Christianity in Taiwan
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Taiwan (traditional Chinese: 臺灣 or 台灣; simplified Chinese: 台湾; Hanyu Pinyin: Táiwān; Tongyong Pinyin: Táiwan; Wade-Giles: T'ai²-wan¹; Taiwanese: Tâi-oân) (known to the Dutch as Formosa) was seized by the Dutch in 1624. It is a thinly populated, mountainous island, about 240 miles long, lying 100 miles off the China coast, between Japan and the Philippines.
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[edit] Christian History of Taiwan
[edit] Dutch Colonization
The Dutch occupied the island of Taiwan for about thirty-five years (1626-1661) and also gave opportunity for many evangelicals to come and preach the gospel. The island's inhabitants had little contact with any of the major organized religions.[1] Muslim expansion had not reached that far north, nor had the Chinese religions, Confucianism and Buddhism, made an impact. Formosa, as the island was known, but was still outside the traditional boundaries of the Chinese empire.^ A small Spanish Roman Catholic enclave planted for a short time in the north had never been able to expand and was soon driven out by the Dutch, who concentrated their own settlements on the west coast of the island. The Protestant Dutch were the first to enter into sustained conversion of the indigenous people.[2]
On the island, where local society was less systematically organized[3], Dutch control was direct and immediate. The more important reason for the growth of the church was the missionaries themselves who, in Formosa, were farther from the Dutch East Indies Company's center at Batavia and were less intimidated by its commercial and political power. They moved into the villages of the coastal interior from the base Fort Zeelandia on Formosa's southwest coast. They soon found out that the inhabitants of the countryside outside the villages were still engaging in the cultural practice of headhunting. The missionaries took up residence in the villages, most of which were within one or two days travel from Zeelandia. There they recognized at once the importance of learning the native languages and began to translate the Bible. However only the Gospels of Matthew and John were completed.[4]
The first ordained minister to visit the island[5], Georgius Candidius, came to Taiwan in 1627. Candidius felt strongly that chaplains should promise to stay for at least ten years in order to learn the language of the natives, without which they would never be more than superficially effective. Candidius advised that missionaries, including himself, who came out unmarried should find and marry suitable native women to render them more sensitive to the customs and needs of the people whom they hoped to convert. He later wrote, presumably in 1628,[6]
"I confidently believe that on this island of Formosa there may be established that which will become...the leading Christian community in all India [the Dutch East Indies]...there does not exist in all India a more tractable nation and one more willing to accept the Gospel."
Candidius was soon joined by another missionary, Robert Junius.[7]
The rapid growth of groups of Christians in the villages prompted the formation of another consistory (organized church session of elders and deacons) by dividing the original "Consistory of Formosa" into two, the consistories of Zeelandia and Soulang[8]. While still in Formosa, Robert Junius had gathered about seventy boys, aged ten to thirteen, in a school, teaching them the Christian religion in their own Sinkan language, writing the words in a Romanized alphabet. About sixty girls were taught in another class. In 1636 he pleaded for permission to take four or six of the most promising men to Holland for ministerial training. "We believe," he wrote to the governor in Zeelandia, "that such a native clergyman could effect more than all our Dutch ministers together could do".[9]^
[edit] Persecution under the Koxinga and Manchu Annexations
The man who drove the Dutch out of Formosa to 'reclaim' that island was Chinese buccaneer Koxinga (Cheng Ch'eng-kung)[10], son of a Chinese pirate and a Japanese mother, fiercely loyal to the fallen Ming dynasty, which he had served as an admiral until the victory of the Manchu Qing Dynasty. Needing a base for his sea-raiders he chose Taiwan and attacked the small Dutch garrison at Zeelandia with twenty-five thousand men, first craftily protesting that he had no use for "such a small, grass-producing country as Formosa[11]." Among the Dutch killed in the conflict was Bible translator Antonius Hambroek and his wife and daughters. [12] Two hundred years following the defeat and expulsion of the Dutch in Taiwan, the next wave of Christianity to reach the island late in the nineteenth century, was English, not Dutch.
[edit] The British Missionary Period
[edit] Christianity and the Political Situation in Taiwan
Several high-profile leaders in Taiwan have been Christians including Chiang Kai-shek, Chiang Ching-kuo and Lee Teng-hui.
[edit] References
- ^ Formosa under the Dutch, Described From Contemporary Records, 2nd Edition
- ^ Two lay catechists were the first missionaries sent to Formossa, Michael Theodori in 1624 and Dirk Lauwrenzoon, but they left little to record. From Formosa under the Dutch
- ^ Campbell, Formosa under the Dutch (Candidius) 1:15-16.
- ^ Formosa under the Dutch (Candidius) 9-25
- ^ Formosa under the Dutch (Candidius), quote from 104.
- ^ Formosa under the Dutch, Memorandum from Reverend G. Candidius.
- ^ An Account of Missionary Success in the Island of Formosa, 2 volumes.
- ^ An Account of Missionary Success in the Island of Formosa, 1:32-33.
- ^ Campbell, An Account of Missionary Success in the Island of Formosa, 1:94-101
- ^ Formosa under the Dutch (Koxinga), 404ff.
- ^ Formosa under the Dutch (Junius), 336-379.
- ^ Ginsel, De Gereformeerde Kerk op Formosa, 162-133. Four or five other missionaries are known to have suffered the same fate as Hambroek, some by beheading, others by crucifixion.
[edit] Notes and Further Reading
^ The entire number of Chinese in Formosa during Dutch rule was perhaps about two hundred thousand. Most of the Chinese had earlier immigrated with Dutch permission as rice and sugar cane farmers, merchants or labourers.
^ The many dialects of the island were not mutually understandable, although all presumably came from a Malay-Polynesian base and not from China. The missionaries reduced the spoken languages to written form in a Romanized alphabet.
- Formosa under the Dutch, aipei, Ch'eng-wen Pub. Co., 1967, by Wm Campbell.
- Hallington K. Tong, Christianity in Taiwan.
- Day Journal of Commander Caeuw, Zeelandia, October 21, 1661.
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