In 1890 the Protestant missions working in China met in Shanghai and admitted a problem. There were already several Chinese Bibles, and no two agreed — not on wording, not on the spelling of names, and not even on which register of Chinese to write in. The conference resolved on a single translation that every mission would use, and called it a union version: 和合本, the harmonised text. Because written Chinese was then split between the literary language of the educated and the spoken vernacular of everyone else, they commissioned three at once — two in literary Chinese, one in Mandarin.
The Mandarin committee took twenty-nine years. Calvin Wilson Mateer, an American Presbyterian who had been in Shandong since 1863, chaired it, and died in 1908 with the work unfinished; the panel he had assembled from a half-dozen missions carried on, as did the Chinese scholars who worked alongside them and whose names the mission records kept much less carefully. They took the English Revised Version as the text they were rendering and checked it against the Hebrew and Greek behind it — which puts the corpus's own Revised Version one step upstream of this Bible, and the King James Version one step above that. The two literary versions were eventually merged into one. The Mandarin version is what survived.
It was published in 1919, and the date did more for it than any committee could have. That was the year of the May Fourth Movement, when Chinese writers began abandoning the literary language for the vernacular in earnest, and the Union Version arrived as one of the very first substantial books already written that way. A translation meant to settle an argument between missionaries turned into a landmark of modern Chinese prose, and its phrasing is quoted by people who have never opened a Bible. It has been printed ever since in two editions that differ in a single word — whether God is 神 or 上帝 — with the spacing adjusted so that both editions still break pages identically.
This reader holds two Chinese texts: this one, the Union Version as it is read today, and [[CUV1919|the 1919 text]], which keeps the old character forms and punctuation of the first printing. In the lineage rungs this one has no recorded parent, so opening a rung beneath a verse goes straight to the original-language floor marked with ≈, even though the Revised Version it was made from is sitting in the corpus one column away. Its rung chip does carry a year, 1919, which not every edition here does.