Catholic missionaries of the 19th century arrived primarily from France. While they arrived somewhat later than the Protestants, their congregations grew at a faster rate. By 1900, there were about 1,400 Catholic priests and nuns in China serving nearly 1 million Catholics. Over 3,000 Protestant missionaries were active among the 250,000 Protestant Christians in China. Missionaries, like all foreigners, enjoyed extraterritorial legal rights. The main goal was conversions, but they made relatively few. They were much more successful in setting up schools, hospitals and dispensaries. They usually avoided Chinese politics, but were opponents of foot-binding and opium. Western governments could protect them in the treaty ports, but outside those limited areas they were at the mercy of local government officials and threats were common. Chinese elites often associated missionary activity with the imperialistic exploitation of China, and with promoting "new technology and ideas that threatened their positions". Historian John K. Fairbank wrote, "To most Chinese, Christian missionaries seem to be the ideological arm of foreign aggression... To the scholar-gentry, missionaries were foreign subversives, whose immoral conduct and teachings were backed by gunboats. Conservative patriots hated and feared these alien, intruders." The missionaries and their converts were a prime target of attack and murder by Boxers in 1900.