Calvin Wilson Mateer

Calvin Wilson Mateer (9 January 1836 – 28 September 1908), Chinese name Di Kaowen (狄考文), was an American missionary to China of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (Northern).

Life

Mateer was born into a Scotch-Irish family in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. In 1857 he graduated from Jefferson College in Canonsburg. He then studied at Western Theological Seminary, during which time he served a Presbyterian church in Delaware, Ohio, for two years. In December 1862 he married Julia A. Brown (邦就烈) of Delaware, Ohio. The same year he graduated from the seminary and was ordained a minister.

On 3 July 1863 Mateer and his wife sailed from New York for missionary work in China together with Hunter Corbett (郭显德). They reached Shanghai the same year, and on 15 January of the following year they arrived by ship at Dengzhou (now Penglai) in Shandong, where they took over the work of the missionary John L. Nevius (倪维思). In 1864 he opened a boys’ elementary school (蒙塾) at Dengzhou, which in 1876 was enlarged into Tengchow College (登州文会馆), and in 1882 higher-level courses were added; some say that Tengchow College thereby became the first institution of higher learning in China. Mateer set up a small museum at the college and wrote textbooks himself. By 1895 he had compiled 28 textbooks, including Bisuan Shuxue (笔算数学, Written Arithmetic), Daishu Beizhi (代数备旨, Algebra) and Dianxue Quanshu (电学全书, Complete Book of Electricity). He also wrote a Chinese textbook for foreign missionaries, A Course of Mandarin Lessons, Based on Idiom (官话类编), published in 1892. His wife, Julia Brown Mateer, introduced the teaching of Western music at the college. The college later merged with other mission schools to form Cheeloo University (齐鲁大学).

In 1881 his younger brother Robert M. Mateer (狄乐播; the fourth son of the family), moved by his example, came to Dengzhou together with their sister Lillian and studied Chinese under him, and in 1883 went to Weixian, where he opened the Ledaoyuan mission compound (乐道院). In 1890 Mateer was elected chairman of the committee for translating the Mandarin Union Version of the Bible, and he worked on the translation with the help of Wang Xuanchen (王宣忱; original name Wang Yuande, 王元德, a graduate of Tengchow College). A surviving photograph shows him together with fellow members of the translation committee Frederick W. Baller, Chauncey Goodrich and Spencer Lewis. On 18 January 1898 Julia Brown Mateer died at Dengzhou. In 1906 the translation of the Union Version New Testament was completed, and it was published the following year. In 1908, while attending a Bible translation conference at Yantai, Mateer contracted dysentery, and on 28 September he died, aged 72, at the Faber Hospital (福柏医院) in Qingdao, then in the German-leased Kiautschou Bay territory. He was buried in the American Presbyterian cemetery at Yuhuangding, Yantai.