William Lockhart

William Lockhart (Chinese name Luo Weilin, 雒魏林; 1811–1896) was a British missionary of the London Missionary Society; he was the first person in history to bring Protestant Christianity to Beijing.

Life

Lockhart was born in Liverpool and studied early on at Guy’s Hospital in London; in 1843 he became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He served as a surgeon at a dispensary in Liverpool. In 1838 the London Missionary Society appointed him to China. At the end of July he set out with his family, travelling together with Walter Henry Medhurst (麦都思); they reached Batavia (now Jakarta) in mid-November, and early in 1839 he arrived in China (first at Macau, then at Canton/Guangzhou) and joined the Medical Missionary Society in China. After that he worked off and on at the society’s hospital in Macau while studying Chinese in Canton. In September 1839, because of the conflict between China and Britain, he left China for a time and went to Batavia. In May 1840 he returned to Macau and, together with Dr. Benjamin Hobson (合信), who had recently come to Macau, and Dr. Diver (戴夫), managed the hospital. In August he went to Zhoushan and opened a hospital for Chinese patients. In February 1841 he closed the hospital, left Zhoushan, and went to Macau to marry Catherine Parkes. In 1842 he went to Hong Kong to manage the hospital set up by the Medical Missionary Society, until the spring of 1843. In June he returned to Zhoushan, then went to inspect Ningbo, and on his return to Zhoushan opened a hospital there again. In November he went with Medhurst, who had come to Zhoushan, to Shanghai. He arrived in Shanghai in December 1843 to do mission work. He also practised medicine, with a particular skill in ophthalmology. In 1844 he opened Shanghai’s first Western-style hospital, the Chinese Hospital (forerunner of today’s Renji Hospital), outside the East Gate of the old city of Shanghai. In March 1848 he and Medhurst and other London Missionary Society missionaries went to preach in Qingpu, where a clash with local grain-transport boatmen led to the Qingpu Incident. In December 1857 Lockhart left Shanghai and returned to Britain. He stayed in Britain for more than two years; during this time he was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. In 1861 he published The Medical Missionary in China: A Narrative of Twenty Years’ Experience in London.

Beijing

In 1861 Dr. Lockhart left Britain and hurried back to China by way of Egypt, planning to begin a medical work in Beijing. In September he went from Tianjin to Beijing and stayed in Bruce’s home in the British Legation. Because the emperor had died, his search for a house was somewhat affected. On October 3 he found a house next to the British Legation, which the Legation bought and he rented. By the beginning of 1862 the hospital was in full operation; this is the forerunner of today’s well-known Peking Union Medical College Hospital.

Patients grew from two or three a day at the start to twenty or thirty a day. They came from every class: officials, merchants, workers, farmers, and beggars crowded his courtyard. In the first three months 6815 cases were registered, and the actual number was even higher.

From the hospital’s opening, local Protestant believers helped give patients oral medical instructions and also handed out Bible passages and tracts. The hospital’s waiting room held about 60 people, and some who heard the preaching in the waiting room began asking to be baptized. Within a year the first Protestant church in Beijing was established. The London Missionary Society thus became the first mission agency to open work in Beijing. By January 2, 1864, Lockhart reported that 10 mission agencies had already entered Beijing to work.

In March 1864, at Lockhart’s suggestion, Dr. John Dudgeon (杜德珍, 1837-1901) was engaged and came from Britain to this medical work. Lockhart ended his brief service in Beijing in April of the same year and made his way back to Britain.

Works

• Reports of the Chinese Hospital at Shanghai for Eleven Years (1846-1857), 188 pages, Shanghai.
• The Medical Missionary in China: A Narrative of Twenty Years’ Experience, 404 pages, 1861, London.
• Several articles by Lockhart in The Chinese Repository.