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As he sailed into the port of Canton in 1807, 25-year-old Robert Morrison was filled with a driving passion to see the Chinese people come to know Christ. By the time he died in China 27 years later, however, he had baptized only ten Chinese. But if Morrison died discouraged, his pioneering work, which included a six-volume Chinese dictionary and a translation of the Bible, opened the door for other missionaries and thus for the millions of conversions he had only dreamed of.

Morrison was raised in a stern Scotch-Presbyterian home where reading missionary stories in a church magazine whetted his interest in foreign missions. His mother, however, made him promise not to go abroad while she was alive. Only after his mother died, during Morrison's early twenties, did he take up ministerial training in London. After two years of study, he was accepted into the London Missionary Society. While waiting to find a male colleague to go with him to China, he studied language for one year with a Chinese scholar living in England. When no partner was forthcoming, Morrison left for China alone. He was forced to go via the United States, since the East India Company, which owned most of the English ships going to China, refused him passage.

Morrison's lifelong relationship with the East India Company was one of mutual need and mutual distrust. The company guarded its commercial interests in China by strictly refusing to let Westerners such as Morrison evangelize. They feared missionaries would offend their Chinese trade partners. But after Morrison's arrival in China, company officials learned of his language skills and hired him as a translator. They gave Morrison a salary but also attempted to restrict his missions activities. In 1815, for example, the company threatened to deport him when it learned that Morrison had completed, in secret, a translation of the New Testament.

In 1809 Morrison married Mary Morton. After six years and two children, a seriously ill Mary returned to England with their children. It was six years before they returned to Canton to see their father and husband. When Mary died, Morrison sent the children back to England, and three years later traveled there himself for his first and only furlough. When he returned to Canton, he brought with him the children and a new wife, Elizabeth, with whom he had four more children and a happy marriage.

In 1834, two months after pioneer missionary William Carey's death in India, Morrison died. When as a young man Morrison had first sailed to China, he was asked, "Do you really expect to make an impression on the idolatry of the great Chinese empire?" In reply, Morrison spoke more prophetically than he knew: "No, sir, but I expect God will."

One historian described him as, variously, "a saint, a crank, a visionary, a true pioneer, and a deluded fanatic." Karl Gützlaff provides a poignant example of how Christ is preached even through those with many shortcomings.

In the waning years of Robert Morrison's life, a younger, equally zealous Gützlaff was skirting the coast of China in his boat, delivering Chinese tracts translated by Morrison. The free-lance missionary had recently lost his wife and daughter after several years of mission work in Indonesia and Thailand.

By the late 1840s, the reports from Gützlaff's work in China were glowing: the 300 Chinese Gützlaff had trained to evangelize China in one generation had distributed thousands of New Testaments and counted no fewer than 2,871 baptized converts. Supporters back home were enthusiastic—until the hoax was discovered in 1850.

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