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.
Early life 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.W.A Mackay (1901) Zorra Boys at Home and Abroad. Toronto:William Briggs The Zorra pioneers were Evangelical Presbyterians, for whom their church, led by lay elders, was the centre of their collective life.W.A Mackay (1899) Pioneer Life in Zorra. Toronto:William Briggs
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.
Mission to Taiwan
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 (), a native Taiwanese woman. The marriage produced three children:
Mary "Tan" Mackay Bella "Koa" Mackay George William Mackay
Mackay was described by the Rev. William Campbell, a contemporary missionary, as:
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
Revitalization movements
Anthony Wallace developed the idea of "revitalization movement" in his study of the Handsome Lake movement in the Seneca of New York,Wallace, Anthony F.C. 1956 Revitalization Movements. American Anthropologist 58:264-281 1969 The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca. New York: Vintage Books "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:詹素娟 2001〈馬偕宣教與噶瑪蘭的族群空間 ，收於許功明編，《馬偕博士收藏臺灣原住民文物──沉寂百年的海外遺珍》，頁26-33。臺北︰順益臺灣原住民博物館。My English translation. “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:
Originally the Pe-po-hoan were nature worshippers, like the savages in the mountains …. But all this was changed when they bowed their necks to the yoke of civilization. Their conquerors forced upon them not only the cue and their style of dress, but also the whole paraphernalia of Chinese idolatry. Whenever a tribe submits, the first thing is to shave the head in token of allegiance, and then temples, idols and tablets are introduced. …. Idolatry does not suit the average Pe-po-hoan, and it is only of necessity that he submits to even the formal observance of its rites and ceremonies. It is political rather than religious, and to the large majority it is meaningless, except as a reminder of their enslavement to an alien race.*
It is in this context that the rapid, mass conversion of almost one-half of the Kavalan people in the early 1880s can be understood. It was not a colonial fraud enforced upon devout practitioners of traditional Chinese folk religion, or destruction of indigenous people's traditional religion but an indigenous revitalization movement - a collective symbolic act of resistance to the dispossession they suffered under the Chinese settlers. Mackay was clearly astounded by the response of the Kavalan to his evangelism, so different from the process of conversion in the rest of north Taiwan.
Idol burning
The removal of idols and ancestral tablets by new Christians in Taiwan was usually a discreet individual decision. A typical reference (among many in Mackay's diary) to people removing idols, is in a letter All references to a letter with a date are from North Formosa Mission Reports:G.L Mackay's Life in North Formosa. Chen Kuan-chou & Louise Gamble (eds.), Taipei: Ming Jiaw Publishing, 2012. of April 11, 1884: "An old Chinaman and his wife cleansed their house of idols last Saturday when I was in the country. These idols &c. are now with my large collection."
But in the Kavalan mission Mackay reports two instances of mass enthusiasm (another expression of a revitalization movement) expressed in communal removal and burning of Chinese household idols. The first is reported in letters of March 30 and June 5, 1883:
I am here about 4 days journey from Tamsui -on the east side of the Island with the Pacific dashing this shore. There are 36 villages of Pe-po-hoan (civilized aborigines) in this District. Fully one thousand (1000) have thrown away their idols and wish to be taught Christianity. .... I dried my clothes before fires made of idolatrous paper, idols &c. I employed 3 men to carry other idols back to Tamsui . I never passed through such an experience.
The revitalization movement in the form of communal removal of Chinese idols proceeded even without the presence of Mackay, who was amazed at what he saw happening. In a letter addressed "To the Presbyterian Church in Canada from Halifax to Manitoba" (June 5, 1883) he wrote:
I sent a telegram some time ago to say that 1000 were asking Christian instruction. I state below the mark now when I declare that upwards of 2000 (two thousand) have thrown idols away and wish to follow the Lord of Hosts. .... In a village with upwards of 200 every soul wants to be Christian – every house cleansed of idols. Another village with nearly 300 not very far away came out as a body, men, women and children and already sing our sweet hymns long in the night.
Visit to Kavalan settlement in Hualien – September 1890 The second reference to communal idol burning is September 8–9, 1890, when Mackay, accompanied by Koa-kau and Tan-he travelled by boat to visit Kavalan people who had settled in Ka-le-oan (嘉禮宛) north of Hualien City (花蓮港). His letter to the Foreign Missionary Society (September 12) presents in detail the process of community decision making, the political symbolism of having idols, negotiating with the Chinese authorities for their consent to remove idols, and the celebratory nature of the burning, followed by a ritual celebrating the new communitas.
Mackay letter to Wardrope, October 16 1890: