Karl Friedrich August Gutzlaff

1803-1851. Missionary to China. Born in Pomerania, he was sent by the Netherlands Missionary Society to Singapore in 1823, and some three years later went on to Batavia, where he met W.H. Medhurst* and began the study of Chinese. In the 1830s he traveled along the Chinese coast distributing Christian literature before succeeding Robert Morrison* as Chinese secretary to the East India Company at Canton. He helped negotiate the Treaty of Nanking, and in Hong Kong elaborated a plan for the evangelization of China, writing voluminously to Germany urging support for his scheme. Unhappily, he became a victim of dishonest Chinese assistants. He died at forty-eight in Hong Kong, but not before inspiring others to form missions for China's evangelization. The Chinese Evangelistic Society, under which Timothy Richard* and J. Hudson Taylor* originally went to China, was one of those which owed its beginnings to Gutzlaff.