The Pollard Script and a Grammar Built to Carry a Gospel

Guizhou's Miao communities received one of the more unusual missionary interventions in the history of Chinese Christianity when the English Methodist missionary Samuel Pollard, working among Miao populations in the province in the early twentieth century, devised a new writing system for the language, combining large and small symbols to represent syllables and tones in a script now known as the Pollard script. Pollard used it to translate the New Testament and hymnals, and literacy in the new script, taught in mission schools, spread rapidly enough among Miao communities that conversion followed at a scale unusual for the region.

The older tradition the mission arrived alongside did not disappear. Miao traditional religion continued its own ancestor veneration and observance of the Miao New Year through the same period, sustained in part by the lusheng, the reed pipe instrument played at festival gatherings that functions as much as a marker of Miao identity as a specifically ritual object, and many Miao communities in Guizhou today observe Christian practice and the older festival calendar side by side rather than one having simply replaced the other, a pattern documented across multiple ethnographic accounts of the province's religious life since Pollard's mission.