Karl Gützlaff

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Karl Gützlaff (around 1834).

Karl Friedrich August Gützlaff (in Anglo-Saxon literature mostly Gutzlaff, Chinese  郭士立 , Pinyin Guō Shìlì ; * July 8, 1803 in Pyritz ; †  August 9, 1851 in Hong Kong ) was a German missionary who worked mainly in the Far East . During the First Opium War , he played an important intelligence role in the warfare of the British Expeditionary Force in China.

life and work

Carl Gützlaff, as his name was spelled in contemporary articles, was the son of the "good and god-fearing" master tailor Johann Jacob Gützlaff. His mother died when the boy was four years old, and his stepmother, a “loving nurse”, died soon too; while the third wife of his father treated him with a harshness "from which both his physical and mental development suffered, and the cheerful cheerfulness of his youth was tarnished by rigid melancholy." He was pietistically influenced by the Francke schools in Halle . After attending primary school , he began an apprenticeship as a saddler ; In 1816 he came to Stettin . He was interested in the faith but had never seen a conversion .

In 1820 he came with King Friedrich Wilhelm III. in contact, to whom he presented a self-written poem during his visit to Szczecin and who provided his support. In April 1821 Gützlaff entered the Johannes Jaenicke mission school in Berlin, which was supported by the king and was characterized by the piety of the Herrnhut . In 1821 he converted to Jesus Christ after internal struggles . He became a burning disciple of Jesus who - strongly influenced by August Tholuck - gave testimony of his Lord and his cross.

Gützlaff studied languages ​​intensively. From 1823 to 1826 he continued his education in Rotterdam and learned Dutch and Malay in order to prepare for the missionary service in the Dutch East Indies . He also acquired knowledge of Turkish and Arabic in Holland. In 1827 a Dutch mission society sent him to Batavia . Here he learned the Chinese language . He worked with the British missionary Walter Medhurst together of the at China encouraged very interested Gützlaff to develop its China Studies.

Karl Gützlaff in Chinese national costume

In 1828 he left the company and settled on the island of Bintan in front of Singapore and founded an infirmary, later he went to Bangkok . His linguistic genius was evident when he translated the Bible into Siamese . Later he also mastered various Chinese dialects, e.g. B. Mandarin, Cantonese, Fuijan etc. In 1830 he married the Englishwoman Mary Newell, whom he knew from the London Missionary Society in England . He began to translate the Bible into other Far Eastern languages ​​and published both a Chinese and a Japanese dictionary. When his wife died in childbed in 1831 , he was again on his own. As a free missionary, he went from Bangkok to Macau and Hong Kong and was the first European to come to Shanghai . After a sea voyage with the British merchant ship Lord Amherst , he was the first German to set foot in Korea on the afternoon of July 17, 1832 and was also the first Protestant missionary in this country.

He turned commercial companies as interpreters available, the trading company Jardine Matheson- and 1835, the British East India Company (British East India Company). He used this contact for missionary activities, e.g. B. Bible spreading etc.

During the First Opium War , he served under Superintendents Charles Elliot and Henry Pottinger as chief intelligence officer for the British Expeditionary Force. Thanks to his contacts with the locals, he was able to provide the British leadership with a clear picture of the situation and predict Chinese actions based on his informants. In the course of his activity he also appeared in Zhoushan and Ningbo as an administrator of temporarily occupied Chinese cities.

Gützlaff made dangerous journeys into the interior of China. He was determined to go to China and evangelize if necessary, at risk of death. He started working in Chinese clothes and gave himself a Chinese name.

When the Chinese government banned foreigners from entering the interior of the country, Gützlaff founded a school for Chinese missionaries in 1844. Fifty locals were trained there in the first four years. However, some of the missionaries took advantage of Gützlaff's good nature. They were opium addicts who used the money entrusted to them for their own purposes. On their return they brought reports of numerous conversions they had brought about inland. They had sold the New Testaments that Gützlaff had given the locals back to the printer. This in turn she sold again to Gützlaff.

From mid-December 1849, Gützlaff gave lectures on a long trip to Europe. In May 1850 he came to Germany while traveling. On June 11th, 1850, he was given honorary citizenship in his hometown of Pyritz . He was also received by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV .

Gützlaff's grave in Hong Kong

Shortly after his return to China, he died on August 9, 1851 in Hong Kong. Hudson Taylor later learned how troubled his predecessor when he learned how he had been systematically tricked. Very few of his Chinese evangelists had worked outside of the cantons and most of the reports were written in opium dens. The officials of the Qing dynasty saw Gützlaff as one of the conspirators and wrongly ascribed to him a decisive political role in the development of the war.

His epitaph is in the Hong Kong Cemetery in Happy Valley . Together with Robert Morrison , he probably paved the way for Hudson Taylor, who called him the "grandfather of the Chinese domestic mission". He became widely known in Europe through his diverse journalistic activities and unusual descriptions of China for the time; even Karl Marx quoted him in January 1850 at a consideration of China's social conditions. A street in Hong Kong was named after him.

Gützlaff plays an important role in Stephan Thome's novel God of the Barbarians (Berlin 2018).

literature

Web links

Commons : Karl Gützlaff  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ NN: Carl Gützlaff . In: Illustrirte Zeitung , Vol. 4, No. 87. Leipzig, March 1, 1845, pp. 129-133.
  2. ↑ Julia Lovell: The Opium War. London, 2011, pp. 27f, 198-200, 204
  3. ^ Frederick Howard Taylor and Geraldine Taylor: Hudson Taylor. A picture of life. Volume 1. Emil Müller Verlag, Barmen 1924, p. 68.
  4. ↑ Mao Haijian: The Qing Empire and the Opium War - The Fall of the Heavenly Dynasty. Cambridge, 2016, p. 419, p. 480
personal data
SURNAME Gützlaff, Karl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gützlaff, Karl Friedrich August
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German missionary
DATE OF BIRTH July 8, 1803
PLACE OF BIRTH Pyritz
DATE OF DEATH August 9, 1851
Place of death Hong Kong