author
Gilbert McIntosh
A Scottish missionary printer and writer, he is remembered for documenting the world of Christian publishing in China and for practical language work connected to Shanghai. His surviving books offer a glimpse of everyday communication and missionary print culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
1 Audiobook
Useful Phrases in the Shanghai Dialect
by Gilbert McIntosh
About the author
Born in Falkirk, Scotland, in 1861, Gilbert McIntosh later worked in China as a missionary and became superintendent of the American Presbyterian Mission Press in Shanghai. The records I found consistently connect him with mission printing and publishing, and one scholarly biographical entry lists his lifespan as 1861–1919.
McIntosh is best known today for books such as The Mission Press in China, a retrospective on the American Presbyterian Mission Press and related publishing work, and Useful Phrases in the Shanghai Dialect, a practical language guide. Together, those works suggest a writer deeply involved in both the machinery of print and the daily realities of cross-cultural communication.
Not much easily verifiable biographical detail seems to survive online beyond his publishing and missionary work, so the clearest picture of him comes through his books: practical, historically minded, and closely tied to Shanghai's multilingual world.