[1] Born at Pyritz (present-day Pyrzyce), Pomerania, he was apprenticed to a saddler in Stettin,[2] but was able to secure admission to Pädagogium in Halle, and associated himself with the Janike Institute in Berlin.

Along with East India Company staff Hugh Hamilton Lindsay, Gutzlaff joined a clandestine reconnaissance that visited Amoy, Fuzhou, Ningbo, Shanghai and the Shandong coast.

"[6] In 1840, Gützlaff (under the anglicized name Charles Gutzlaff) became part of a group of four people (with Walter Henry Medhurst, Elijah Coleman Bridgman, and John Robert Morrison) who cooperated to translate the Bible into Chinese.

This translation, completed in 1847, is well-known due to its adoption by the revolutionary peasant leader Hong Xiuquan of the Taipingtianguo movement (who started the Taiping Rebellion) as some of the reputed early doctrines of the organization.

It was observed by a visitor to Hong Kong in 1848 that Gützlaff had turned his back on being a missionary and become a corpulent figure enjoying a large civil service salary.

Shattered by the exposure of the fraud, Gützlaff died in Hong Kong in 1851, leaving a £30,000 fortune,[7]: 304  equivalent to over 5 million pounds in 2024.

The Chinese Evangelization Society which he formed lived on to send out Hudson Taylor who founded the successful China Inland Mission.

John Francis Davis, at that time chief superintendent of British trade in China, was made an honorary member.

David Livingstone read Gützlaff's "Appeal to the Churches of Britain and America on Behalf of China" and decided to become a medical missionary.

So the London Missionary Society sent him to Africa, where (in 1871) Henry Morton Stanley would find him working hard in Ujiji, Tanzania.

He also read Gützlaff's many writings, which became sources for Karl Marx' articles on China for the London Times and the New York Daily Tribune in the 1840s and 1850s, all of which are anti-imperialist and anti-religion.