Julia Brown Mateer

Early Years and Coming to China

Julia Brown Mateer (Julia Ann Brown Mateer) was born in 1837 on her family's farm in Delaware, Ohio, USA. Compassionate and eager to teach, she was educated in Granville, Ohio. In 1862 she married Calvin Wilson Mateer, and in 1863 she and her husband, sent by the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., set sail; after a voyage of half a year by way of the Cape of Good Hope they reached Dengzhou (now Penglai), Shandong, in early 1864.

Co-Founding the Tengchow College

After arriving in Dengzhou she and her husband together founded the Dengzhou Wenhuiguan (Tengchow Boys' School; growing out of a primary school opened in 1864, and one of the sources of the later Cheeloo University), one of the earliest Western-style institutions of higher education in China. The school had been her idea, and until 1873 she did almost all the work of running it.

Educating Girls

She cared about the education of girls; at her request her elder sister, Margaret Brown, founded a girls' school in Dengzhou, where she taught music and other subjects.

Chinese Textbooks

With her husband she promoted the movement to "write textbooks in Chinese for the Chinese church." She also took part in proofreading early drafts of the Mandarin Union Version New Testament, whose translation was led by Calvin Mateer (begun in the 1890s and completed in 1906), and helped compile Sunday school materials for the North China Presbyterian church. In 1898 she died of illness in Dengzhou. She was first buried in Dengzhou and later reburied at the Temple Hill Cemetery (Yuhuangding) in Yantai (Chefoo); shortly before her death she was still teaching a Sunday school class. Calvin Mateer remarried in the 1900s, but the biography of him by Daniel W. Fisher speaks highly of Julia Brown Mateer’s contribution as a co-worker in the school.