Sinologist: Frederick W. Baller

Frederick William Baller (21 November 1852 – 12 August 1922) was a British Protestant Christian missionary to China, Chinese linguist, translator, educator and sinologist.

Following his conversion to Christianity at age 17, Baller was one of the first students of the Missionary Institute established in the East End of London by Henry Grattan Guinness.

Baller applied to the China Inland Mission and left England on 3 September 1873 with Charles Henry Judd, M. Henry Taylor, and Mary Bowyer. They arrived at Shanghai on 5 November 1873. The following year, he and Mary Bowyer were married at Shanghai, on 17 September. Mary was a veteran missionary to China who had ventured out with Hudson Taylor on the Lammermuir (clipper) in 1866, at the beginning of the China Inland Mission. She had been baptised by Taylor, along with some others, en route at the Sunda Strait.

Baller studied the Chinese language in Nanking (Nanjing), then just recently liberated from the ravages of the Taiping rebels. Baller was then appointed superintendent of missions in Anhui and Jiangsu with the China Inland Mission. He went to Shanxi in 1876, with George King, to distribute famine relief. Due to the continued famine in 1878, he returned to Shanxi with Taylor's wife Jane Elizabeth Faulding and single women missionaries Horne and Crickmay. Baller took a China Inland Mission party through Hunan, facing antiforeign opposition, to Guiyang in 1880, visiting the capital of Guizhou. He was appointed secretary to the first China Inland Mission China Council in 1885.