Missionaries

New Brunswick missionaries who served in Asia were among the most generous donors of international artefacts to the Natural History Society of New Brunswick and the New Brunswick Museum. Their donations include ceramics, costume, accessories, textiles, lacquer ware, dolls, artworks, photographs, postcards, metalwork, coins, books and documents from China, Japan and Korea. The significance of these donations is that they represent a connection Saint John and the East through missionaries who served there and returned with curiosities; items that most residents would never have seen on their own.

Because of the relative size and diversity of the missionary contribution and the strength of the costume and textile component, the latter have been chosen as the focus of this theme.

After the formation of the New Brunswick Museum, most of the missionaries who had been donating artefacts continued to do so, and other missionaries followed suit, adding substantially to the Asian collection throughout the 1930s and 1940s. The continued giving of these women expanded a collection that was already well established by 1929. In turn, this collection of Asian artefacts attracted collectors from all over New Brunswick to participate in the phenomenon, creating one of the most substantial collections of Asian material in Canada.