From Mission Text to Public Text: Mission Educational Print and the Making of Useful Knowledge in Kashgar, 1912-1932

Abstract

This paper examines how the Swedish Mission Press in Kashgar transformed missionary print into a broader framework of educational and practical writing between 1912 and 1932. It argues that the press did not merely supply mission schools with textbooks but played a pivotal role in reorganizing vernacular literacy itself by turning reading into a graded discipline, useful knowledge into a portable textual form, and local writing practices into objects of standardization. In this process, the schoolbook became more than a pedagogical tool; it emerged as a medium through which arithmetic, geography, documentary literacy, and orthography could circulate well beyond the classroom. The paper begins with the establishment of the printing office and demonstrates why educational print emerged under the material and institutional conditions of missionary work in the western regions of China. It then traces how arithmetic manuals, geography textbooks, and model letter collections linked school learning to trade, calculation, document use, and social practice. Finally, it examines the regional ambition of this textual project through the language of the Six Cities and the concerted effort to produce a common written norm. What emerged was not yet a public sphere in the full political sense, but rather a field of public texts: reproducible, portable, and widely legible forms that allowed readers in Kashgar and beyond to imagine themselves as participants in a shared written order. This study contributes to the broader historiography of print culture, missionary education, and knowledge circulation in early twentieth-century Central Asia.