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James Ostram Fraser was a Scottish Protestant Christian missionary to China with the China Inland Mission. He pioneered work among the Lisu people of western China in the early part of the 20th century.
First years in Yunnan
Born in Scotland, Fraser travelled to China's Yunnan province in 1910, and spent nearly thirty years there among the Lisu. Fraser is best known for the alphabet he created for the Lisu, designed for purpose of translating the New Testament into the Lisu language. Fraser also designed a written musical notation for transcribing the Lisu's oral history songs. Going to China with CIM (China Inland Mission), he was stationed in the then remote province of Yunnan to work with the local Chinese. However he was a keen climber and revelled in climbing through the mountains meeting and preaching to the Lisu people, particularly in the upper Salween river valley. Readily accepted by them and able to live in their mud floor huts, he was able to communicate a little through Chinese and then to learn their language, which is in the Tibeto-Burman group. Initial success was followed by years of doubt and difficulty until 1916 when he and fellow missionaries started to see scores of families convert and enthusiastically pursue a new life without the fear of the spirits that had previously characterised them.
Aware that they would soon need material in their language, he began work immediately on Mark's gospel and a book of hymns, since they showed great interest in writing and were already great singers and natural musicians.
Furlough and marriage
Fraser went back to England on furlough in 1924 and when he returned to Lisuland in 1929, he was married, to Roxie Dymond, the daughter of a Methodist missionary stationed in Kunming.
Revival and the Fraser alphabet
Working initially on Mark and John and then on a handbook of Lisu history and language, Fraser handed on the translation task to Allyn and Leila Cooke, coming back to help the team with revision and checking in the mid 1930s. The complete New Testament was finished in 1936.
Fraser maintained a consistent policy of training the Lisu converts (usually whole households and whole villages at a time) to be self supporting and to pay for their own books and church buildings. They raised their own funds for the support of pastors, of wives and children of their travelling evangelists and of festivals and other occasions. Unlike other missionaries of his generation, Fraser would not pay local preachers to go out, or for building local church structures, and this was something that put the Lisu in good stead for the years of Japanese occupation and the communist persecution, particularly during the Chinese cultural revolution. Never the less tens of thousands of them fled during this era to neighbooring Burma and Thailand. Fraser also left church government in the hands of Lisu elders, very litle imprint was made on them that had a home church character, other than the tremendous prayer support the Fraser organised back in England for the Lisu and his work.
Throughout the 1930's other missionaries came to assist in the work, but the bulk of the conversions happened as a result of Lisu evengelists covering the ground and reaching not only Lisu but also Kachin and Yi people (Nosu). Revivals also broke out at this time. It is acknowledged by the Chinese Government that by the 1990's over 90% of the Lisu in China were Christian.
After seeing great fruit for his labours, James O Fraser died in Yunnan in 1938 of cerebral malaria, leaving and wife and three children. His main biographer is daughter, Eileen Crossman who published Mountain Rain in 1982.
Legacy
In 1992, the Chinese government officially recognized the Fraser alphabet as the official script of the Lisu language. Today, Fraser is remembered as one of Christianity's most successful missionaries to east Asia in modern times.