Samuel Dyer

British missionary
the translator

Samuel Dyer (台約爾, 20 February 1804 – 24 October 1843) was a British Protestant Christian missionary to China in the Congregationalist tradition who worked among the Chinese in Malaysia. He arrived in Penang in 1827. Dyer, his wife Maria, and their family lived in Malacca and then in Singapore. He was known as a typographer for creating a steel typeface of Chinese characters for printing to replace traditional wood blocks. Dyer's type was accurate, aesthetically pleasing, durable, and practical.

Samuel and Maria had five children while overseas. Maria Dyer (born at Penang 1829–1831), Samuel Dyer, Jr. (born at Penang 1833–1898), Burella Hunter Dyer (born at Penang 1835–1858), Maria Jane Dyer (born at Malacca 1837–1870), and Ebenezer Dyer (born at Singapore 1842 aft. October 1843)

Samuel Dyer and his wife left England on 10 March 1827, and they arrived at Penang, in the Straits of Malacca, on 8 August 1827. The Dyers were to have gone on to Anglo Chinese College in Malacca, but a lack of workers lead them to stay in Penang and settle in the Chinese sector of town. They both began studying the Min nan dialect (Hokkien) spoken by the local population. After gaining some knowledge of the language, Dyer faced the challenge of producing movable metallic types for the thousands of Chinese characters. He started with a systematic analysis of characters and strokes. At first, using wood reliefs to create the clay moulds from which type could be cast, he soon moved to steel punches and copper matrixes. Dyer's linguistic abilities, meticulous planning, and painstaking attention to detail resulted in Chinese fonts of high quality. They were later passed on to the American Presbyterian Mission Press in China and played a significant part in its development. Maria opened school for girls with 23 students, but she was forced to close it later in the year. By 1828 Samuel was preaching in Chinese only 5 months after their arrival. He grew committed to the production of Christian literature in Chinese, printing Bibles, tracts, and books with the moveable, metal cast type with a controlled vocabulary that he developed. In 1829 they had their first daughter, Maria, who died about two years later. The same year, in 1831, Samuel visited Malacca, the headquarters of the London Missionary Society's Chinese ministries. In 1833 the Dyers had a boy named Samuel. About this same time some in the Chinese community requested a school. During this period Samuel was hard at work on a revision of the translation of Matthew's Gospel in Chinese. The amount of work that still was left to be done prompted him to write to England in the following year, appealing for more workers to be sent out. Robert Morrison died at Guangzhou in 1834. 1835 brought another daughter, Burella Hunter, to the Dyer family at Penang. Samuel then took his family to Malacca to join the London Missionary Society China Mission headquarters. The Dyers established 2 schools, with the curriculum including reading, writing, sewing, and embroidery. There Samuel worked with Liang Fa (who had been baptised by William Milne in 1819). Dyer soon recognised the strategic importance of his metal type printing and proceeded with the revision of the Chinese Bible at Malacca. Another daughter, Maria Jane Dyer, was born in 1837 at Malacca.

Samuel and Maria had been at the LMS Penang station from 1827 to 1835. They were at the Malacca station from 1835 to 1839. The Dyers went on furlough from 1839 to 1842. It was the first time that their children had seen England. On 19 September 1839 the Dyer family arrived in England. Maria was ill with what was thought to be a liver problem. The Dyers remained in England until 1841, when they left again for the Ultra Ganges Mission, this time to Singapore. A single woman named Buckland accompanied them and helped Maria with the three children. They arrived in Singapore in 1842 and rented the mission house of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, there. Samuel began work with John Stronach of the LMS and began learning Teochew dialect. He also worked on a revision of the Chinese Bible, translations, preparation of books, type casting, printing, and a comparative vocabulary of Chinese language. Dyer printed "Two Friends" by William Milne, a "Commentary on 10 Commandments" by Walter Henry Medhurst, and the "Miracles of Christ". He also helped Chaozhou, a Christian teacher compile the "Life of Christ". During this busy period, Dyer conducted religious services through the week, visited house to house, preached in the bazaars, and visited Chinese junks in the harbour to reach the Chinese there with the gospel message. Maria established a Chinese Girls' Boarding School with 20 students in their home (at the present day site of Raffles Hotel); the school later became St. Margaret's Primary School. Dyer moved the LMS press from Malacca to Singapore on James Legge's suggestion before the end of 1842. 1842 brought another son, Ebenezer Dyer. The Treaty of Nanking was signed, raising hopes that missionary work could soon begin in mainland China. Dyer preached the first sermon at the Malay Chapel in Prinsep Street opened by Benjamin Peach Keasberry in 1843. That summer he left with John Stronach for the LMS conference in Hong Kong. His family would never see him again.

Dyer was able to finally reach China on 7 August 1843 at Hong Kong. At the LMS general conference he was appointed as Conference Secretary. The Dyers were appointed to go to Fuzhou, Fujian, to open missionary work there. Samuel visited Guangzhou, where he had a severe attack of fever and was cared for by Peter Parker, M. D. He was taken to Macau and died there on 21 October 1843. This was the same outbreak that took the life of Robert Morrison's son, John Robert Morrison, at Guangzhou. Dyer was buried next to the graves of Robert and Mary Morrison at the Old Protestant Cemetery in Macau. Dyer had once written: Maria Dyer died three years later at Penang, leaving 3 children in the care of her second husband, Johann Georg Bausum. A fellow missionary to Penang, Evan Davies, wrote a memoir of Samuel Dyer and a volume of Samuel's letters to his children in 1846. The Chinese Repository recorded his obituary and mentioned that, His attainments in speaking the Fukien dialect were of the first order, and he had already published a small Vocabulary and a translation of Thom's Esop's Fables in the colloquial, and had commenced another larger vocabulary. Besides preaching among the people, Mr. Dyer had also devoted much of his time to the cutting of punches for a font of Chinese types, in which he had attained to a great degree of perfection. One large and one small font are now partly done

The type that came to be known as Dyer's Penang font became the standard in Chinese printing until the 1850s, when it was replaced by William Gamble's font in 1859. All three of the Dyers' surviving children became involved in work to spread the Gospel in China. The Dyers' daughters returned to China as teenagers and worked with Mary Ann Aldersey at her school for Chinese girls in Ningbo, Zhejiang. Maria Jane Dyer married James Hudson Taylor, who went on to found the China Inland Mission. She had a strong influence in the beginnings of that agency. Burella Dyer had married a year earlier to John Shaw Burdon, but had died in Shanghai very soon after they were married. Samuel Dyer, Jr., succeeded Alexander Wylie with the British and Foreign Bible Society as their agent in China in the 1870s.