Devello Zelotos Sheffield

Early Years and Coming to China

Devello Zelotos Sheffield was born in 1841 into a rural family in Gainesville, New York State, USA. As a young man he served in the American Civil War; after being discharged because of illness, he turned to education and theology, studying at several schools in his home state and finally graduating from Auburn Theological Seminary. He was ordained in 1869. In the autumn of that same year, sent by the American Board (Congregational), he and his wife sailed from San Francisco, and at the end of November that year they reached Tongzhou in North China. From then on he never left the land to which his whole life was bound.

Building Schools and Training People

When he first arrived he helped teach at a local boys' school. Faced with how hard it was to see fruit from preaching, he gradually turned his energy to education, convinced that founding schools and training Chinese people was the long-term way for the gospel to take root in China. Over years of work the school steadily grew; in 1889 it was raised to the level of a college and named Luhe College (潞河书院), and in 1893 it was raised to university level and officially named North China College in English, with Sheffield as president until he stepped down in 1909, leading it for more than ten years. He also served as president of the Educational Association of China, working for modern education in China.

Writing Textbooks

Alongside his school work, Sheffield wrote constantly. Because suitable Chinese textbooks were lacking at the time, he raised the funds himself and compiled China's first world-history textbook in Chinese, Wanguo Tongjian (万国通鉴) [Comprehensive Mirror of All Nations]. He went on to write textbooks on church history, systematic theology, logic and other subjects, laying the foundation of the curriculum for church schools in North China. His command of Chinese was deep: from 1890 he was chosen to take part in translating the Wenli (classical Chinese) version of the Bible and served as chairman of the New Testament committee, devoting himself to a faithful rendering of the text.

A Chinese Typewriter

He is especially remembered for this: to solve the difficulty of printing and typesetting Chinese characters, he began work around the late 1880s and in 1897 completed a Chinese typewriter that actually worked. Shaped like a round table, the machine held a selection of about 4,600-odd commonly used characters. Although it was never mass-produced, it was one of the earliest Chinese typewriters that actually worked, a testimony to his remarkable ingenuity.

Rebuilding After the Uprising

When the Boxer Uprising broke out in 1900, the church and school buildings in Tongzhou were all burned; teachers and students fled in haste to Beijing, and several co-workers were martyred. After the uprising was put down, Sheffield did not shrink back. He returned to the ruins and led the rebuilding of the campus so that the school's work could continue.

At Rest in Tongzhou

Sheffield died of illness in Tongzhou on 1 July 1913, aged seventy-one, and was buried in the land he had served for more than forty years. North China College, which he founded, later became part of Yenching University and was an important source of Christian higher education in North China. Sheffield gave his life's work to running schools, writing and translating the Bible, sowing the seeds of Western learning and of faith in China, and his contribution is still remembered with gratitude today.