Dyer Ball

Early Life and Coming to China

Dyer Ball was born in 1796 in West Boylston, Massachusetts, USA. He graduated from Union College and later studied medicine in New York and elsewhere, making him one of the early missionaries to China who were both ministers and physicians. In 1838 he and his wife, Lucy Mills, were sent by the American Board (Congregational) to Singapore in the Straits Settlements, where he first served the local overseas Chinese and the communities of Chaozhou-Shantou and Minnan (southern Fujian) migrants along the Malay coast.

Co-worker in Macau

In 1841, in the later stage of the First Opium War, he moved to Macau, where he served alongside early missionaries there such as Elijah Coleman Bridgman (裨治文), Peter Parker (伯驾) and Samuel Wells Williams (卫三畏). When Hong Kong opened as a port in 1843 he moved there briefly, and in 1845 he moved to Canton (Guangzhou), where he opened a dispensary, established a school and preached publicly to the people, carrying on evangelism, medical care and education side by side. In 1854 he and his wife went home on furlough; he returned to China in 1857 but, because of the Second Opium War, stayed in Macau until November 1858, when he went back to his old station in Guangzhou. He served there from then on until his death.

Cantonese Writings

Over many years he wrote bilingual Chinese-English Christian catechisms and tracts and preached to the people of Guangzhou in colloquial Cantonese. During the Second Opium War (1856-1860) he repeatedly helped Christians of Guangdong and Guangxi find refuge. His son, J. Dyer Ball, served for many years in the Hong Kong government, rising to First Interpreter at the Supreme Court, and wrote sinological works such as Things Chinese (1892). The elder Dyer Ball died of illness in Guangzhou in 1866 and was buried in the foreign missionary cemetery in Guangzhou. Together with the missionaries to China of his generation, he is regarded as one of the early founders of Protestantism in Lingnan (South China).