Mission and Revolution in Central Asia - Svenska Missionskyrkan

immensity and its millions of non-Christians appealed to the mission leaders as a “challenge”,
which is was now time to address. 28
Here, to the inner of Asia, to “the most isolated country on earth”, an area of political
confrontation for the giants of the East, to a people completely governed by non-Christian
religions and with no knowledge of the Christian faith – this was the place to which Christian
mission now arrived, and it was Swedish missionaries who got the privilege of bringing the
gospel.
The missionaries were to experience the isolation of the country. But not only they. When
the British embassy official to China, Sir Eric Teichman, visited Kashgar in the 1930s, he
pointed out that the British Consulate in Kashgar was probably the most isolated one in the
whole British Empire. He writes about its extreme isolation and about how very difficult it
was to get there. 29 Another person expressing the same opinion is Eleanor Lattimore who was
on her honey moon trip in Eastern Turkestan, in 1927, with her husband Owen Lattimore.
They arrived in Kashgar and Jarkend where the couple got to know the Mission. There were
only very few white people in the whole province, the capital Urumchi included, according to
her. There was one British Consul, two Russian Consuls, one Irish Commissioner at the Post
Office, four Catholic priests, some British and Swedish missionaries, a couple of business
men, but not one single American. Travellers having visited the country, she continues, have
been few and “consequently the country is still in the blessed state of being very little
known”. 30 At the end of her diary she writes that the stay in Kashgar had given her the feeling
of having spent her honeymoon on another planet. 31
The missionaries came to a people being belonging to the most neglected ones among all
the Muslims of the world, says Samuel Zwemer, Professor of Missiology. And as late as
1929, there was Christian mission work going on among Muslims in Central Asia only in
Buchara and in the Swedish field. To that one could add a few touring missionaries, says
Zwemer. 32 He does not count the Catholic mission in the northern part of the province.
Decades would pass until mission people outside Sweden knew about this Mission.
Raquette spoke about these silent, unknown years in a lecture, in 1931:
“The world knows only very little about this country and only some two years ago did mission people in
the West turn their attention to it. And then, to their great astonishment, they realized that a small
evangelizing nation in the world had been awake and had gone to meet the rising sun in the East, nearly
20 years earlier. And this small nation was Sweden.” 33
Even though Kashgar was an exceptionally isolated place, the Mission would soon experience
the opposite. Kashgar was in fact the main town for a very large area in the inner of Asia, a
crossroads for many roads and interests. Höijer was right in his mission strategy. This was all
the time being stressed by different people during the missionary era. China Inland missionary
H.D. Hayward, for example, writes about this in 1935, when the Mission was going through
its hardest times. The Orthodox Russians present in the country had done nothing to
evangelize among the Muslims, he points out. The Swedish Mission was going through a
hard time, he continues, but it was strategically very important. 34 In his book Pivot of Asia,
28
General Conference minutes, 1893. Some people however were hesitant to the idea of closing down the
mission to Persia, among them E. John Larson (Larson, 1919, p. 52) The Challenge of Central Asia (World
Dominion Survey Series. Nr 1, p. 3).
29
Teichman, 1937, p. 151.
30
Lattimore, 1935, p. 8.
31
Ibid. p. 238.
32
Zwemer, 1929, p. 210.
33
The Missionsförbundet, 1928, p. 434. SMT, 1913, p. 84.
34
The Muslim World, 1935, p. 194.
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