Caleb Cook Baldwin

Early Years and Coming to China

Caleb Cook Baldwin was born in 1820 into a Presbyterian family in Bloomfield, New Jersey, USA. He graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and was ordained in 1847. In 1848 he arrived in Fuzhou with his wife, Harriet Fairchild, sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), and was among the first Protestant missionaries to come to Fuzhou.

Laying Foundations in Fuzhou

On arriving in Fuzhou he pioneered work inside the city together with Stephen Johnson, a colleague of the same mission who had arrived a little earlier, and Justus Doolittle, who came later. He chose to live in an ordinary house inside the city of Fuzhou, outside the foreign residential area at Cangshan, and devoted himself to learning the Fuzhou dialect. In 1870, together with the Methodist missionary Robert S. Maclay, he compiled An Alphabetic Dictionary of the Chinese Language in the Foochow Dialect, and in 1871 he published Manual of the Foochow Dialect. These were important early Western reference works on the Fuzhou dialect and are still used in sinological research today.

Translating Scripture into the Dialect

Working with his wife and colleagues, he translated much of the Bible into the Fuzhou dialect. He published the Gospel of Luke in the Fuzhou dialect in 1853 and went on to take part in translating the Fuzhou dialect New Testament. This translation influenced several generations of churches in the Fuzhou area.

Building Churches and Training Workers

He oversaw the building of congregations such as the Zhongzhou Church and the Puqianding Church in Fuzhou, and trained early Chinese preachers. Baldwin also took part in the work of Foochow College, run by the American Board (first called the Fuyin Jingshe, today Fuzhou Gezhi Middle School), and together with Justus Doolittle edited the Chinese Recorder. In 1895 he returned to the United States for health reasons, and he died in New Jersey in 1911.