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George William Hunter, MBE (31 July 1861 – 20 December 1946) was a missionary of the China Inland Mission who worked in China for 57 years, most of them in Xinjiang.
Hunter was born in 1861 in Kincardineshire, Scotland, and lost his mother as a child. As a young man, his sweetheart Jessie died at the age of 22 and was buried in Aberdeen; after this Hunter gave himself to missionary work. He came to China in 1889 and worked first in Gansu. In 1906 he entered Dihua (now Urumqi) in Xinjiang and remained there from then on. In his 57 years of missionary work in China he returned home only once, in 1900. He translated the Bible into the languages of various ethnic groups, printed in very small numbers.
In 1934 Sheng Shicai (盛世才), Military Governor of Xinjiang, defeated Ma Zhongying (马仲英) with the help of the Soviet Red Army and began pursuing an “anti-imperialist, pro-Soviet” policy in Xinjiang. In 1935 he expelled the foreign missionaries in Xinjiang, and Hunter was arrested on charges of espionage.
Hunter died on 20 December 1946 in Zhangye, Gansu Province, China.
Biographies
- Mildred Cable and Francesca French, George Hunter: Apostle of Turkestan (1948)
- B. V. Henry, Fakkelbæreren til de ukjente: pionermisjonæren George Hunter i Sentral-Asia, Oslo: Lunde (2001)