Arthur H. Smith

Born in 1845, he was an American Congregational missionary who went to China in the early 1870s under the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. He spent most of his working life there, living in northern China and learning the language and daily life well enough to write vividly for readers back home.

He is best remembered for books such as Chinese Characteristics, Village Life in China, and China in Convulsion. These works helped shape how many Western readers understood China at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth, especially during the years around the Boxer Uprising.

He died in 1932. Today, his writing remains valuable both as a record of long missionary experience in China and as an example of how foreign observers interpreted Chinese society in that era.