Rev. Carter D. Holton was a missionary of Christian & Mission Alliance in the United States and he worked in and dedicated to the region of Northwest China inhabited by the Salar, Dongxiang, Hui, Tibetans, Tu and Han peoples for 27 years. Although he and his wife Lora Newberry Holton spent a long time in Gansu-Tibetan frontier area in which various ethnic minorities lived, almost gained no substantial result in the missionary work, however, by the communication of cross-faith and cross-culture, they left the primary recording materials of many ethnic minorities’ religious cultures in the region of Gansu and Qinghai in the Republic period: more than 5000 pieces of the photos, two-hours video recording. Rev. Carter Holton was eventually also a botanist, photographer, linguist and medical worker. Most of his life time was spent on the course of the cultural and botanic gardening technic exchanges between China and the United States of America, even he made important contribution to the historical records in religiosity and ethnology.
Rev. Carter Holton (his Chinese name was Hai Yingguang 海 映 光 when he worked as missionary in China) and his wife (Chinese name was Hai Mude海慕德) came to Gansu- Tibetan border area in China respectively in 1923 and were forced to leave Linxia of Gansu in China in 1949. It is evidently that they dedicated their most beautiful time in their life to the missionary work in the area of Gansu-Qinghai frontier, especially to the missionary work among the Muslims in China. The all historical materials they left were donated by their young daughter Mrs. Lora Jean Heurlin to the Harvard-Yenching Library in the early of the 1990s after they had passed away in the 1970s and 1980s. This rich historical photos and videos recorded by Rev. Carter Holton were raised to the attention in the academics in the beginning of the 21the century, and the Harvard-Yenching Library therefore scanned them into the electric images and invited Dr. Wang Jianping (author) to compose the annotative notes based on the content of this dispatch of the historical photos. The author while he sorted out the materials went to the region of Gansu and Qinghai provinces for the historical investigation almost continually in his summer vacations for five years. He looked for and found the several old men who even met Rev. Holton, made the interview notes.
Through fieldwork the author realized that Rev. Holton was not only the first missionary of C&MA from the America doing missionary work among the Salar Muslims but also he was truly a botanist, linguist, photographer and medical worker. He contributed greatly to the cultural exchanges between China and America. Unfortunately, his achievement has not been well known among the academic circles both in China and in the United States. This is the motivation of the author as a scholar of Islamic studies to write the bio-notes of Rev. Carter Holton, and he thinks that the Chinese scholars in religious studies should know Rev. Holton and understand him. This chronicle of Rev. Holton is completed on the basis of having read large quantity materials of West China Mission of C&MA in its periodical of The Alliance Weekly, a magazine of C&MA in the United States, and have interviewing several elderly, from which to catalogue and select for the essences and relative data. The author received the assistance and some proofreading from the young daughter of the Holtons, Mrs. Lora Jean Heurlin (that time she was in the ages between 81 and 84 years old) when he composed and revised this bio-notes, at the same time he gained the sincerely support from Dr. James Cheng, the director of Harvard-Yenching Library and late Dr. Raymond Lum, the librarian of Harvard-Yenching Library, hereby their helps are acknowledged in this chronicle.
