Jehu Lewis Shuck

Early Life and Coming to China

Jehu Lewis Shuck was born in 1812 in Alexandria, Virginia, in the United States. In 1832 he trained at the Virginia Baptist Seminary; in 1835 he was ordained as a pastor and in the same year married Henrietta Hall. In 1836 the couple sailed from Boston by way of Singapore to Macau, becoming among the first missionaries sent to China by the American Baptists (the Triennial Convention); after the Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1845 he came under it.

Laying Foundations in Macau

While in Macau he studied Cantonese and worked with colleagues of other missions then in Macau (such as the Baptist missionary Issachar J. Roberts (罗孝全), who arrived in 1837), setting up preaching points for Chinese and starting literacy classes and a clinic. When Hong Kong was opened in 1842 he moved at once to Hong Kong Island, where with colleagues from British and American missions he established the Hong Kong Baptist church and bought land to build the first Baptist chapel. After his wife Henrietta Hall died in 1844, he carried the church work alone, and worked with local preachers to translate Cantonese gospel tracts and preliminary colloquial Bible texts.

Moving to Shanghai

From 1847 he took part in the work in Shanghai, where with colleagues of the same mission such as Matthew T. Yates (晏玛太) he established the first Baptist church in Shanghai. At the end of 1852 he left China for the United States; after arriving in 1853 he was sent by the mission board to preach among Chinese immigrants in California, founding a Chinese Baptist church in San Francisco in 1855; after retiring in 1861 he lived in South Carolina. He died of illness in Barnwell in 1863. Shuck's ministry in China spanned three places, Macau, Hong Kong and Shanghai, and he was one of the earliest generation of founders of Baptist work in South China and the Jiangnan region.