Alfred Marie Caubrière (1876-1948) and His Private Writings in Early Twentieth-Century Manchuria

Abstract

Alfred Marie Caubrière (1876-1948) was a French Catholic missionary from the Société des Missions Étrangèrés de Paris (MEP) who worked in Manchuria for about half a century from 1899 to 1948. During his stay in Manchuria, Caubrière has left us two sets of manuscripts: 1) Over six hundred family letters written to his parents in France, including over one hundred illustrations depicting daily life of Chinese Catholic villagers, kids, churches, houses, village scenes and rituals. 2) A thirteen-volume Chinese language study notes which record word-by-word over two thousand entries of Chinese Catholics’ everyday conversions. A striking feature of the conversations lies in their extremely private and intimate contents, which contain the topics of pregnancy, childbirth, midwife and delivery, postpartum confinement (zuoyuezi), gift about a baby's completion of its first month (xianai), quarrels between husband and wife, complaints of in-laws and breaking up the family and living apart. A dutiful missionary and a meticulous ethnographer, Caubrière used his pen to open up a window for us to examine the ways in which Chinese Catholic villagers appropriated the traditions, languages, discourses and symbols that make up a religion and a local culture in everyday situations. Examination of these private writings also allow us to construct the family and private life in Chinese Catholic communities, to rethink the historical process of indigenization and the impact of Christianity in China on grassroots level.