A graduate engineer born near Saint Albans, England, with an unusual gift in music, Fraser went to China in 1908 with the China Inland Mission. After a period of studying Chinese, he arrived in 1910 in the southwest China province of Yunnan. He was forced by the chaos accompanying the Chinese revolution of 1911 to divide his time between western Yunnan and Burma. He learned the language of and commenced his work among the Lisu, a Tibeto-Burmese minority people who lived in the high mountains along the borders of the two countries.
By 1918, sparked by family evangelism carried on by the people themselves, 60,000 believers had been baptized. Fraser was known for his ability to organize the people into strong indigenous churches that became models for church-planting ventures not only for other minority peoples in China's southwest but in other countries as well. He wrote many articles in English for The Chinese Recorder. He also developed a script for the Lisu language and used it to prepare a catechism, portions of Scripture, and eventually, with much help from his colleagues, a complete New Testament. He died in Paoshan (Baoshan), in western Yunnan, of malignant malaria.