Richard Madsen Quoted on Religious Revival in China
Shanghai's Red Church rises once again
02/27/2011
Martha Groves,
The Los Angeles Times
"Empire of the Sun," J.G. Ballard's atmospheric novel about his coming of age in China, opens on the eve of Pearl Harbor. Shanghai Cathedral choir boys are being marched to the crypt to watch newsreels of Royal Air Force fighter planes falling in flames to the English countryside.
The cathedral's actual name was Holy Trinity, and Ballard, the son of expatriate Britons, attended the cathedral's prestigious boys school.
Built in a Victorian Gothic style in the 1860s, Holy Trinity served for nearly eight decades as the spiritual home for colonialists who flocked to Shanghai after Britain's victory in the Opium Wars opened the port to trade. With its stout pews, stained-glass windows and 2,500-pipe organ, the red-brick Anglican church provided a cloistered haven in an exotic, untamed place.
Along with the men-only Shanghai Club and racehorse owners' Shanghai Race Club, "the cathedral was a central feature of British life in a faraway land," said Peter Hibbard, a British expat and president of the Royal Asiatic Society China in Shanghai. Here in the Red Church, as many called it, babies were baptized, couples were married and parishioners were laid to rest in a homey refuge complete with manicured lawn, gargoyles and spire.
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Richard Madsen received an MA in Asian studies and a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard. He is currently Professor of Sociology and director of the Council on East Asian Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is also a co-director of a Ford Foundation project to help revive the academic discipline of sociology in China.
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