User:CWH/Isaac Taylor Headland

Isaac Taylor Headland (b. 16 August 1859, Freedom, Pennsylvania- 2 August 1942, Alliance, Ohio), was an American missionary and educator known for his work in China. 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 福州. He also published numerous articles and books. After he returned to America in 1907, he taught comparative religion at Mount Union College in Beaverton.

Biography
Isaac Taylor Headland was born on August 16, 1859 in Freedom, PA. 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 1990, 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 an exhibition of Chinese paintings from his collection. He took the chair, he specified that he would take no salary, in Missions and Comparative Study of Religions at Mount Union College from 1914 to 1937. He died on August 2, 1942 in Alliance, Ohio.

Study of Chinese Children and play
Headland joined the movement for the scientific study of play in China when a group of Chinese and foreign scholars formed the Child Study Association. The general impression 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 he 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. Headland's evident purpose was to interest American children in supporting China missions or to become China missionaries.

Collector and scholar of Chinese art and culture
Headland collected some 500 paintings, some of which he put on exhibition in Pittburgh in 1908. Charles Freer boought one of these paintings, now in the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C., Pavilion of Rising Clouds, attributed to the Song dynasty painter [[Mi Fu}, (1052-1107).

Headland sold Chinese paintings and other work to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Two of the most important and oldest paintings in the Freer collection, allegedly Song (Sung) dynasty works, were brought to Freer's door in Detroit and sold to him by Headland.

Headland's views were what we would now call Cultural relativism "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."

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'' [etc.] Fleming H. Revell company, [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

 * Isaac Taylor Headland, Exhibition of Chinese Paintings: Part of the collection of Professor Isaac Taylor Headland, April 15–30 (Pittsburgh, 1908).
 * Isaac Taylor Headland, 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

 * reprint accessed December 3, 2020.






 * 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.




 * GOOGLE BOOK SEARCH


 * http://selfknowledge.com/194au.htm Encyclopedia of the Self]