Teaching and research between China and America
Johnson was born in Iowa in 1881. A contemporary Wabash faculty biography records study at Oberlin, missionary service in Canton and teaching at several American institutions. He received a University of California doctorate in 1925. At Wabash from 1929, he served as professor of religion and philosophy and as college chaplain.
His own preface describes fourteen years in China and an investigation developed with E. T. Williams. Signed at Berkeley in November 1925, it identifies language study, library materials, photostats and scholarly assistance behind the book. The accessible record gives a fuller account of his professional work than of his personal life. These documented connections place his alchemical history within teaching, missionary experience and university research.
Chinese sources and a comparative historical thesis
A Study of Chinese Alchemy was published by the Commercial Press in Shanghai in 1928. The held copy is the later Arno Press facsimile reprint, catalogued as 1974. Its reproduced original title records an earlier publication, not the date of that later physical copy. Williams’s separately signed foreword supplies his own framing of Johnson’s investigation.
The chapters move through Taoism, immortality, metallic transmutation and comparisons between East and West. An early attestation of a practice and evidence for its transmission between societies are different historical questions. The study’s proposed connections therefore need to be followed through the particular texts and contacts it cites. Recipes and theories appear as historical evidence, while the acknowledgments reveal the research infrastructure that made their English-language interpretation possible.
