prints of the Daoist patriarch Zhang Daoling riding his tiger, which is trampling the five disease-bringing poisons – represented by a toad, snake, centipede, lizard and spider. The left-hand print dates to 1927 and has been issued in the name of Shangqing Temple on Dragon-Tiger Mountain, a Daoist hub in Jiangxi province. But following the outlawing of folk gods the following year, the temple was robbed, sacked and burned down. The right-hand print, dating to 1930, makes no mention of the temple
Having already witnessed the Shanghai Massacre of 1927, where Nationalist-sponsored thugs slaughtered their left-wing opponents, in 1937 Hallock described the panic sweeping the city as it was bombed by the Japanese during the prolonged and bloody Battle of Shanghai. A letter from 1939 catalogued atrocities committed by the occupying forces: troops terrorising the Chinese population, schools and churches destroyed, missionaries driven away, converts murdered.
Aspects of the September Moon Festival. Left and centre show a newly immortal Chang’E escaping from her wrathful husband to live on the moon, where she becomes the Moon Goddess. The right-hand print illustrates the poem “Everlasting Sorrow” by Bai Juyi, about the legendary tragic romance between the beautiful concubine Yang Guifei and Tang emperor Xuanzong. It’s possible all three prints are lithographs
He was later interned by the Japanese at the Chapei Civilian Assembly Centre, whose inmates suffered severe overcrowding, a near-starvation diet, and outbreaks of malaria and dysentery. But Hallock survived, and by 1947 was back at his Endeavourer’s Church, reflecting on his half-century of danger, excitement and hard work in China.
From left: creator spirit Pan Gu; Thunder Department, with winged Lord of Thunder and his wife Lady Lightning; Confucius; Guanyin as bringer of children (and simultaneously as protector of fishermen). All but Confucius sport red, demon-deflecting seal stamps of Zhang Daoling
Hallock died at Shanghai in January 1951, aged 80, shortly before China’s Communist government began to expel foreign missionaries. It’s ironic today that this devout Christian’s major legacy is a scattered collection of letters and prints demonstrating his fascination for Chinese folk deities, something he studied in considerable depth and yet condemned in his writings as heathen superstition. But it is thanks to Hallock that these fragile prints have survived.