苏慧廉 · 1861 – 1935 · British
William Edward Soothill was born on 23 January 1861 in Halifax, Yorkshire, England, into an ordinary family; his father worked in the textile trade. As a young man he worked as a clerk in a solicitor's office and could have followed a secure worldly career, but in response to an inner call he turned to the mission field overseas. He joined the United Methodist Free Churches, resolved to go to China.
In early 1882, Soothill, then only twenty-one, arrived in Wenzhou, Zhejiang, and from then on put down roots in this port city south of the Yangtze for more than 25 years. He was highly gifted in languages; it is recorded that after only six months of studying the Wenzhou dialect he could preach from the pulpit in the local speech. So that believers who could not read Chinese characters could also read the Scriptures, he and his co-workers designed a romanization scheme for the Wenzhou dialect, and with it translated and published the New Testament in the Wenzhou dialect in 1903. Besides preaching, he devoted himself to education and to healing the sick, founding the Yiwen School (1897) and the Blyth Hospital (1906; the predecessor of today's Wenzhou No. 2 People's Hospital), and he set up a large number of preaching stations in the city and the countryside, laying foundations for modern education and medicine in Wenzhou. The large number of Christians in Wenzhou today is not unrelated to the seeds he sowed in those years.
Around 1907, Soothill was invited north to Taiyuan to become principal of the Western studies college of the Imperial Shanxi University. The university had been established with Boxer Indemnity funds after the Boxer Uprising. He directed its Western curriculum, bringing Western scholarship and educational systems into the interior and training people in the new learning; several years later the college was handed over to Chinese administration.
Around 1911 he returned to England. In July 1920, Soothill was appointed Professor of Chinese at the University of Oxford and became an important holder of the chair; John King Fairbank, who later became a well-known sinologist, studied under him.
Soothill made outstanding scholarly contributions. He translated the Confucian classic the Analects into English (1910) and also translated the Buddhist scripture the Lotus Sutra (1930). In his later years he worked with the American scholar Lewis Hodous to compile A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms, which appeared in 1937, after his death, and long served as an important reference work for Western study of Chinese Buddhism. He also took part in matters related to the British Boxer Indemnity, promoting the use of the indemnity for education and culture in China.
On 14 May 1935, Soothill went to his rest in Oxford, aged 74. His life spanned the late Qing and the Republic of China; he was both a missionary deeply rooted in the countryside of Wenzhou and a great sinologist who bridged China and the West. With his whole life's effort he built a bridge between the spread of the faith and mutual learning between cultures, and his devotion is remembered to this day.