George Smith (Chinese: 施美夫; 19 June 1815 – 14 December 1871) was a missionary in China and the Bishop of Victoria (the Anglican bishop in Hong Kong) from 1849 to 1865, the first of this newly established diocese.
Smith worked hard to raise money for further missionary work in China, and in 1849 was made bishop of the new diocese of Victoria, Hong Kong and warden of the newly founded St Paul's Missionary College (see St Paul's College). He was consecrated a bishop on 29 May 1849 at Canterbury Cathedral,[3] by John Bird Sumner, Archbishop of Canterbury.[4] With his new wife Lydia, née Brandram, Smith arrived in Hong Kong on 29 March 1850 and threw himself into missionary and educational work. He learned Mandarin, becoming sufficiently fluent to conduct services in it.
Smith was also responsible for missionary work in China and Japan. A weak constitution limited this work, but he nevertheless visited Japan (1860), the Ryukyu islands (1850), India and Ceylon (1852–1853), Australia (1859), and elsewhere, partly to work for emigrants from China.
Smith had a misinformed sympathy on religious grounds for the Taiping rebel movement in the neighbouring Chinese Empire. In 1853 he wrote in letter to Archbishop Sumner: "The rebel chiefs profess to believe in Protestant Christianity; declare that they are commissioned by the Almighty to spread the knowledge of the one true God; have everywhere shown a determination to destroy idolatry of every kind; and now profess to await a further revelation of the divine will, ere they advance upon the northern capital Peking".[5] He was still sympathetic as late as 1863, when he protested to the Foreign Secretary (then Earl Russell), without checking his facts, over Hong Kong newspaper reports on the killing of Taiping prisoners in Taintsan by followers of the Ever Victorious Army who were under command of Charles George Gordon (but done without his knowledge).[6] At that stage he considered the Taiping sincere if somewhat heretical Christians, and he was supported by a strong lobby of merchants in Hong Kong who profited from supplying the rebels.[6]
Smith left Hong Kong for the last time in 1864, retiring from the bishopric early the next year.[7] He had arrived back in Britain by St Peter's Day (29 June 1864), when he presented Charles Bromby for consecration as a bishop at Canterbury Cathedral.[8] Over the following years, he occasionally assisted successive Bishops of Winchester (Sumner and Wilberforce at least) in north Surrey (what is now South London).[9] He died in his house at Blackheath (then in Kent, now in Greater London), on 14 December 1871 after a short illness.
