In the years after the Boxer Rebellion, foreign influence increased in Beijing, a conservative bastion of China. Missionaries, tourists, artists, soldiers, and businessmen came in larger numbers to visit or reside in the Legation Quarter. The "place just crawls" with "globetrotters" said a British diplomat in 1907. The ubiquitous Protestant missionaries, mindful of the anti-missionary and anti-Christian fervor of the Boxers, began to turn away from proselytizing, and more toward education, health, and women's issues in attempting to accelerate a century of very slow progress in achieving their goal of making China into a Christian nation. A few foreign businessmen came to Peking and many foreign enterprises were located in the Legation Quarter, but Peking never became a mercantile center for foreign companies comparable to Shanghai and other Treaty Ports. The foreign population in Beijing was never more than two to three thousand people (not counting foreign soldiers), compared to the 60,000 non-Chinese who lived in Shanghai in 1930. (The American civilians resident in Beijing in 1937 numbered about 700.) Rather the population that Beijing attracted included, in addition to the diplomats working in the Legations and the soldiers guarding them, a sizable number of scholars, artists, and aesthetes, especially in the early 1930s. They were attracted by the ancient Chinese culture preserved in Beijing and leisurely living for very little money.