On April 22, six of us traveled from Nanjing and Shanghai to Hangzhou. We visited John Leighton Stuart’s former residence and Tianshui Church before proceeding to Anxianyuan Cemetery on Banshan Hill to pay our respects at his grave. Along the way, we listened to the guides and shared our thoughts with one another. Shiguang serves in a Christian writing ministry. What follows is the essay he wrote after the visit.
Few figures in modern Chinese history have been as obscured by the dust of history—or by the one-sided judgments of a particular era—as John Leighton Stuart (1876–1962). Yet when we clear away the layers of accumulated perception and look at him anew, we discover not only a bridge figure who moved between Chinese and Western cultures, but also a man from another land who regarded traditional Chinese culture with profound respect, affinity, and compassion—a Chinese at heart.
Stuart was indeed a missionary, educator, and diplomat. But he was also a foreign-born son of China, deeply immersed in Chinese culture and possessed of a sincere respect and love for it. He once described himself as “more Chinese than American.” This was no diplomatic courtesy. It was a concise account of the life he actually lived.
For pastors and Christian workers in China, Stuart’s approach to Chinese culture remains especially relevant. Throughout the long history of Christianity’s encounter with Chinese culture, the Chinese Church has moved from the fierce confrontation of the Chinese Rites Controversy to the constructive explorations of the Christian indigenization movement. Through his distinctive life experience and cultural vision, Stuart opened another path—one free from the arrogance of cultural superiority and rooted instead, with incarnational humility, in this ancient land.
01 Born and Raised in China: A Cultural Affinity in His Blood
“I am more Chinese than American. I was born in Hangchow, and, apart from my early years, I spent most of my life in China…”
This was Stuart’s own confession in his memoir, Fifty Years in China: The Memoirs of John Leighton Stuart, Missionary and Ambassador. His identification with China arose neither from politeness nor flattery, still less from a contrived missionary strategy. It came from the deepest foundations of his life.
John Leighton Stuart was born on June 24, 1876, in a missionary residence beside Tianshui Church in Hangzhou. His parents were missionaries to China with the Southern Presbyterian Church. His father was commonly known in Chinese as Situ Er. In gratitude for the assistance they had received from Dr. John Leighton Wilson, executive secretary of the Southern Presbyterian Church’s foreign missions work, the Stuarts gave their first child the name John Leighton. For his Chinese surname, they used the first two characters of the Chinese transliteration of “Stuart”—Situ, which also happened to be an established Chinese surname. The little boy thus received a name that united East and West: Situ Leideng, or John Leighton Stuart.
His parents could hardly have imagined that this child’s entire life would become so deeply bound to China.
For the Stuarts, China was a mission field they had deliberately chosen. For their son, however, China was simply home. His earliest memories were not of the clamor of Western industry or the rise of modern cities, but of Jiangnan’s mist and rain, oil-paper umbrellas, stone-paved lanes, and neighbors speaking the unmistakable dialect of Hangzhou.
Born and raised in Hangzhou, Stuart was cared for by a Chinese nurse who spoke nothing but the local dialect. Hangzhou dialect was therefore the first language he learned. His earliest words were spoken in the local tongue; only later did he acquire English, Mandarin, and other languages. In Hangzhou dialect, shua zi’er means to go out and play. It may be difficult for us to imagine the scene: a boy who would one day become a missionary, educator, and diplomat—and who, to outward appearances, was a Westerner—running to his neighbors’ doors and calling to his childhood friends to come out and play.
The banquets and village operas of the Lunar New Year, the lanterns and delicacies of the Lantern Festival, and the illuminated boats and waterside pavilions of West Lake were all imprinted on his childhood memory and remained vivid throughout his life. He later recalled in his memoir:
“Although our lives were largely confined to the neighborhood of the mission compound, particular scenes remained vivid in my memory—the New Year’s Eve feast, the lanterns on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, boating on West Lake, and other customs of ordinary life.”
This childhood immersion in Chinese culture formed Stuart’s deepest emotional bond with China. It was not the rational attachment of a scholar who had arrived at an appreciation of China through study, nor an accommodation adopted for missionary purposes. It was a natural, embodied sense of belonging—something lived every day without conscious reflection, as instinctive as breathing. He spoke fluent Hangzhou dialect, and even his way of thinking acquired something of the gentleness and resilience associated with the people of Jiangnan.
China at the time was in the waning years of the Qing dynasty, weakened and impoverished after a long period of decline, while Europe and the United States were rapidly advancing. Many Western missionaries who came to China consequently carried a pronounced sense of cultural superiority. Some regarded Chinese culture as little more than a collection of “pagan remnants” that had to be eradicated.
Stuart was different. Having lived among Chinese people since childhood, he knew that the people of this land had their own joys and sorrows, as well as a moral and ethical order that had sustained their society for thousands of years. He recognized the value that traditional Chinese culture placed on the family, its reverence for the moral order of Heaven, and its pursuit of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and trustworthiness.
For pastors today, Stuart’s childhood and formation offer a profound lesson: genuine ministry begins with genuine identification. We cannot proclaim the gospel from the lofty posture of visitors from another world. We must understand intimately the cultural world of the people we seek to serve.
By 1887, Stuart’s parents had served in China for thirteen years. Under the Southern Presbyterian Church’s regulations, they were entitled to a year of home leave. Stuart and his three younger brothers therefore accompanied their parents on their first journey to the United States—a country entirely unfamiliar to them. Stuart was eleven years old.
His first experience of America was not a happy one.
He later recalled that a female attendant aboard the ship told them that he and his brothers were the most ignorant children she had ever encountered. They knew nothing about many things other children took entirely for granted.
Once in the United States, Stuart’s parents had numerous responsibilities, particularly speaking at churches across the country to awaken support for overseas missions. Although Stuart was now in America, his parents continued to have him wear Chinese clothing, eat with chopsticks, and sing hymns in Chinese, presenting him to American congregations as a living illustration of the “China mission field.”
As a result, he endured ridicule, pranks, and exclusion from his classmates, who regarded him as an outsider. The young Stuart naturally disliked the experience. Yet the very fact that he was treated as different testified to how deeply China had already marked him.
When their year of leave ended, Stuart’s parents returned to Hangzhou in the fall of 1888 with their two younger sons. John and his eldest younger brother, David, remained in the United States to continue their education. Stuart then underwent a difficult period of cultural adjustment. It was not until the age of sixteen that he began to shed what others saw as his “distinctively Chinese stamp” and become, in outward terms, a “normal American boy.”
The course of his life, however, would demonstrate that this Chinese imprint had only been temporarily concealed. The memories and attachments of childhood would never disappear.
At the end of 1904, Stuart returned to Hangzhou with his new wife, Aline, beginning a life in China that would extend for nearly half a century. He not only mastered the Chinese language but also developed an intimate understanding of Chinese patterns of thought and feeling. This cultural formation gave his educational work and Christian practice in China a foundation markedly different from that of many missionaries of his generation.
02 The Way of Confucius and Mencius and the Way of Christ: A Distinctive Cultural Theology
If Stuart’s emotional attachment to Chinese culture was rooted in his childhood, his intellectual appreciation of it was most clearly expressed through his sustained study and distinctive interpretation of the Confucian classics. In this respect, he moved beyond many missionaries of his era who regarded Chinese culture as purely “pagan” or “backward,” and developed something approaching a new framework of cultural theology.
The Confucian classics stood at the center of Stuart’s long engagement with Chinese culture. In his memoir, he stated candidly that Chinese culture inspired in him a sense of reverence and had deeply shaped his own capacity for tolerance and forbearance. He read widely in the Chinese classics. Among Chinese thinkers, Mencius and Wang Yangming appealed to him most strongly.
Mencius’s moral courage in speaking on behalf of the people, his forceful condemnation of tyranny, and his people-centered conviction that “the people are of supreme importance; the state comes next; the ruler is of lesser importance” resonated deeply with the biblical tradition of God’s concern for the poor and defense of the vulnerable.
In the thought of Mencius, Stuart perceived a social philosophy that could be described as possessing a “democratic spirit.” He referred to Mencius’s admiration for the dignity of a beggar who would rather starve than accept food offered with contempt. The original passage appears in the chapter “Gaozi I” of the Mencius:
“If it is offered with an insult, even a traveler on the road will refuse it; if it is kicked toward him, even a beggar will disdain it.”
For Stuart, this was no simple moral injunction. It was a profound affirmation of human dignity: even under the threat of hunger and death, a beggar could still choose to preserve his integrity.
If Mencius represented the social concern and democratic impulse within Confucian thought, Wang Yangming represented its tradition of introspection and moral self-cultivation. Stuart’s affinity for the Lu-Wang School of Mind may have arisen, at least in part, from its resonance with the Christian spiritual tradition’s emphasis on the inner life and moral self-awareness.
The Cheng-Zhu School of Principle emphasized an outward path of “investigating things and extending knowledge,” while the Lu-Wang School of Mind stressed the inward realization of one’s “innate moral knowledge.” Together, these traditions formed two central dimensions of Chinese Confucian thought.
It was through this deep engagement with Chinese classical thought that Stuart developed a missionary philosophy markedly different from that of many other missionaries in China at the time. Since the late Qing period, many Western missionaries had approached China with a sense of cultural superiority and a determination to destroy “pagan idols,” treating Confucianism as an enemy to be eradicated.
Stuart, by contrast, believed that Christianity had come to China not to destroy, but to fulfill.
This insight arose from his precise understanding of the psychological and cultural structure of Chinese society. As he once observed:
“If the Chinese are to be converted to Christianity, they must never be incited to renounce the veneration of their ancestors. Such an approach would only prove counterproductive, with potentially disastrous consequences.”
In Chinese society, ancestral rites were not simply religious ceremonies. They were a foundation of the entire ethical order and social structure. To demand that Chinese people abandon them wholesale was effectively to ask them to sever their living ties to family, history, and culture.
Stuart’s efforts pointed toward a more ambitious goal: to find a key capable of opening communication between the Christian spirit and the traditional culture and ethics of China. He placed the Confucian concept of ren—benevolence or humaneness—alongside the Christian understanding of love.
Although he never developed these ideas into a complete and systematic theology, he opened a highly suggestive path in both thought and practice. In A Recent History of Christian Missions, a work produced in collaboration with Chen Jinyong, this approach found a more mature expression. Stuart drew upon the Confucian ideal of datong, or “Great Unity,” to describe Christianity’s ultimate vision. In his understanding, the Confucian aspiration toward “Great Harmony under Heaven” pointed toward the same highest horizon sought by the Christian faith.
Theologically, Stuart belonged to the liberal camp and was, in many respects, one of its leading representatives within the Chinese Church of his time. Christians may agree or disagree with his theological position. Yet regardless of where one stands, his practice in the areas of missionary methodology and incarnational engagement with culture continues to offer valuable reminders to the Chinese Church today.
Conservative Christians regarded Stuart’s approach as theological syncretism or liberal theology. For this reason, he was not well received by many conservative missionaries. A number of missionaries with conservative theological commitments—particularly those associated with denominations and missions such as the China Inland Mission, which emphasized direct evangelism—strongly resisted and at times openly criticized him.
What Stuart sought to affirm, however, was that the noble values already present within a culture should not be treated as enemies of the gospel. They could instead serve as a preparation for it, and even as an aid to its reception.
He believed that the Confucian virtues of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and trustworthiness; the discipline of self-cultivation; and a profound sense of responsibility toward family and nation were not obstacles to the gospel. On the contrary, they constituted an exceptionally rich moral soil.
The history of modern missions had repeatedly demonstrated the difficulty of proclaiming the gospel in places where a strong moral foundation was absent. Confucian ethics, by contrast, offered an existing cultural vocabulary through which Christian teachings on sacrifice, universal love, and service could be understood.
Stuart studied the Confucian classics not because he wished to become a Confucian scholar, but because he was seeking an answer to a fundamental question:
How could Christianity be expressed and communicated in China through a language of thought that Chinese people could genuinely understand?
03 Founding Yenching University: Embedding Cultural Respect in Educational Practice
Stuart was not merely an advocate of these ideas. He became a practitioner who gave them institutional form and protection.
In 1919, Stuart was commissioned to merge Peking University, North China Union College, and North China Union Women’s College—three mission institutions in Beijing and the surrounding region—into Yenching University. He became its first president.
From that moment until his departure from China in 1949, he devoted most of his time and energy to the university. When he assumed responsibility for the institution, it lacked strong and unified leadership. Internal factions abounded, and the various missionary societies involved were deeply divided. The school did not even possess a formal name or a permanent campus. For a time, it used “Peking University” as its English name, creating a serious conflict with the national university already known by that name.
The institution was also burdened by a severe financial deficit. Stuart therefore took personal responsibility for raising funds, crossing the Pacific ten times to secure support for Yenching University.
From the beginning, Stuart established a central educational principle: Yenching was to be “a Christian university, but one thoroughly Chinese.”
He strongly opposed reducing a church-affiliated university to an instrument of narrowly defined Christian higher education. In his view, an excellent Chinese university had to be deeply rooted in the country’s own cultural soil. Through sustained effort, he transformed Yenching into one of the most important centers in China for exploring dialogue between Confucianism and Christianity.
Wu Leichuan, a former member of the Hanlin Academy and a distinguished scholar whom Stuart strongly supported and appointed as Yenching’s first Chinese chancellor in 1929, embodied this vision. Wu sought within the Confucian classics a redemptive spirit compatible with Christianity. He argued that the noble character of China’s traditional scholar-officials should be preserved while being infused with the Christian commitment to active service in the world.
T. C. Chao, or Zhao Zichen, who served as dean of Yenching University’s School of Religion, also represented this intellectual approach. He sought to remove the heavy “Western cultural clothing” in which Western theology had been wrapped and to reinterpret Christian doctrine through the language of traditional Chinese philosophy. His work closely aligned with Stuart’s conviction that the noble values already present within a culture could assist, rather than obstruct, the gospel.
Although he was a foreign president, Stuart attached extraordinary importance to the study of China’s own intellectual traditions. He established high-quality departments of Chinese literature and history at Yenching and later helped create the renowned Harvard-Yenching Institute. Through these institutions, he sought both to preserve and advance traditional Chinese culture and to make Yenching a leading center of scholarship in China and the wider world.
In the early 1920s, Chinese nationalism continued to intensify. The Anti-Christian Movement and the Movement to Reclaim Educational Rights placed Christian schools—and especially Christian universities—at the center of public controversy. Many Chinese intellectuals regarded mission universities as instruments of imperialist cultural aggression.
Under this immense pressure, most Christian universities adopted a defensive and conservative posture. Stuart chose a different course. Rather than placing himself in opposition to Chinese public opinion, he responded to the direction of the times by introducing comprehensive reforms at Yenching.
He insisted that Yenching could not remain merely “a school established in China by Westerners.” It had to become “a thoroughly Chinese university.”
Stuart implemented a series of measures to make the university genuinely Chinese. Yenching was among the first Christian universities to register with the Chinese government, thereby becoming a legally recognized member of China’s national educational system. Chinese faculty and administrators were given greater responsibility in academic affairs, administration, religious life, finance, and other departments. Teaching in Chinese literature and history was strengthened. Religious education ceased to be compulsory, and neither students nor faculty members were required to attend chapel services.
These reforms were startlingly bold for their time. Yet they were also among the clearest expressions of Stuart’s respect for Chinese culture.
His educational philosophy was most concisely expressed in the motto he established for Yenching University:
“Freedom Through Truth for Service.”
The phrase drew upon the central spirit of the Christian Scriptures: education is a means of knowing the truth; the truth makes human beings free; and this freedom is not the freedom to place oneself above others or exercise power over them, but the freedom to serve.
The Yenching University anthem is equally revealing. Its lyrics include the lines:
“Good teachers and true friends,Each polishing the other,United in purpose and aspiration.Eagerly pressing forward in search of truth,We live in the fullness of freedom.”
The expression “each polishing the other” comes from “Qi Ao” in the Book of Songs:
“There is the noble gentleman—Cut and polished,Carved and burnished.”
T. C. Chao, who wrote the lyrics to the Yenching anthem, incorporated an image from one of China’s most ancient collections of poetry into his expression of the university spirit. This itself became a powerful symbol of cultural integration.
Stuart did not directly write the anthem’s words or music. Yet as the central figure in Yenching’s life, he was profoundly connected to every note and every line.
The design of Yenching’s campus likewise carried deep cultural meaning. Stuart once said:
“The buildings themselves symbolize the purpose of our education: to preserve the finest elements of China’s cultural heritage.”
When the campus was being built, Stuart insisted that its architecture adopt traditional Chinese forms.
Objectively speaking, Stuart the educator was far more successful—and made a far more enduring impression—than Stuart the missionary or diplomat.
04 “Civilization Knows No Borders”: A Vision Beyond Cultural Centralism
It would be a serious mistake to assume that Stuart respected and embraced Chinese culture merely because he had been born and raised in China.
When we examine his words across the course of his life, a consistent theme emerges: he pursued a vision in which human civilizations could enter into dialogue and enrich one another. He remained deeply wary of every wall built along the lines of nationality, geography, or religion.
Stuart met many prominent Chinese figures during his lifetime, including a considerable number of military and political leaders. During one meeting with Sun Chuanfang, the Shandong-born commander-in-chief of the allied armies of five provinces, Sun asked him a blunt question:
“Why do foreigners come to China to educate the Chinese?”
It was an extraordinarily difficult question—almost any answer could easily have been the wrong one.
Stuart replied:
“Civilization knows no national boundaries. Civilization belongs to the world. If we wish to understand one another’s civilizations more deeply, we must bring together the civilizations of the entire world. Our goal is to work alongside China’s traditional culture and together create a new culture.”
At a time of rising nationalism, when memories of China’s humiliation at the hands of Western powers remained painfully fresh, Stuart did not resort to the arrogant language of “helping China progress.”
Instead, he spoke of bringing civilizations together—a humble and expansive expression. He spoke of working alongside Chinese culture: not replacing it, not remolding it, but moving forward together.
05 Stuart’s Final Years and Resting Place
On August 2, 1949, amid the storms and upheavals of a rapidly changing era, John Leighton Stuart left the China to which he had devoted most of his life and returned to the United States.
He would never set foot on Chinese soil again.
Stuart died in Washington, D.C., on September 19, 1962, at the age of eighty-six.
The final thirteen years of his life were marked by isolation, illness, and disappointment. Not long after his return to the United States in August 1949, he suffered a severe stroke that November, leaving him partially paralyzed and largely unable to speak. He spent nearly all of his remaining years in a wheelchair or confined to bed.
Even then, he often recalled the West Lake of his childhood and the narrow lanes of Hangzhou.
During his final years, Stuart was cared for by his former Yenching student and personal secretary, Philip Fugh, or Fu Jingbo, together with Fu’s family. This bond between teacher and student, transcending nationality and blood, was itself a fitting response to the Chinese ideals of respect for teachers and loyalty in human relationships.
For a missionary and educator who had devoted his life to Chinese education and the care of human souls, the desolation of Stuart’s final years appears profoundly tragic.
More moving still, however, was his final wish. He asked that his ashes be returned to China and buried on the campus of Yenching University beside his beloved wife, Aline, where the traditional Chinese eaves, painted beams, and waters of Weiming Lake might remain his companions forever. Aline had rested at Yenching since her death in 1926; the former Yenching campus is now part of Peking University.
“I am more Chinese than American.”
For Stuart, this was not a piece of sentimental rhetoric. It was the final recognition, before God, of where his earthly belonging lay.
He died in the United States, his legal homeland. Yet the country that remained in his thoughts was China—the homeland of his heart. His heart remained, until death, in the Eastern land for which he had shed his blood, sweat, and tears.
For various reasons, Stuart’s ashes were ultimately unable to enter the former Yenching campus, now Peking University. Hangzhou, however, received him as a native son.
The city that held all his childhood memories became his final resting place more than half a century after his death. In 2008, following extensive negotiations, his ashes were interred at Anxianyuan Cemetery on Banshan Hill in Hangzhou.
His gravestone bears only his name, the years of his birth and death, and the words:
“First President of Yenching University.”
John Leighton Stuart, a servant of God, found his final rest in the place where his life had begun. Perhaps this completed the circle of his life. It also represented Chinese culture’s acceptance of this son who had come from another land.
On April 22, 2026, rain fell steadily over Anxianyuan Cemetery on Banshan Hill.
When I arrived at Stuart’s grave, it was clear that others had visited before me. Wreaths had been placed on either side of the headstone, and a Bible lay at its foot.
Both the wreaths and the Bible had been left by Chinese visitors. Written in Chinese on the wreaths were words of gratitude to Stuart. The Bible was a Chinese Union Version—the translation Stuart himself had very likely read.
It has been said that death is not the end; to be forgotten is.
Thankfully, in the China to which John Leighton Stuart gave his life, there are still people who remember him.
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