Joseph Edkins

1823-1905. Missionary to China. When Shanghai was declared a “Treaty Port” in the settlement of the Opium War (1841), it soon became a center of missions. Edkins, sent by the London Missionary Society, arrived there in 1848. In 1860, at the invitation of Hung-ren, a convert of Hung Hsiu- ch'üan, the Taiping leader, he twice visited the Taiping rebels in Suchow and Nanking to instruct them in the Christian faith. That same year Edkins moved to Chefoo, and 1861 to Tientsin, whence he visited Peking in 1862 and baptized the first three Protestant converts in that city, which then became a new LMS base for evangelism. An eminent philologist, Edkins also wrote extensively about China's religions.