https://www.amazon.com/Forty-Years-China-Transition-Spanish/dp/B002JPJ4NS?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B002JPJ4NS
Rosewell Hobart Graves was a native of Baltimore. His father, John James Graves, of old New England stock, was a physician, and served in the Maryland legislature and as a city official of Baltimore. His mother, Anna Jane Baker, combined a deeply religious nature with marked literary ability.
From the time when, at the age of fifteen, Graves joined the Seventh Baptist Church of Baltimore, then under the pastorate of the famous Dr. Richard Fuller, he devoted much time to religious activities.
In the year of his graduation from St. Mary’s College, he decided to enter the ministry, and a few years later he took the further step of determining to be a missionary.
Appointed, in 1855, to China, for some months he studied medicine under his father’s direction and at the University of Maryland. He acquired theological training under the direction of Dr. Fuller, and in 1856 he was ordained to the Baptist ministry.
In 1856, Graves sailed for China and in August of that year arrived in Canton, which for the remainder of his long life was to be the center of his work.
The language gave him some trouble, and for years, he struggled with ill health, but by diligent application, he became master of the one and by care and determination he largely overcame the other.
In 1864, he was left the only representative of his mission board in South China. From then until his death, as the senior member of his mission, which later grew to large proportions, he had a marked influence upon its policies.
During his earlier years, he gave much time to itinerant preaching throughout the region, and helped to bring into existence Christian groups as far west as Kwangsi.
During his middle and later years, he more and more centered his attention upon training Chinese preachers and upon literary activities.
The Graves Theological Seminary, in Canton, rose out of his efforts, with himself as its first head, and he was the author of scores of religious books and pamphlets in Chinese, the total circulation of which ran into the millions, and, in English, of Forty Years in China, or China in Transition (1895). He was one of the organizers of the China Baptist Publication Society, helped in the revision of the translation of the Scriptures into the literary language, and devised a widely used system of phonetic writing for the Cantonese dialect.
Graves was married three times, in 1863 to Mrs. Eva M. Gaillard, the widow of a colleague, in 1872 to a boyhood friend, Jane W. Norris, and in 1890 to a missionary to the Chinese in the United States, Mrs. Jane Lowrey Sanford, who survived him.
