Teaching Chinese to a foreigner was a capital crime in early nineteenth century China, yet it was this forbidden language that a young Englishman chose to study in London, with the help of a Cantonese tutor, years before he ever set foot on Chinese soil. Robert Morrison believed it was worth risking everything for a people who still had no Bible in their own language.
Born in 1782 in Bullers Green, in the north of England, he was the son of a Scottish farm laborer who later became a shoemaker, and he grew up in a godly home. As a teenager, he drifted from the faith and fell into heavy drinking, a phase he himself later regretted. He was converted around age 16 and, on hearing of the lack of Protestant missionaries in Asia, felt called to go to China, then practically closed to the gospel.
In 1807, sent by the London Missionary Society, he sailed for Macau, becoming the first Protestant missionary to reach China. The hostility of local Catholic authorities, who went so far as to burn copies of his translation of the Gospel of Luke, and the Chinese ban on teaching the language to foreigners forced him to keep learning and translating almost in secret.
To remain in the country legally, he accepted a post as translator for the British East India Company, an entity that also profited from the opium trade, a practice he himself condemned as a moral evil. This tension between livelihood and conviction stayed with him throughout his life in China.
He completed the translation of the New Testament into Chinese in 1813 and, with his colleague William Milne, finished the translation of the complete Bible in 1819. He also produced the first grammar and the first major Chinese dictionary for Westerners, a reference work for generations. His Bible translation, however, had a formal style that was not always natural to the ordinary Chinese reader, and it was eventually revised and superseded by later versions, decades afterward.
In 1814, after seven years of work with no visible fruit, he baptized Cai Gao, his first Chinese convert. By the end of 27 years on the field, he had baptized only about ten people, a number that today reminds us that faithfulness does not always come with quick results.
In 1818, he and Milne founded the Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca, to train translators and workers who would connect China to the rest of the Christian world. He died in Canton in 1834, at age 52, worn out by work and a fever, without seeing the Chinese church flourish as it would later.
His dictionary and his Bible opened the way for the missionaries who came after him, among them Hudson Taylor. Today the Chinese church is one of the largest in the world, the fruit of seeds planted by those who, like Morrison, trusted God more than immediate results.
