James Hudson Taylor was a British Protestant Christian missionary to China, and founder of the China Inland Mission (CIM) (now OMF International) who served there for 51 years, bringing over 800 missionaries to the country and directly resulting in 18,000 Chinese converts to Christianity by the time he died at age 73.

      Taylor was born into a Christian home in Barnsley, Yorkshire, England, the son of "chemist" (pharmacist) and Methodist lay preacher James Taylor and his wife, Amelia (Hudson), but as a young man he moved away from the beliefs of his parents. At 17, upon reading an evangelistic tract pamphlet, he became a Christian, and in December of 1849, he committed himself to going to China as a missionary

      In 1858, after working in a hospital for four years, he married the daughter of another missionary. He returned to England in 1860 and spent five years translating the New Testament into the Ningpo dialect. He returned to China in 1866 with sixteen other missionaries.