Samuel Dyer

Samuel Dyer (20 February 1804 – 24 October 1843) was a nineteenth-century Protestant missionary minister to the Chinese and the father-in-law of the missionary Hudson Taylor.

Life

He was born in Greenwich, England. His father, John Dyer, was secretary of the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich and in 1820 became Chief Clerk of the British Admiralty. Samuel became a Christian in 1822 and was ordained in England in 1827. In 1827 the London Missionary Society sent him to Southeast Asia to evangelize the overseas Chinese; he left England for Penang on 10 March and arrived on 8 August.

In Penang Samuel spent a great deal of time studying and perfecting metal type for Chinese characters. The 3,000 pieces of Chinese metal type he designed and cast were very fine, accurate and practical. He also published a selection of Chinese type forms, A Selection of Three Thousand Characters (《作印集字》).

In 1835 Dyer moved to Malacca to take charge of the printing press of the Anglo-Chinese College, while also making steel punches with raised characters and copper matrices with sunken characters for casting Chinese metal type. In 1843 the London Missionary Society missionary James Legge moved the Chinese type of the Anglo-Chinese College and its press in Malacca, together with more than 3,000 steel punches and the printing machinery, to Hong Kong. Hong Kong's first Chinese-language newspaper, the Chinese Serial (《遐迩贯珍》), was printed and issued by the Anglo-Chinese College's Chinese type press.

At that time the Chinese type designed by Dyer and cast by the Anglo-Chinese College was known around the world: an envoy of the Russian Tsar, a learned society in Paris, the Singapore government, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the Viceroy of Liangguang, the Shanghai Daotai and the Qing government's Zongli Yamen all bought type, or complete sets of copper matrices, cast by the Anglo-Chinese College. This was the beginning of Western-cast Chinese lead type entering China.

Death

On 18 July 1843 Dyer went to Hong Kong to attend a meeting of the London Missionary Society and a conference on Bible translation, where he was appointed secretary of the conference. On his way back to Singapore after the meetings he fell ill, and on 24 October he died in Macau. He was buried in the Old Protestant Cemetery in Macau, beside the grave of Robert Morrison.

Works

• Lun Tian [On Heaven] (《论天》), 1835, Penang
• Fuyin Zonglun [General Account of the Gospel] (《福音总论》), 1839
• "Vocabulary of Hokkien Dialect", 1838, Singapore.
• A Selection of Three Thousand Characters being the most important in the Chinese Language (《作印集字》), 1834, Malacca.
• "Aesop's Fables" (in Hokkien, 1843)