Page "Pe̍h-ōe-jī" Paragraph 7

The first people to use a romanized script to write Southern Min were Spanish missionaries in Manila in the 16th century.

However, it was used mainly as a teaching aid for Spanish learners of the language, and seems not to have had any influence on the development of pe ̍ h-ōe-jī.

In the early 19th century, China was closed to Christian missionaries, who instead proselytized to overseas Chinese communities in South East Asia.

The earliest origins of the system are found in a small vocabulary first printed in 1820 by Walter Henry Medhurst, who went on to publish the Dictionary of the Hok-këèn Dialect of the Chinese Language, According to the Reading and Colloquial Idioms in 1832.