This paper investigates the evangelistic tactics of Welsh Baptist missionary Timothy Richard (1845-1919) in late Qing China by focusing on the Tune Book in Chinese Notation (1883). This work, a collaboration with his wife, Mary Richard (1843-1903), merged Christian hymnody with traditional Chinese musical elements, embodying a strategic inculturation approach (Franzen 1988; Shorter 2006) that respected local cultural norms in order to advance Christian conversion. Simultaneously, the Tune Book exemplifies Homi Bhabha's concept of hybridity in its intricate dynamics of cultural blending and colonial power, highlighting the resilience of Chinese converts in navigating the complexities of embracing Christianity while maintaining their cultural identity under colonial influence. Previous studies (Liu 1988; Gong 2017) have praised the Tune Book for its merits in cultural syncretism without fully addressing its colonial implications. This research revisits the Tune Book, critically examining its integration of Tonic Sol-fa and staff notation with the Chinese gongche notation. This synthesis subtly enforces a narrative of cultural superiority, echoing colonialist views that non-Western traditions required Western refinement. I argue that the Tune Book reveals a complex relationship between inculturation and hybridity, where cultural exchanges can both empower local identities and serve as vehicles for cultural imperialism. This duality underscores the ambiguous nature of such exchanges, where cultural resilience and the mechanisms of dominance coexist. This study contributes to comparative religion and postcolonial studies by offering a nuanced understanding of power dynamics in colonial-era cultural engagements, revealing the role of music pedagogy among missionary activities in Sino-Western encounters.

The purpose of this study is to explore how indigenous songs have been adapted into hymns and the challenges encountered in the process. Let the Hills Sing: Hymns of the tribal Christians in Taiwan was a music score jointly published in 1986 by the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan and the Asian Institute for Liturgy and Music based in Philippines. It includes 25 hymns adapted from indigenous songs, representing six ethnic groups, accompanied by a cassette recording, aiming to introduce contextualized indigenous hymns to all believers. This highly experimental practice not only embodied the ideal of developing contextualized and indigenous Christian music in the Asian churches at that time but also held particular significance against the backdrop of the indigenous movement in the 1980s Taiwan. The research utilizes interviews and music score analysis to investigate the compilation process, song selection, origin tracing, and recording process. It seeks to clarify the methods used in adapting indigenous songs into hymns and reveals significant discrepancies between the musical notation and recordings of some hymns. In certain cases, the complexity is so high that musical scores cannot be printed, with only lyrics and reference notation from other hymnals being provided. In the context of Taiwanese hymn research predominantly focused on the tracing of lyrics and song origins, this study represents a new attempt by incorporating historical recording materials to witness the process of hymn contextualization.