Oberlin Band (China)

[1] Its abolitionist activism led one historian to call Oberlin the "town that started the Civil War.

"[2] After the Civil War, Oberlin turned much of its attention to the spread of the Christian gospel of salvation around the world.

[4] Thus, a missionary could foster the blessings of both Christianity and civilization in the non-Christian countries, the largest of which was China, ruled by the Qing dynasty.

Underlying the enthusiasm for missionary endeavor was the theory that it was essential to convert the world to Christianity to anticipate the coming of the millennium, the thousand-year reign of Christ foretold in the Bible.

[5]: 22–23 The idealism and social and religion activism of Oberlin made it a major contributor to the missionary enterprise around the world.

Oberlin graduates such as William Scott Ament had joined the ABCFM and were living and working in China in the 1870s as part of the effort to bring the gospel of Christianity to all peoples.

During the famine, caused by a drought, missionaries distributed food in the province to an estimated 3.4 million persons.

Charles D. Tenney moved away from conventional Christian beliefs to Unitarianism and favored attempting to evangelize only among the elite.

[12] The Oberlin Band's Annual Report for 1899 mentions rumors among the Chinese that the Christian missionaries were poisoning wells.

This was perhaps the first harbinger in Shanxi of the Boxers—an anti-Christian, anti-foreign peasant movement that began in Shandong province in 1898 and spread north and west.

The Boxers were a millenarian movement which believed that by observing the proper rituals they could become invulnerable to Christian bullets and kill or expel the hated foreigners from China.

In June 1900, Boxer emissaries arrived in Taigu and Fenzhou and the missionaries began to experience threats and taunts as they moved around the city and the countryside.

That day passed without incident for the Oberlin Band in Taigu and Fenzhou but two young Englishwomen, missionaries of the China Inland Mission, were killed in an outlying village.

[14] On July 9, 45 foreign missionaries, Protestant and Catholic, and Chinese Christian leaders were executed by beheading in the government courtyard in Taiyuan.

Francis Ward Davis, both of whose wives were in the United States; and two single female missionaries, Susan Rowena Bird and Mary Louise Partridge.

(See Battle of Tientsin and Siege of the International Legations), but not until January 1901 did German soldiers reach Shanxi and learn the fate of the Oberlin Band and other missionaries in the province.

[21] In 1951, Oberlin College and Shanxi Agriculture University lost contact with each other following the outbreak of the Korean War.