Photographs, pamphlets, books, and ephemera related to the life and work of Reverend Gilbert Reid and Sallie Reynolds Reid. The collection documents the Reids’ experience as American missionaries in Peking and Shanghai from 1882-1927. Materials include family photographs, photographs of the International Institute of China, and a photographic chronicle of the Siege of Peking (Boxer Rebellion) of 1900.

Gilbert Reid was an American Presbyterian missionary active in China from 1882 until his death in 1927. Born in 1857 in Laurel, New York, he graduated from Hamilton College in 1879 and from Union Theological Seminary in 1882. In 1894, after two years as a practicing Presbyterian missionary in China, Reid founded the International Institute of China to advance Christianity among China’s upper classes and to promote greater understanding between Christians and non-Christians. Under his direction, the International Institute became an interfaith forum in which representatives of world religions sought common ground on questions of faith, ethics, and social action. Reid was the author of several books, including Glances at China (1892) and A Christian’s Appreciation of Other Faiths (1921), and a frequent columnist for The London Times, New York Herald Tribune, and other papers. In 1917, Reid began publishing the Peking Post to argue against Chinese involvement in World War I. His stance led to his exile to the Philippines in 1917. Reid returned to Shanghai after the war, where he died in 1927. Sallie B. Reynolds Reid was born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1864 and educated at the Columbia Female College and the New England Conservatory of Music. She began missionary work in China in 1892 under the auspices of the Woman’s Board of Foreign Missions, a missionary division of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. She married Gilbert Reid in 1897 and thereafter played an active role at the International Institute of China and among social reform groups in Shanghai.

5 boxes

Permission to publish must be obtained from the Pacific Basin Institute Archive

Open for research