Edwin Stevens

Edwin Stevens (August 1802 – January 5, 1837) was an American Congregationalist chaplain and a Protestant missionary to Qing China who is primarily remembered for his unintentional influence on Hong Xiuquan.

Life Stevens was born in August 1802 in New Canaan, Connecticut. He attended Yale College (1824–1828) or 119 Stevens also served as a chaplain to the foreigners resident at Guangzhou's Thirteen Factories trading ghetto He worked with the ABCFM's missionary Elijah Bridgman and printer Samuel Wells Williams or April 14 he travelled with Karl Gützlaff and Gordon from Nei Lingding on the brig Governor Findlay. The pair passed out around 18,000 books and tracts while encountering varying levels of interest and hostility. As did Gützlaff before them, they found curiosity and eagerness for books when officials were not present, coolness when they were, and increasing animosity as the imperial government became aware of the voyage and exerted pressure on the area's mandarins, particularly to block Stevens and Medhurst's attempts to travel inland. He is generally believed to have been the foreign missionary who gave Hong Xiuquan his copy of Liang Fa's 1832 Good Words to Admonish the Age after his second failed imperial examination in Guangzhou. Its ideas were later adapted by Hong in his preaching of an idiosyncratic form of Christianity which led to the decade’s-long Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s and '60s.

On 3 December 1836, he departed Macao with George Tradescant Lay on the Himmaleh to explore the prospects for evangelization on Borneo and through the Indonesian islands (the "Indian archipelago"). They reached Singapore on the 15th but Stevens contracted an "intermittent fever" He died on January 5, 1837.

. "Sketch of the Life and Labours of Dr Milne", Chinese Repository, Vol. I. "Account of Formosa", Chinese Repository, Vol. II. "Obituary of Dr Morrison", "History of Chinese Pirates", & "On the Propagation of the Gospel in China", Chinese Repository, Vol. III. . . "Account of Assam", Chinese Repository, Vol. V. . .