Biography
Samuel Pollard was born on April 20, 1864, in Camelford, Cornwall, in the far southwest of England, the son of a Bible Christian minister. The Bible Christians were a small Methodist body, strong in Cornwall and Devon, known for plain living, open-air preaching and a deep concern for missions. The family moved from circuit to circuit as his father was appointed to new churches, and Samuel grew up in many villages. He was a quick, cheerful boy, with a gift for friendship and an easy sense of humor. He was a good student, and he won prizes at school. At seventeen, he sat for the civil service examination and did so well that he was given a post in London, as a clerk in the government's service. It was a good position for a boy of his background, and it might have been the start of a comfortable career.
He was an earnest member of the church, and he taught in the Sunday school. In London, he was drawn to the idea of going to the mission field. The Bible Christian Missionary Society had begun work in Yunnan, in the southwest of China, in 1885, and it called for workers. He gave up his post and offered himself. He was sent to the denomination's college at Shebbear, in Devon, for training, and in 1887, at the age of twenty-three, he sailed for China. The journey took many weeks. He arrived in a country that was largely closed to foreigners, in a province that was remote from the coast and that had few roads. He settled at Zhaotong, a walled city in the northeast of Yunnan, where the mission had its station.
He set himself to learn the language, with a determination that his colleagues admired. He wore Chinese dress, ate Chinese food and walked the streets and the markets, speaking to the people. He was a man who made friends easily and who laughed readily. He liked to play games with the children. He took with him a fondness for football, which he introduced to the people of the region. In 1894, he married Emma Hainge, a fellow missionary, who shared his work and who bore him several children. He worked as an evangelist and a teacher, and he was a doctor in a rough fashion, though he had no medical training. He built a modest church. For years, the work was slow, and the converts were few.
In 1904, there came a change. A group of Miao people came to the mission house in Zhaotong. The Miao were one of the minority peoples of southwest China, a poor and despised people who lived in the mountains, on the poorest lands, and who were treated as inferiors by the Chinese. They were largely illiterate. Many of them worked as tenant farmers for Chinese landlords. The group that came to Pollard asked for the gospel. They said that they wished to learn about the God of whom he spoke. He was moved. He went to their villages, high in the mountains, and he stayed with them in their huts. Within a short time, great numbers of Miao were coming to him, in crowds, asking to be taught. A mass movement began. It was a work that took him up and carried him along.
He saw that they needed to read the Scriptures in their own tongue. The Miao had no written language. With the help of a Miao man, he set out to devise a script. He took a simple alphabet, adapted from shapes in the Latin letters and in the Miao embroidery, and he made a syllabic system that was easy to learn. A man could learn to read it in a few weeks. It was a masterstroke. It came to be known as the Pollard script. He and his helpers wrote the Gospels and then the New Testament in the Miao language. He also wrote hymns and school primers. Thousands of Miao learned to read, for the first time, through the script. He opened schools in the villages, for boys and for girls, and he made them a mark of the mission.
He was a man who worked at a heavy pace. He traveled through the mountains in the rain and cold, on foot and by pony, to visit the scattered congregations. He lived on the food of the people and slept in their huts. He had a capacity for joy, and he sang. He loved the Miao, and they loved him. They called him a teacher who had come to make them a people. He saw the church grow to many thousands. He also faced opposition from the Chinese landlords, who disliked the Miao's new independence. He was often sick. In 1915, he made a journey to the mountains to a gathering of the church. He caught typhoid fever and died on September 16, 1915, at Shimenkan, at the age of fifty-one.
His death was mourned by the whole Miao community. He was buried in the mountains that he loved. His wife and children survived him. He wrote several books about his work, among them Tight Corners in China and In Unknown China, which were popular in Britain. They give a lively picture of the life of the mission. He also took pains to record the stories of the Miao. His life shows the effect of a cheerful clerk who gave a people a written language and a Bible. The Miao church that he helped to found survives to this day.