Walter Henry Medhurst
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 Southern Min, and seems not to have had any influence on the development of "pe̍h-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.