In 1820, a teenager orphaned of his mother threw a poem through the window of the King of Prussia’s carriage, pleading for help to study. The bold gesture worked: King Frederick William III was impressed and opened the doors of a mission school in Berlin to the young Karl Gützlaff, son of a tailor from Pomerania.
Trained at the school of the preacher Johannes Jänicke and later by the Netherlands Missionary Society in Rotterdam, Gützlaff showed a rare gift for languages. Within a few years he learned Dutch, Malay, Thai, Cambodian, and several Chinese dialects, a skill that would mark his entire life.
Sent to Batavia in 1826, he moved to Bangkok two years later. Alongside the missionary Jacob Tomlin, he began translating the Gospels into Thai. In 1834 he published the Gospel of Luke in Thai script, the earliest known Bible printing in that language.
The joy did not last: in 1829 he married the missionary Mary Newell, but she died in 1831, shortly after giving birth to twins who also did not survive. Widowed and without ties to his mission society, Gützlaff decided to press on alone toward China, then closed to foreigners.
To reach the Chinese coast, he agreed to work as an interpreter aboard British trading ships that also carried opium. He distributed Bibles and tracts while the ship sold the drug, a contradiction he himself acknowledged with discomfort and that still stains his biography today.
In 1834, now widowed, he married the British missionary Mary Wanstall. Settled in Macau, she opened a school and, from 1837, pioneered work teaching blind Chinese girls to read. Mary died in Singapore in 1849; a few months later, on a tour of Europe, Gützlaff married for a third time, to Dorothy Gabriel.
His fluency in Chinese made him indispensable: he served as interpreter during the First Opium War and at the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, and afterward as secretary for Chinese affairs to the British government in Hong Kong. He used the post to distribute Christian Scriptures and tracts.
Convinced that China would only be reached by the Chinese, he founded the Chinese Union in 1844, a network of native evangelists. On a tour of Europe, however, he discovered that some of them had forged conversion reports and resold the Bibles they had received. The blow shook him deeply, and critics of the time went so far as to call him a fraud.
Gützlaff died in Hong Kong in 1851, without seeing the full outcome of the scandal he had helped bring about. His conviction that the Chinese themselves should evangelize China outlived his failures and inspired later generations, among them Hudson Taylor, who called him the grandfather of the China Inland Mission.
