Narratives of Religious Landscape: Reading Gender and Chinese Buddhism in the Travel Writing of Christian Women
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the narrative descriptions of the Chinese religious landscape embedded within nineteenth century Christian missionary writings. I demonstrate the potential use of Protestant missionary writings as sources in the academic study of religion in China for both the physical descriptions of religious places that they contain and the narratives they express regarding the religious activities and identities of Chinese women. Of particular interest to this study are the religious encounters experienced between Christian and Buddhist women. My analysis of the travel writings of three Protestant women, Eliza Bridgeman (1805–1871), Helen Nevius (1833–1910), and Isabelle Williamson (d. 1886), illustrates that Chinese women were highly active within sacred spaces across China. This article contributes to discourses on the history of women and Chinese Buddhism, offers historiographical insights into the origins of Western academic studies of Buddhism in China, and provides alternate source material for information about religious continuity and change in early modern China.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".