Robert Henry Mathews

Although Mathews set up his own printing business after graduating, he abandoned it to join the CIM in 1906, receiving eighteen months' training in Adelaide where he ministered to the city's outcast poor.

[3][4] Mathews left for China on 4 October 1908, stopping at the CIM headquarters in Shanghai for a short period before being despatched to Henan.

In 1915 he was transferred to Huizhou (now a district of Huangshan), Anhui, where he is said to have found, as in Henan, "a peculiar lack of response to the Gospel message.

In 1921 Mathews returned to Henan, where he led Bible classes for the troops of the warlord Feng Yuxiang, a convert known as "the Christian General", whom the CIM supported.

In April 1943, Mathews and his wife, Violet, were interned in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre, seven miles southwest of Shanghai.

Writing in 1931, Mathews cites the "rapid changes which have taken place in China," the "influx of modern inventions and the advance of scientific knowledge" as having given rise to new expressions in the thirty years since Baller's dictionary.

[18] Mathews himself had been working on a revised edition of his dictionary, but when the Japanese occupiers took over the original Shanghai headquarters of the CIM (which had moved headquarters in Shanghai in 1931, and moved to the temporary Republican capital in Chongqing in 1943), unbound copies of Mathews' revision were destroyed, along with printing blocks and the CIM's library.

Today it is known simply as Mathews',[21] and has been considered a great resource for students of classical Chinese,[22][23] although recent scholarship is beginning to supersede it in this role.

[24] Mathews married Anne Ethel Smith, an Australian CIM missionary from New South Wales in Shanghai on 30 December 1908, with whom he had three children.