George Leslie Mackay (偕瑞理 or 馬偕 Má-kai; 21 March 1844 – 2 June 1901) was a Canadian Presbyterian missionary. He was the first Presbyterian missionary to northern Taiwan (then Formosa), serving with the Canadian Presbyterian Mission. Mackay is among the best known and most influential Westerners to have lived in Taiwan.
George Leslie Mackay was born on March 21, 1844, the youngest of six children to a pioneering Scottish family in Embro, Zorra Township, Oxford County, Canada West (now Ontario), Canada. His family was part of the Zorra Pioneers, refugees from the Sutherland Clearances in northern Scotland, who arrived in Zorra in 1830. The Zorra pioneers were Evangelical Presbyterians, for whom their church, led by lay elders, was the centre of their collective life.
He received his theological training at Knox College in Toronto (1865-1867), Princeton Theological Seminary in the United States (1870), and New College, Edinburgh in Scotland, all Presbyterian institutions. In Mackay's days Princeton and Edinburgh were important centres of advocacy and training for foreign missions.
In 1871, Mackay became the first foreign missionary to be commissioned by the Canada Presbyterian Church (predecessor of both the Presbyterian Church in Canada and the United Church of Canada), arriving in Taiwan on December 29, 1871.
After consulting with Dr. James Laidlaw Maxwell Sr., a medical doctor serving as a Presbyterian Church of England missionary to southern Formosa (1865), Mackay arrived at Tamsui, northern Formosa in 1872, which remained his home until his death in 1901. Starting with an itinerant dentistry practice amongst the lowland aborigines, he later established churches, schools and a hospital practicing Western biomedicine.
Mackay learned to speak vernacular Taiwanese fluently and married "Minnie" Tiu (張聰明; Tiuⁿ Chhang-miâ), a native Taiwanese woman. The marriage produced three children:
Mackay was described by the Rev. William Campbell, a contemporary missionary, as:
...a little man, firm and active, of few words, unflinching courage, and one whose sound common sense is equalled only by his earnest devotion to the Master. [...] During the first year of his stay at Tamsui, he began an educational and evangelistic training movement among the young men who came about him, and this has been greatly blessed throughout that northern part of the Island.
Accompanied by his students, who were to become pastors of the churches founded, Mackay itinerated all across northern Taiwan. They founded 60 churches. Churches planted in north Taiwan by Mackay later became part of the Northern Synod of the present Presbyterian Church in Taiwan.
Social impact of Mackay's mission
Anthony Wallace developed the idea of "revitalization movement" in his study of the Handsome Lake movement in the Seneca of New York, "to denote any conscious, organized effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture. Since many revitalization movements are religious, the concept of revitalization becomes central to the analysis of the development of new religions". He argued that "when the misery of poverty and degradation is combined with a hope of moral and material salvation, the resulting mixture is explosive." (1969:239).
What resulted when the Kavalan people (噶瑪蘭) heard Mackay's preaching 1880s was a revitalization movement combining the egalitarian and salvific ideas of Mackay's Presbyterianism and their own resistance to the land loss, cultural collapse and humiliating poverty brought by Chinese invasion of their homeland in the 19th century.
Destruction of Kavalan Society
Indigenous historian Chan Su-chuan (詹素娟)，describes the “extremely difficult situation” confronting the Kavalan in the 1880s:
“The period when Mackay entered Ilan was exactly the period in the late 19th century when traditional Kavalan society was facing shocks from an external power and was undergoing large scale forced emigration ... With the changes in their social and economic life, the traditional religion of the Kavalan people also underwent huge changes. Mackay observed that the faith of the Kavalan people was “at the present time a potpourri of Confucian morality, Buddhistic idolatry, and Tauistic demonolatry”, which is to say the Taiwanese folk religion of that time. But Mackay also saw that in fact the Kavalan people still “simultaneously” preserved their traditions “nature worship” and “relics of superstition”. Mackay wrote that the traditional religious life of the Kavalan “had no temple, idol or priest."
Mackay was angered at the plight of the Kavalan. He must have seen in their crisis a reflection of the collective memory of his own people, the Highland refugees from the Sutherland Clearances, who were burnt out of their cottages by officials clearing the land for sheep:
There were at one time thirty-six thriving villages in the Kap-tsu-lan plain. The Chinese settlers came in, enterprising, aggressive, and not overly scrupulous, and little by little the weaker went to the wall. The Pe-po-hoan were crowded out of the cultivated land, many of their villages were scattered, and they had to begin life again in the waste jungle. And, very often, when they had succeeded in reclaiming land to grow rice and vegetables enough to supply their meager wants, the greedy Chinese would appear again, and, either by winning their confidence or by engaging them in dispute, would gain a foothold and in the end rob them of their lands. Being unable to read and being ignorant of the law, they are almost entirely at the mercy of their enemies. It sometimes makes one’s blood boil to see the iniquities practised upon these simple-minded creatures by Chinese officials, speculators and traders.
He was aware of the political context of Kavalan adoption of Chinese idols: