Born in Edingurgh and serving with the London Missionary Society, Alexander Stronach arrived in Singapore in 1838 with his brother, John. He moved to Penang in 1839. In August 1843, he attended the Convention of Missionaries on Bible Translation and the LMS Conference of Missionaries in Hong Kong. That year, Alexander and John buried Samuel Dyer next to Robert Morrison in Macao.
Returning to Penang and then Singapore, Stronach closed the LMS “Ultra-Ganges Mission” since it moved to the mainland. He then restored the Malacca printing press in Hong Kong in 1846, and the same year joined John in Xiamen (Amoy) with his wife, Eliza. He helped John and William C. Burns build up a strong, outgoing Chinese church there, which at 52 members was the largest of all the Chinese congregations at the time.
Stronach worked mainly in printing, education, and evangelism, but was also a hymn writer and in 1857 he published a hymnbook in Amoy. After retiring to London, he died in 1879.
Sources
- A.J. Broomhall, Hudson Taylor and China’s Open Century: Barbarians at the Gates, 309, 407.
- A.J. Broomhall, Hudson Taylor and China’s Open Century: Over the Treaty Wall, 162.
- A.J. Broomhall, Hudson Taylor and China’s Open Century: If I Had A Thousand Lives, 37-8.
- John Roxborogh, “Stronach, Alexander,” Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, ed. Gerald Anderson (1998).