Paul Hyer

Who is Paul Hyer?

Paul Van Hyer is an emeritus professor of Chinese History at Brigham Young University and the founder of the Asian Studies Program at that institution.

Hyer was born in Ogden, Utah. During World War II Hyer served in the United States military in the Pacific Theatre. As a young man Hyer served as an LDS missionary in the Japanese mission located in Hawaii from 1946-1948. While in Hawaii Hyer set up a system to train missionaries in the Japanese language in an organized manner.

Hyer received his BA in history from BYU in 1951, followed by an MA in Asian history and Asian Social Institutions from the University of California, Berkeley in 1953 and a Ph.D. in Asian History, also from UC Berkeley, in 1961.

Hyer wrote the book A Mongolian Living Buddha which was a biography of Kanjurwa Khutughtu along with Sechin Jagchid. Hyer also wrote Mongolia's Culture and Society with Sechin.

Besides his long period as a professor at BYU, Hyer also taught for three years in China. Hyer has also had published several articles on the history of Inner Mongolia within the People's Republic of China as well as on Japanese-Tibetan relations and Lamanist Buddhism in Japan. He also contributed an article on the prospects for the LDS Church in Asia to the first volume of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.