Arthur Henderson Smith

Arthur Henderson Smith (July 18, 1845 – August 31, 1932) (Chinese name: 明恩溥; pinyin: Ming Enpu) was a Christian missionary and a member of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, noted for spending 54 years as a missionary in China and writing books which presented China to foreign readers.

Smith was born in Vernon, Connecticut, to a middle-class Protestant family described by historian Lydia H. Liu as "rich on either side with clergy and local respectability.

[6] Smith's "Rex Christus: An Outline Study of China" (1904) was a brief presentation of "a few selected topics" ranging from the religions to the make up of the soil.

[9] Smith's role in the siege was a minor one as a gate guard, but he gathered material for his book, China in Convulsion, which is the most detailed account of the Boxer Rebellion.

[10] In 1906, Smith helped to persuade President Theodore Roosevelt to devote the indemnity payments China was making to the United States to the education of Chinese students.

Harold R. Isaacs, in his influential Scratches on Our Minds (1958), said Smith wrote with a "suggestion of exhausted patience" as he undertook to write in the "scholarly manner", complete with "prefatory warnings against generalizations and a text dotted with sweeping statements.

He wrote that Smith also deplored the widespread use in the United States of the phrase "John Chinaman" applied to all Chinese because it spread the idea that all Chinese were alike and had no individual identities [16] Timothy Cheek for instance, wrote that Smith's work exemplified the ‘thinly disguised racism’ contained in the writings of many Protestant missionaries in China at that time.