Lu was born in Fujian, on the southeast coast of China, and was raised in Xiamen—where Christian missionaries had introduced a romanization of the local variety of Chinese that was widely used in newspapers and books.
When he was 18, Lu Zhuangzhang failed the imperial examination for the civil service, and he subsequently converted to Christianity and sought out opportunities in the missionary community.
John MacGowan of the London Missionary Society recruited Lu to help compile the English and Chinese Dictionary of the Amoy Dialect (1883),[1] which used the romanization system from Carstairs Douglas (1876).
Lu devised a streamlined system of 55 distinctly pronounced zimu (字母; 'alphabet letters'), symbols largely derived from the Latin alphabet.
Therefore, in the civilized nations of Europe and America, all men and women over the age of ten, even in remote villages and isolated areas, are able to read.... What is the reason for this?
[8][9] When Lu later supervised a language school in colonial Taiwan, he realized the flaws with his Qieyin Xinzi and attempted to redesign the system on the basis of the Japanese kana syllabary, but there were already too many competing schemes.
[10] Lu Zhuangzhang continued to work on reforming written Chinese, and in 1912 he was appointed as one of 55 members in the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation, which developed Zhang Binglin's Jiyin Zimu (記音字母 "Alphabetic Phonetic Notation") into the Bopomofo transcription system, which the Beiyang government adopted in 1918.