Matthew Tyson Yates

Early Years and Coming to China

Matthew Tyson Yates was born in 1819 into a Baptist farming family in Wake County, North Carolina, USA. After theological training at Wake Forest College he was ordained in 1846. In 1847 he arrived in Shanghai with his wife, Eliza Moring, and from then on made Shanghai his lifelong field of work until he died of illness in 1888.

Building a Church in Shanghai

Soon after arriving, in the area of the Old North Gate of the walled city of Shanghai, he first lived in borrowed lodgings and then bought land, building one of the earliest Baptist chapels in Shanghai, the Old North Gate Chapel (north of today's City God Temple). He put weight on training Chinese preachers, opened schools for boys and girls, and kept in close contact with local scholars.

Mediating in Times of War

During the Taiping War, Yates repeatedly mediated on behalf of the foreign residents of Shanghai, helped settle refugees from Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and went on preaching to coolies and boat dwellers outside the foreign settlements. When the Small Swords uprising broke out in 1853 and the rebels held the walled city of Shanghai, he stayed on in Shanghai and kept preaching, and he was regarded as an example of steadfastness in a time of danger. He himself translated the New Testament into the Shanghai dialect, and he compiled bilingual Chinese-English Baptist catechisms and hymns.

Advocating Self-Support; Final Rest

In his later years in Shanghai he actively promoted self-support in mission work, holding that Chinese churches should set their own church rules and choose their own elders. In March 1888 he died of illness in Shanghai and was buried in the foreign cemetery in Shanghai. His biography in letters, The Story of Yates the Missionary (edited by Charles E. Taylor, 1898), long circulated among Southern Baptists, and he is seen as a representative of the kind of missionary who "stays in one place for a whole lifetime."