| Alexander Wylie | |
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Missionary to China |
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| Born | April 6, 1815 London, England |
| Died | February 10, 1887 London, England |
Alexander Wylie (Traditional Chinese: 偉烈亞力, Simplified Chinese: 伟烈亚力) (April 6, 1815 - February 10, 1887), British Protestant Christian missionary to China. He is known for his translation work and scholarship during the late Qing Dynasty.
He was born in London, and went to school at Drumlithie, Kincardineshire, and at Chelsea.
While apprenticed to a cabinet-maker he picked up a Chinese grammar written in Latin, and after mastering the latter tongue made such good progress with the former, that in 1846 James Legge engaged him to superintend the London Missionary Society's press at Shanghai. In this position he acquired a wide knowledge of Chinese religion and civilization, and especially of their mathematics, so that he was able to show that Sir George Horner's method (1819) of solving equations of all orders had been known to the Chinese mathematicians of the 14th century in his paper Jottings on the Science of the Chinese.[1]
He made several journeys into the interior, notably in 1858 with Lord Elgin on a British Navy gunboat up the Yangtze and to Nanking, where he served as one member of delegate of three to meet with officials of the Taiping, and in 1868 with Griffith John to the capital of Szechuen and the source of the Han. He completed the distribution of the 1 million Chinese New Testaments provided by the British and Foreign Bible Society's special fund of 1855. From 1863 he was an agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society. He was succeeded by Samuel Dyer, Junior, the son of Samuel Dyer and brother-in-law of Hudson Taylor. He settled in London in 1877.
In Chinese he translated books on arithmetic, calculus(Loomis), algebra (De Morgan's), mechanics, astronomy (Herschel's), in colloboration with Li Shanlan,and The Marine Steam Engine (TJ Main and T Brown), as well as translations of the Gospel According to Matthew and the Gospel According to Mark. In English his chief works were Jottings on the Science of the Chinese,published in 1853, Shanghai, a collection of articles published under the title Chinese Researches by Alexander Wylie (Shanghai, 1897).Memorials of Protestant Missionaries (1867), Notes on Chinese Literature (Shanghai, 1867), He also published an article on the Nestorian Tablet in Xian.
While in China, Alexander Wylie amassed a large collection of Chinese antique books. In 1882, he sold his collection of about 20,000 Chinese titles to the Oxford Library. His collection is now housed in the Bodleian Library as Alexander Wylie Collection.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
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