Anne Swann Goodrich: The American Who Saved Beijing’s Paper Gods
Today, we’ll talk about an American woman who devoted nearly a century building bridges between cultures and preserving the paper gods, folk beliefs, and everyday spiritual life of old Beijing before they disappeared from memory.
Anne Swann Goodrich: The American Who Saved Beijing’s Paper Gods
Today, we’ll talk about an American woman who devoted nearly a century building bridges between cultures and preserving the paper gods, folk beliefs, and everyday spiritual life of old Beijing before they disappeared from memory.
On the evening of May 22, 2026, the first season of the “I Can Do It at Tianqiao” outdoor leisure night market opened at Tianqiao Citizen Square in Beijing. The event was themed “Intangible Cultural Heritage Wonder Night” and organized by the Tianqiao Subdistrict Office in Xicheng District. It brought together traditional performances, folk crafts, and creative cultural products from intangible cultural heritage-friendly cities and districts all across China. As visitors browsed colorful displays and watched age-old traditions come to life, the event highlighted a growing effort to preserve and reintroduce China’s rich folk culture to new generations.
Yet the story of safeguarding Chinese folk traditions extends far beyond China’s borders. In 2025, a new scholarly volume based on Columbia University’s remarkable collection of Chinese Paper Gods brought another chapter of that preservation effort back into public view. The Sacred Understanding: The Research of the Chinese Paper Gods Collections at the C.V. Starr East Asian Library of Columbia University examines hundreds of fragile ritual prints depicting door guardians, kitchen gods, fertility deities, and other divine figures once found in ordinary homes across northern China. These colorful images, rooted in everyday religious life, might easily have disappeared amid the upheavals of the twentieth century. Instead, they survived thanks largely to the dedication of one remarkable woman: Anne Swann Goodrich, an American scholar whose lifelong fascination with Chinese folk beliefs helped preserve a unique cultural legacy and build an enduring bridge between China and the United States.
Long before Chinese folk religion became a subject of serious academic study, Goodrich was walking the streets of Beijing, talking with ordinary families, visiting temples, collecting ritual prints, and recording traditions that were already beginning to disappear. By the time she died in 2005 at the age of 109, she had become one of the most important Western interpreters of everyday Chinese religious life.
Her achievement was unusual for another reason. Goodrich was a Christian missionary who developed a profound appreciation for the gods and rituals of Chinese folk religion. She was born in the United States, yet considered Beijing her second home. She spent decades explaining Chinese beliefs to Western audiences, not as exotic curiosities, but as meaningful expressions of human hopes, fears, and values.
Anne was born in Florida in 1895, a period when the United States was emerging as a global power and China was approaching the end of the Qing Dynasty. Her ancestors were among the earliest English settlers in North America. Her family was comfortable and respected, but tragedy struck early. Her mother died when she was twelve, and her father passed away two years later. Before she reached adulthood, she was an orphan.
Relatives in New Jersey and New York helped raise her, giving her educational opportunities that many young women of her generation could only dream of. She attended excellent schools and eventually enrolled at Vassar College, one of America’s most prestigious women’s institutions.
At Vassar, she encountered the writings of Harry Emerson Fosdick, one of the most influential Protestant thinkers of the twentieth century. Fosdick’s version of Christianity emphasized compassion, understanding, social responsibility, and engagement with the modern world. His ideas would shape Anne’s outlook for the rest of her life.
After graduating in 1917, she pursued further studies at Columbia University’s Teachers College, earning a master’s degree in education and social work. During these years she became increasingly involved in church activities and community service. Gradually, she began considering missionary work overseas.
Several destinations were possible. She could remain in New York. She could work elsewhere in the United States. She could travel to India. Instead, she chose China.
Later in life, she admitted that her reasoning was surprisingly simple. On an application form asking why she wanted to become a missionary, she wrote, “I like adventure.”
The answer reflected more than youthful enthusiasm. Having lost both parents at an early age, she possessed a fierce independence. Unlike many women of her generation, she felt relatively free from social expectations and family obligations.
Her relatives strongly opposed the decision. To them, China seemed distant, unstable, even dangerous. Why would a well-educated young woman leave behind comfort and security to travel halfway around the world?
Anne remained determined. In 1920, shortly after her twenty-fifth birthday, she boarded the ocean liner Empress of Asia and sailed toward a country she had never seen.
Her first years in Beijing did not unfold as she had imagined. After studying Chinese at a language school for missionaries, she was assigned to work with women employed in church workshops. Her responsibility was not to preach religion but to help workers stay healthy through exercise and physical activity. The result was often laughter.
The women found her exercise routines amusing, while her imperfect Chinese provided a steady source of entertainment. Every day was filled with jokes, smiles, and shared experiences. Years later, Anne would write with characteristic honesty: “I must confess that I was a very poor missionary.”
Yet what seemed like failure turned out to be the beginning of her life’s work. Instead of converting souls, she learned to listen. Through friendships with ordinary women, she discovered a side of China that foreign visitors rarely encountered. Of course, she saw hardship and poverty, but also resilience, humor, generosity, and an enormous sense of community.
These experiences transformed her understanding of what meaningful service could look like. Rather than focusing on religious conversion, she began helping women earn side-income through embroidery and handicrafts. Supporting livelihoods, she believed, was often more valuable than delivering sermons.
Her relationship with China deepened further after her marriage in Beijing in 1923 to Luther Carrington Goodrich, a rising American scholar of Chinese history who would later become one of the leading figures in Western Sinology and serve as chairman of Columbia University’s Department of Chinese.
The marriage connected Anne even more deeply to China. Her father-in-law had spent decades translating the Bible into Chinese, while her mother-in-law was a formidable missionary leader known for practical social work. Surrounded by people who believed that actions mattered more than words, Anne continued developing her own approach to cultural engagement.
Meanwhile, Beijing itself captivated her imagination. She explored temples, markets, festivals, alleyways, and neighborhoods. She attended all kinds of social gatherings – everything from operas, to weddings and even funerals. She rode through the city streets immersing herself in daily life. The city was not simply a place where she lived. It became a place she loved.
Later, she wrote, “I grew to love the Chinese people and became fascinated by the gods they worshipped.”
That fascination would eventually define her legacy. In 1930, Anne returned to Beijing with her husband and children. During the Lunar New Year season, she noticed something she had previously overlooked. Images of fierce warrior gods decorated doorways. Families carried small paper shrines. Temples sold colorful ritual prints depicting dozens of deities.
The more questions she asked, the more intrigued she became. These objects were part of a rich tradition of popular religion that touched every aspect of daily life. Families used them when praying for children, seeking protection, honoring ancestors, celebrating festivals, or coping with illness and uncertainty.
Eventually, she coined a new English term for these objects: “Paper Gods.” The phrase was her own invention, yet it perfectly captured their role. They were printed images, but they were also quiet participants in everyday religious life silently connecting ordinary people with the divine.
One ritual particularly moved her. Families hoping for a child would purchase images associated with fertility deities and burn them in carefully prescribed ceremonies. Afterward, a piece of red paper would be placed on the roof, signaling the family’s prayers for a healthy birth.
To outsiders, such practices might seem quaint or superstitious. To Anne, they revealed universal human desires: love, security, family, hope. Ironically, just as she was becoming fascinated by these traditions, they seemed to be disappearing. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, many forms of folk religion came under increasing pressure from modernization campaigns. Temples were closed, ritual practices were discouraged, and traditional paper images became harder to find.
Anne realized that an entire world of cultural knowledge was at risk of being swallowed up by the machines of the modern age. In 1931, she made a decision that would shape the rest of her life. She purchased the entire remaining inventory of a Beijing shop specializing in ritual prints. This was the beginning of what would eventually become the renowned Chinese Paper Gods Collection.
Unlike many collectors, she was not particularly interested in their artistic quality. Torn edges and faded colors did not matter. What did matter were the stories behind the images and the people who knew them. She believed that understanding another culture’s beliefs was essential to understanding its people. For Anne, Christianity and Chinese folk religion were not enemies. They represented different ways of addressing life’s deepest questions. Both offered comfort, meaning, and moral guidance. Both reflected humanity’s search for something greater than itself.
After leaving China in 1932 and settling in New York, she never abandoned these interests. Her home became a small corner of Beijing transplanted to America, filled with Chinese furniture, religious images, and memories.
Decades later, after raising her children, she returned to the notebooks and research materials she had gathered in China. The result was a series of pioneering books that transformed Western understanding of Chinese folk religion.
Her studies of the Dongyue Temple, Chinese concepts of hell, and Beijing paper gods introduced scholars to aspects of Chinese culture that had previously received little attention. Most importantly, she treated popular religion seriously. Rather than dismissing it as mere superstition, she recognized it as a sophisticated system of rituals that embedded meaning into everyday life.
Eventually, she donated her entire collection to Columbia University, thereby ensuring its preservation for future generations. And the collection continues to inspire research even today. Through restoration, digitization, and publication, the paper gods she rescued from obscurity now reach audiences around the world.
Anne returned to China twice in her later years, revisiting Beijing and many other cities she had known decades earlier. These journeys were deeply emotional. They allowed her to reconnect with a country that had shaped her identity as profoundly as her native America. When she died in 2005 at the age of 109, she left behind more than books and collections: she left a model for cross-cultural understanding.
Anne never tried to change China. Instead, she tried to understand it. She approached unfamiliar beliefs with curiosity rather than judgment. She viewed cultural differences not as barriers but as opportunities for learning.
The paper gods she preserved were fragile objects, easily destroyed by time, politics, and changing trends. Yet through them she saved something far more enduring: the hopes of families, the rhythms of community life, and the spiritual imagination of ordinary people in old Beijing.
In an interview with a reporter from The Paper, Li Mingjie, author of Sacred Understanding, pointed out: “Paper gods are like a delicate ‘folk map,’ guiding the way to the spiritual world of the past. Although many of the specific ‘streets’ on this map have since changed or disappeared in reality, it helps us understand how generations of Beijingers made sense of life and found peace of mind. This longing for a better life and the need for cultural identity are themselves timeless and transcend time and space.”
In a world that often emphasizes differences, Anne Swann Goodrich spent nearly a century demonstrating another possibility. She believed the deepest form of cultural exchange begins not with persuasion, but by listening.
Well, that’s the end of our podcast. Our theme music is by the famous film score composer Roc Chen. We want to thank our writers Zhang Le, Ma Xiaofei and Zhang Jin, translator Yu Shougang, and copy editor Pu Ren. And thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, please tell a friend so they, too, can understand The Context.