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DATE: Wednesday. November 11, 2026. 7:20PM (Seoul)
VENUE: Fifth floor (Conference Room) of FAST FIVE Tower (Namdaemun-ro 9-gil 24, Jung-gu, Seoul), a short walk from Exit 1 of Euljiro-1-ga Station (을지로입구역, Metro Line 2)
SUMMARY:
East Asia has historically attracted eccentric, malcontented, miscreant, and amoral Western expatriates, confidence men, and adventurers, and the nineteenth century was probably their golden age. This talk concerns one of the most notorious: the German Lutheran minister Karl Friedrich August Gützlaff (1803–1851). A man of protean interests, in addition to being an ardent Protestant evangelist gifted in languages, he served as an interpreter for opium smugglers, the East India Company, and the British government during the First Opium War. He was also a swashbuckling adventurer, a magistrate and Chinese Secretary to the Governor of Hong Kong, a prolific writer on Christianity and Asian culture (which, ironically, influenced Karl Marx), a master of public relations, a contributor to a Chinese translation of the Bible, and even a British spy.
Yet Gützlaff was also an extremely controversial figure who died in disgrace. Although capable of great charm and respected for his linguistic abilities, he was widely disliked, considered arrogant and duplicitous, and regarded with deep suspicion by many contemporaries, so much so that the noted British Sinologist and translator Arthur Waley famously described him as “a cross between parson and pirate, charlatan and genius, philanthropist and crook.” The novelist Timothy Mo, in his celebrated novel An Insular Possession, about the foundation of Hong Kong and the Opium Wars, portrayed Gützlaff as “a controversial figure – ‘that sinister eye’ – regarded by many as a hypocrite, if not a murderer,” and the historian Julia Lovell has dryly remarked that he was “fluent in both self-deception and China’s southeastern dialects.”
This lecture will discuss Gützlaff’s colorful and contentious experiences as a missionary and interpreter in China during the First Opium War, including his close association with opium smugglers and participation in the negotiations resulting in the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, which ended the war; his landmark 1832 visit to Korea, where he stayed for a month and developed an interest in the Korean language; and his prodigious writings, particularly those concerning Korean, as well as his authorship in 1832 of the first interpretative essay in English on China’s greatest novel, Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng), in which he fundamentally misread the work. The talk will conclude by addressing whether Gützlaff deserves the negative reputation he has acquired.
BIO:
Ronald Gray has taught at universities in Japan, Korea, China, and, most recently, the United States. He has written seven books, including several on Dream of the Red Chamber. He lives in Gongju, South Korea.
ADMISSION (Online & In-person):
Free for RAS Korea Lifetime and Annual Members; W10,000 for Non-members; W5,000 for Non-member students (Student ID requested)
