Tiuⁿ Chhang-Miâ (Minnie Mackay, 1860?–1925): Life in Taiwan's Contested Colonial Space

By Dr Mark Dodge PhD

Explore the overlooked life of Tiun Chhang-miâ, the Taiwanese woman behind the nineteenth century's most accomplished missionary, George Leslie Mackay.

Tiun Chhang-miâ (1860?-1925), a Fujian-Taiwanese girl also known as Minnie Mackay, was a key figure in nineteenth century Canadian-Taiwanese relations and the first local woman to marry a Christian missionary, George Leslie Mackay. This biography tracks Tiun’s history from being a child bride to a heroine devoted to education for women and the Taiwanese Presbyterian Church.

Mark Dodge delves into how Taiwanese lives were torn between harsh predicaments, and the example Tiun set as an imagined ideal of new womanhood in contested colonial space. The complex legacy left by Tiun continues, for better or worse, to be felt, in Taiwan and elsewhere, while that island nation fights for its own identity and existential rights during the twenty-first century.

A tale of resilience, this book is suitable reading for students of Taiwan, Asian Studies, Taiwanese history, the history of Christianity and missions, Asian women's history, Gender Studies, Religious Studies, and Colonial Studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lived Places Publishing
• Release date: May 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9781915734150

Book preview

TIUN CHHANG-MIÂ (MINNIE MACKAY, 1860?–1925)

Dr Mark A. Dodge

TIUN CHHANG-MIÂ (MINNIE MACKAY, 1860?–1925)

Life in Taiwan’s Contested Colonial Space

The Asian Studies Collection

Collection Editor

Dr Dong Wang

For 艾莉: Taiwan’s most beautiful flower

First published in 2024 by Lived Places Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

The authors and editors have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of information contained in this publication, but assume no responsibility for any errors, inaccuracies, inconsistencies and omissions. Likewise, every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. If any copyright material has been reproduced unwittingly and without permission the Publisher will gladly receive information enabling them to rectify any error or omission in subsequent editions.

Copyright © 2024 Mark A. Dodge

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781915734143 (pbk)

ISBN: 9781915734167 (ePDF)

ISBN: 9781915734150 (ePUB)

The right of Mark A. Dodge to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

Cover design by Fiachra McCarthy

Book design by Rachel Trolove of Twin Trail Design

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

Lived Places Publishing

Long Island

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www.livedplacespublishing.com

Abstract

This book discovers the overlooked life and enduring influence of Tiun Chhang-miâ (1860?–1925), known to the Canada Presbyterian Church as Minnie Mackay. The story of her life as narrated by the Taiwanese Presbyterian Church is a key to understanding how Taiwan’s democracy developed and where it is heading.

Tiun Chhang-miâ (1860?–1925) tells of a Fujian-Taiwanese woman, the first from Taiwan (or the Qing Empire for that matter) to legally marry a Christian missionary. Tiun, along with her husband, George Leslie Mackay, became a pioneering figure in the foundation of Taiwanese Christianity and in Canadian-Taiwanese relations in the nineteenth century. This book recounts Tiun’s life from her sale as a child-bride through her rise to become the symbolic heroine leading the push for education for women and local control of Taiwan and the Taiwanese Presbyterian Church.

Taiwanese lives in the nineteenth century were caught between the faltering Qing Dynasty and various other imperial forces eager to challenge each other’s claims of sovereignty by establishing colonies of their own. In those tumultuous times, Tiun provided a model of feminine strengths which reinforced Taiwanese and Canadian ideals of new womanhood, and ultimately became an important element in the formation of a distinctly Taiwanese imaginary of modern womanhood. The complex legacy left by Tiun continues to be felt in Taiwan and elsewhere while that island nation fights, like so many other former colonies, to establish its own identity and existential rights in the post-colonial world.

Keywords

Tiun Chhang-miâ; Minnie Mackay; George Leslie Mackay; missionary; Taiwanese Presbyterian Church; nineteenth century; Canadian–Taiwanese relations; Asian womanhood; Dutch, British, Chinese, and Japanese colonist; biography; Taiwan; colonialism

Contents

Learning objectives

Introduction: crafting the story of Taiwan

Chapter 1Taiwan: a contested colonial space

Chapter 2Womanhood in nineteenth-century Taiwan

Chapter 3From Little Onion to Brilliant One: becoming the woman who made Mackay a superstar

Chapter 4The native mission’s gynocentric imaginary

Chapter 5Tiun’s first world-tour

Chapter 6The Sino-French War of 1884

Chapter 7A cooler homecoming

Chapter 8You cannot live here anymore

Chapter 9Quiet resignation

Glossary

Suggested Discussion Topics

References

Further reading 1a

Further reading 1b

Further reading

Index

List of figures and tables

Figure 1 Tiu n Chhang-miâ’s self-written marriage contract

Figure 2 The earliest known photograph of Tiu n Chhang-miâ

Table 1 Number of female converts in northern Taiwan

Table 2 Indigenous baptisms, March 1886

Figure 3 Portrait of Mrs Mackay from The Presbyterian Record

Figure 4 Photograph of G. L. Mackay’s funeral, June 5, 1901

Figure 5 Opening ceremony for the Mackay Hospital in Taihoku

Figure 6 The Mackay family in the summer of 1925

Figure 7 Tiu n Chhang-miâ’s funeral procession

Learning objectives

Christianity, gender, and democracy

European and American intellectuals began calling themselves modern in the nineteenth century. For them, modernity represented the pinnacle of human achievement in science, industry, and government. Asian elites, faced with the superiority of European military and industrial technology, began to engage in a variety of self-strengthening movements aimed at creating distinctive Asian modernities.

Explain how the lived experience of Tiun Chhang-miâ, a pivotal figure in Taiwanese nationalism and Taiwan’s Presbyterian Church, has been diversely narrated by different groups at different times.

Identify how the nineteenth-century introduction of Christianity in Taiwan helped to shape Tiawan’s modern identity, and how Tiun’s life in particular has been mobilized to represent a distinctively Taiwanese modernity.

Explore the significance and character of Canadian–Taiwanese relations within the context of Taiwan’s colonial period.

Analyze how Taiwan’s contested space throughout the colonial and post-colonial era has affected its quest for sovereign statehood, with hope of better understanding its unique autonomous and international position today.

Introduction

Crafting the story of Taiwan

The nineteenth century is often referred to by historians as the European century because, despite its being a relatively small peninsula protruding from the northwest corner of Asia, Europeans managed to explore and subjugate other peoples in nearly every other part of the world. By the end of the century Europeans and their descendants controlled nearly 85 per cent of the earth’s surface and ruled over most of its human inhabitants. European historians tend to perceive this period as the long nineteenth century—an epoch that began with the French Revolution in 1789 and culminated with the outbreak of Total War in Europe in 1914, a periodization which accentuates Europe’s rise and fall. This periodization highlights the development of democracy and the technological successes (and failures) of the Industrial Revolution, reinforcing themes of the disastrous consequences of a divided Europe.

Historians of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and their political allies, on the other hand, write of a very different era—one they call 百年國恥 (bainian guochi): the century of humiliations. Theirs is also a long century, but it tells a very different story. For these historians, China’s nineteenth century began in 1842 with the signing of the first unequal treaty at the end of the Opium War, or perhaps in 1839 at the beginning of that conflict. This century ended in 1949 with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s retreat to Taiwan, and the victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This periodization adopts the Marxist/Leninist view of history that centers on the growing weakness of the Qing Dynasty and the CCP as the inevitable victor. During these years the Qing Dynasty proved incapable of securing its borders first from the British, but soon from the French, Americans, Russians, Germans, Italians, Austro-Hungarians, and ultimately even the Japanese they had long regarded as their little brother in Asian politics. Nor could the Qing Dynasty suppress the long series of internal revolts and civil wars within its borders during this period without the assistance of these same foreign powers. This narrative emphasizes the immense human suffering experienced in China, and attributes much of it to greed and foreign (particularly European) aggression ending with the rise of the CCP to power as the single ruling political party in 1949. This narrative celebrates communist ideology and China’s ultimate victory over foreign imperialism, but tends to forget that communism itself was an ideological export of Europe to China.

Charles S. Maeir has suggested that it makes more sense in the study of global history to imagine a century beginning in 1860 and ending in the late 1960s or early 1970s, during which the dual political aims of territoriality and state building were nearly ubiquitous throughout the world. Maeir contends that focusing on the processes by which the empires of the previous era transformed into the consolidated nation states that dominate the world today might produce a more coherent and meaningful narrative of modern world history (Maeir, 2000). Maeir cites such examples as the American Civil War, the Meiji Constitution, and the confederation of Germany, Italy, Canada, Mexico, Thailand, and Argentina as important events that support an 1860 beginning and a variety of Cold War conflicts like the Vietnam War and the emergence of new manufacturing economies such as Brazil and the four Asian Tigers, as justification for his endpoint.

I hold that a period beginning in 1860 and ending in the early 1970s is a strong framework for understanding the modern history of Taiwan as well. The year 1860, when a combined British and French military expedition took Peking and ravaged the emperor’s summer palace in order to enforce the terms of the Treaty of Tientsin, which ended the second Opium War, was also the year that the first expeditionary survey of Taiwanfoo was conducted by British emissaries guided by Fujianese merchants. Although Taiwan had been a nexus of international trade since as early as the seventeenth century, the arrival of the Sino-British tea industryin 1860 marked a new beginning of Taiwan in the world economy—a significance that culminated in the years after the Second World War and the exile of Chiang Kai-shek and the Republic of China to Taiwan. In the 1960s and 1970s trade-led economic growth averaged more than 7 per cent per year, making Taiwan’s economy one of the fastest growing in the world. Taiwan’s miraculous growth earned it a reputation as one of the four Asian Tigers. The year 1971 was also the year that the Republic of China, whose government in exile held Taiwan under martial law, ceased to represent the other China in international diplomacy. While the world agreed that China was no longer part of Taiwan, even today the leadership of the PRC continues to contend that Taiwan is part of China. Taiwan continues to enjoy de facto statehood, despite recurring military and political threats from the PRC, but international recognition of Taiwan’s sovereignty has suffered significantly since the PRC’s 1971 induction to the UN.

The year 1860 is also an appropriate beginning for this particular story. The protagonist, Tiun Chhang-miâ, is said to have been born that year in Taiwan (although this claim has been questioned), not far from the place that first joint British–Chinese expedition found suitable for the establishment of the infrastructure for a local tea trade. The British embassy at Tamsui, founded that year, became the center for all political and economic dealings between the Qing Empire and all of the other foreign powers operating in Taiwan for many years to come. The success Fujian and British merchants achieved in introducing tea cultivation and processing to Taiwan substantially transformed the Taiwanese economy. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, sugar, produced primarily in lowland regions of southern Taiwan, was the island’s chief export, but by the 1880s tea accounted for more than half of Taiwan’s exports, and the economic center of the island had shifted from the south to the northern highlands surrounding the area that would grow to become Taipei. The introduction of the tea trade had a direct impact on the life of Tiun Chhang-miâ, whose family was one of many to take on an early role in the cultivation and processing of tea. Tiun’s life, as we will see, also had a significant effect on the British success in the tea trade. Tiun and her husband George Leslie Mackay were imagined as a sort of human bridge between the Fujian-Taiwanese community that produced tea and the British merchants who sought to export it. Their family and the church that it founded provided networks of trust that enabled the British and Taiwanese to cooperatively control Taiwan’s most valuable industry throughout the Qing Dynasty’s rule of Taiwan, and for many years after Japan colonized the island.

Although Tiun passed away in 1925, her influence was keenly felt even into the 1970s, when her children and grandchildren continued to maintain high positions within the Presbyterian Church of Taiwan (PCT), and the PCT continued to play an important role in supporting Taiwan’s relationships with countries of the West. Most foreigners, along with many of Tiun’s direct descendants, were forced to leave Taiwan by 1937 as Japan mobilized the island for war production, and did not return until well after the war was concluded. The Presbyterian Church USA arrived in 1949, with the American military complex that helped support the establishment of the Republic of China in Taiwan. Chiang Kai-shek established martial law throughout Taiwan shortly after his arrival, and the policy continued for thirty-eight years (1949–1987) in what many of the Taiwanese call his Second White Terror (the first being the mass exterminations of Chinese Communists and other left-wing radicals in Shanghai, Changsha, and other places in 1927). In 1971, Chiang expelled most foreign missionaries when the PCT and other missionary groups supported UN resolution 2758 to recognize the CCP’s rule of China. The PCT was part of a coalition of Christian churches that fought to limit Chiang’s international recognition and have Chiang Kai-shek removed from power.

…to restore all its rights to the People’s Republic of China and to recognize the representatives of its Government as the only legitimate representatives of China to the United Nations, and to expel forthwith the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek from the place which they unlawfully occupy at the United Nations and in all the organizations related to it.

(1971 UN Resolution 2758)

The PCT subsequently released its Statement on our National Fate, confirming the church’s position on human rights, social responsibility, and self-determination, and begged for support from the international community to establish free elections through which the people of Taiwan could enact their sovereign will in replacing the autocratic regime that had been imposed upon them as a result of the Chinese Civil War. Based on the claim that religious institutions had an obligation to become involved in political affairs when the Church’s life and human rights are violated, then (i) the Church cannot but contend vigorously for the truth of the Gospel and its own life, and (ii) also fight to protect God-given human rights, the PCT issued a statement urging the leadership of Taiwan and the international community to support the introduction of free elections in Taiwan, and to resist a transfer of Taiwan to the control of the PRC (Liu and Kao, 1972).

In 1977, the PCT and its mother church, the Canada Presbyterian Church, once again rose to the forefront of Taiwanese politics by releasing a declaration of human rights that became a foundational document in the creation of Taiwanese democracy. The declaration stated:

As we face the possibility of