Samuel Pollard
| Samuel Pollard | |
|---|---|
| Born | 20 April 1864 Camelford, Cornwall, England |
| Died | 16 September 1915 (aged 51) Weining Yi, Hui, and Miao Autonomous County, Zhaotong, Yunnan, China |
Samuel Pollard (20 April 1864 in Camelford, Cornwall – 16 September 1915 in Weining, China), known in Chinese as Bo Geli (Chinese: 柏格理; pinyin: Bó Gélǐ) was a British Methodist missionary to China with the China Inland Mission who converted many of the A-Hmao (closely related to the Hmong) in Guizhou to Christianity, and who created a Miao script that is still in use today.
Born the son of a Bible Christian Church preacher, Sam Pollard initially aimed for a career in the civil service. However, a conference in London in 1885 encouraged him to instead become a missionary. He was appointed a missionary in 1886, left the United Kingdom for China in 1887, and was posted to Yunnan province in 1888. He remained in China, as a missionary, until his death from typhoid.
In 1891 he was posted to a newly opened Bible Christian mission station in Zhaotong (referred to in contemporary sources in Wade–Giles as Chaotung), where he married Emmie Hainge. He began a Christian movement with the Big Flowery Miao in 1905 that spread to Zhaotong. Pollard also invented a script for the Miao languages called the Pollard Script (also sometimes called the "Ahmao script"). He credited the basic idea of the script to the Cree syllabary, "While working out the problem, we remembered the case of the syllabics used by James Evans, a Methodist missionary among the Indians of North America, and resolved to do as he had done". He also gave credit to a non-Miao Chinese pastor, “Stephen Lee assisted me very ably in this matter, and at last we arrived at a system”.
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