Canadian missionary George Leslie Mackay who died at the beginning of the 20th century, is largely unknown in Canada. In Taiwan, he remains an influential Westerner.Steven Chase/The Globe and Mail
At the start of Taiwan’s recent presidential election campaign, one of the top three candidates launched his bid by comparing himself, of all people, to a Canadian missionary from Southwestern Ontario.
Ko Wen-je formally announced he was running for president in Tamsui, a district 22 kilometres north of Taipei, where Canadian Presbyterian minister George Leslie Mackay, dead for more than 120 years, remains a household name. He called Mr. Mackay “the best role model for the Taiwanese people.”
Mr. Ko came third in the Jan. 13 ballot and is now engulfed in an unrelated political scandal.
But that doesn’t mean name-checking George Mackay is political bad luck.
The photos are of a statue of Canadian missionary George Leslie Mackay who has left a legacy of schools and hospitals in Taiwan taken on Nov. 3.Steven Chase/The Globe and Mail
Taiwan’s previous president Tsai Ing-wen also invoked Mr. Mackay’s name during her campaigns. She went on to serve two consecutive terms as the leader of this Asian democracy, which has blossomed decades after defeated Nationalist forces who lost the Chinese civil war retreated to Taiwan.
Mr. Mackay, who died at the beginning of the 20th century, is largely unknown in Canada. In Taiwan, he remains an influential Westerner. It wasn’t too long ago that a local hospital featured mobile mammogram clinics with a cartoon drawing of the Canadian missionary on the side – featuring his blue eyes and flowing black beard – inviting women to get checked.
So why is a Canadian preacher from more than a century ago still relevant in modern Taiwan, where only about 7 per cent of the population identify as Christian?
In short, Mr. Mackay has evolved into a folk hero and one of the most influential Westerners in Taiwan – not for his preaching so much as for his good deeds.
He founded the first school for girls in northern Taiwan as well as the first college: Oxford College. Mr. Mackay was popular for his frontier dentistry, too, extracting thousands of teeth over his tenure. He established the first Western hospital in the region – one that provided medical care to residents of northern Taiwan. Hobe Hospital evolved into the modern Mackay Memorial Hospital, one of the largest medical centres in Taiwan today.
The dozens of churches founded by Mr. Mackay and his followers went on to form part of the backbone of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan.Steven Chase/The Globe and Mail
Hong-Hsin Lin, a retired professor from the Taiwan Graduate School of Theology, said many Taiwanese feel abandoned by the world. Today, few countries have formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan. And it’s increasingly menaced by China and shut out of the United Nations and other international organizations. Some feel “we are like orphans,” he said, quoting a phrase coined by a Taiwanese writer many decades ago. Mr. Mackay, however, is a foreigner who never gave up on Taiwan.
The Canadian was considered a maverick by the Presbyterian Church, Columbus Leo, a Taiwanese Canadian, said. Mr. Mackay married a local Taiwanese woman, Tiun Chhang-mia, rather than a Canadian. She became the head of the girl’s school and worked as his partner. He relatively quickly learned the language.
During his return visits to Canada, Mr. Mackay campaigned against the first head tax that Ottawa imposed on Chinese immigrants to restrict their numbers, calling it racist and unjust. He declared his “uncompromising opposition to all restrictive legislation against the Chinese.”
Mr. Mackay’s reputation does not appear to have suffered from the late-20th-century global backlash over Christian missionaries, likely because he didn’t arrive in Taiwan with an invading force. Spain, the Netherlands, Japan and China all at various times colonized Taiwan but Mr. Mackay came over largely by himself.
The dozens of churches founded by Mr. Mackay and his followers went on to form part of the backbone of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan. Over the decades, the Presbyterians became a focal point for resistance to the brutal and repressive Kuomintang military dictatorship that ruled Taiwan before the island peacefully transitioned into a democracy in the late 1980s and 1990s.
“The Presbyterians were at the very heart of opposition to the Kuomintang: They were the human-rights champions,” David Mulroney, a former Canadian ambassador to China who also once served as Ottawa’s top envoy to Taiwan, said.
Mr. Mackay’s son would go on to found what is now called TamKang High School, where students included Lee Teng-hui, the first democratically elected president of Taiwan.
On a recent Sunday afternoon in Tamsui, Jimmy Chu, 52, an executive at a software company, stopped in front of a massive statue of George Mackay. He took photos of his each of his children in front of the sculpture, explaining to a reporter that they are taught about Mr. Mackay in school.
He said the Canadian missionary has been adopted by the land where he spent half his life.
“He is a part of Taiwan, actually,” Mr. Chu said. “Without him, Taiwan would have been different.”