For the purpose of evangelization in nineteenth-century China, the translation of Christian tracts was seen as a high priority by Protestant missionaries. While freedom was usually given in the processes of text selection, interpretation and re-presentation, the missionary translators were largely constrained by their own linguistic competence, the specific needs of the Chinese audience, and, not least, the stipulated agendas of religious institutions. In the shadow of the missionary translators, the Chinese collaborators also had a significant role to play in shaping the final products. Given an enormous corpus of English Christian literature, The Peep of Day, an elementary Sunday-school textbook, emerged as one of the most popular tracts to be translated into Chinese. The present paper attempts to scrutinize the contextual factors which determine the selection of text, strategies of translating, and to assess the role of missionaries as manipulators, through the case study of a Christian tract in Chinese costume.