Christianity in Taiwan

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Taiwan (originally known as Formosa) was seized by the Dutch in 1624 to protect the northern flank of their rich monopoly of trade in the Spice Islands, gurading their sea route to Japan, and serve as a possible base for challenging Portuguese Macao for the China trade. It was a thinly populated, mountainous island, about 240 miles long, lying 100 miles off the China coast, between Japan and the Philippines.

Though they occupied the "beautiful isle" for only thirty-five years (1626-1661) the Dutch proved far more evangelistically energetic and successful there than in the Spice islands of the East Indies. One reason was that the islanders were primitive animists with very 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, for Formosa was still outside the bounds of the traditional bounds of the Chinese empire. A tiny Spanish Catholic enclave planted for a short time in the north had never been able to expand and was soon driven out by the Hollanders. The Protestant Dutch were the first to enter into sustained evangelistic outreach among the people.

On Formosa, where local society was less systematically organized^[2], Dutch control was direct and immediate, and the influence of the new religion that they brought with them had more impact. The more important reason for the growth of the church was the character and faith of the missionaries themselves who, in Formosa, were farther from the Dutch East Indies Company's centre at Batavia and less intimidated by its secularizing commercial and political power. They moved out quickly 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 fierce headhunters, and the missionaries were for a time forced to accept the protection of armed guards as they traveled. Yet they 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. They began to translate the Bible, and completed the gospels of Matthew and John^[3]. They registered converts by the hundreds, most of whom, as they noticed, came from the non-Chinese tribal people on the island who then far outnumbered the more recently arrived Chinese^[4].

The first ordained missionary-chaplain^[5], Georgius Candidius, came to Formosa in 1627, and within a year and a half, of his arrival had gathered together more than a hundred islanders eager to become Christians but not yet ready for baptism. Despite this early success, Candidius felt strongly that chaplains should promise to stay for at least ten years in order to learn the langage of the natives, without which they would never be more than superficially effective. Candidius had high praise for the native ability of the tribal Formosans. he did not deny their reputation for savage intertribal wars and headhunting, but was impressed with the intellectual quickness of their minds and openness to new ways^[6], even advising that missionaries who came out unmarried should find andmarry suitable Formosan women to render them more sensitive to the customs and needs of the people whom they hoped to win to the faith. He himself proposed to marry a Formosan woman if permitted, but was persuaded by the Company government not to be "too precipitate"^[7]. So great was his hope for a Christian future in Formosa that he wrote, probably in 1628, "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^[8]."

In some respects, however, his judgements were typically colonial , as when the large village in which he was living and preaching proposed that he accept a contest on the greater power he claimed for Christianity as against their old religions by making one house in the village a Christian house to let them see if in time it really propsered more than the others, and in great frustration he wondered if it would not be better to ask the Company government simply to order all the women and children to attend his instruction classes for the faith. Fotunately, the government refused, and four years later without a contest or a government order, it was happily reported that "all the inhabitants" of the village "have cast away their idols..and call upon one and the same Almighty and true God^[9]".

Candidius was soon joined by a Rotterdamer named Robert Junius, son of a Dutch father and a Scottish mother, who for the next fourteen years (1629-1643) laid the foundations of what might have proved to be the bastion of Protestantism in Asia. An early account of an interview with Junius gives a glowing account of the spread of Christianity along the eastern coastal plains through seven villages north of Zeelandia. and some twenty-three to the south. The work is quaintly titled, "Of the Conversion of Five Thousand nine hundred East Indians In the Isle Formosa neere China...^[10]". Upon arrival on the island, like most early Company chaplains he began preaching in Dutch to the mystification of the natives, but after two fruitless years, "moved with an exceeding desire of their Conversion..with great paines and diligence, in a short time...[he] learned the barbarous Language and rude Idiome of those Heathen^[11]"." By thetime Junius left Formosa in 1643, there were over seventeen-thousand Christian Formosans, of whom he had baptized more than fifty-four hundred adults in twenty-nine villages^[12]. A presbytery had been formed, and in six villages north of Zeelandia Christian schools were flourishing, with about six hundred schoolchildren taught by eight Dutch and fifty-four native Christian schoolmasters. Instruction was in one of the five major Formosan tribal dialects (Sinkan)^[13], into which Robert Junius had translated two Catechisms and a Formulary of Christianity but the Dutch language was taught in the afternoon, for the bewildering variety of local dialects was causing the missionaries to consider using Dutch as a common language^[14]. Two problems were noted however: some of the Dutch teachers were behaving scandalously ("one of them was decapitated on account of his misdeeds"); and the Formosan teachers were underpaid, forcing consideration of a proposal to reduce their number from forty-five to seventeen^[15].

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^[16]. While still in Formosa Robert Junius had gathered about seventy boys, aged ten to thirteen, in a little school, teaching them in their own Sinkan language the Christian religion, 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 in his own house. "We believe," he wrote the governor in Zeelandia, "that such a native clergyman could effect more than all our Dutch ministers together could do^[17]"

[edit] Persecution under the Koxinga and Manchu Annexations

The man who drove the Dutch out of Formosa to 'reclaim' that island for Asia was no shining example of a liberator. He was the Chinese bucaneer Koxinga (Cheng Ch'eng-kung), son of a Chinese pirate and a Japanese mother, fiercely loyal to the fallen Ming dynasty, which he had faithfully served as an admiral until the victory of the Manchu Qing Dynasty turned him intothe scourge of the China seas. Needing a base for his sea-raiders he chose Formosa and attacked th small Dutch garison at Zeelandia with twenty-five thousand men, first craftily protesting that he had no use for "such a small, grass-producing country as Formosa^[18]." The siege was long, bloody and terrifyingly cruel.

The most heroic death on the Dutch side was that of the brave Bible translator Antonius Hambroek, the man nominated as principal of the seminary which never opened, who was captured at his country station and paraded with his wife and several children in view of the besieged fort with the threat that all would be killed unless the Dutch immediatedly surrendered. When that falied, Koxinga sent Hambroek in to urge his countrymen to surrender. Instead, Hambroek urged his countrymen to stand fast even though that would mean not only his own death but that of his family and all other prisoners. Two of his daughters were in the fort, having escaped capture , but when the governor told him he need not go back, and urged him to stay with his daughters in safety, he refused and returned to face Koxinga with the news. He was beheaded publicly along with several other missionaries, including some of the women and children. One of Hambroek's daughters - a very sweet young girl, as a contemporary report described her - was seized by Koxinga for his harem when the fort fell^[19]. Matyr or not, Hambroek deserves honourable mention among the thirty-two ordained missionaries who preached, taught, and planted churches during the brief flowering of Protestantism on Formosa between 1627 and 1662^[20].

As for the Christian communities among the tribes, which had for a time numbered more than seventeen thousand recorded converts, non survived in organized form under the cruel anti-Christian persecutions of Koxinga and his son. Nor did the prospects for Christianity improve after the death of the latter in 1682. Formosa was then for the first time annexed into the Chinese empire where, unfortunately, the Qing dynasty's official toleration of Christianity was beginning to give way to harrassment and soon to outright persecution. For the next two hundred years until Protestant missionaries again were able to enter the island, the church that had promised to be the model for the expansion of the faith in East Asia simply 'disappeared', leaving only a trace among a few who acknowledged to a visiting Catholic clergyman in 1715 that they remembered the words of the baptismal formula and believed in a God in three persons^[21].

Two hundred years following the defeat and expulsion of the Dutch were for Christianity in Formosa the "years of silence," as in Japan after the persecution and expulsion of the Portuguese, except in Formosa not even the silent Christians survived. And the next wave of the faith to reach the "Beautiful Isle," late in the nineteeth century, was English, not Dutch.

[edit] The British Missionary Period

[edit] Notes and Further Reading

• ↑  Formosa under the Dutch, Described From Contemporary Records, 2nd Edition.
• ↑  Campbell, Formosa under the Dutch (Candidius) 1:15-16.
• ↑  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.
• ↑  Two lay catechists were the first missionaries sent to Formossa, Michael Theodori in 1624 and Dirk Lauwrenzoon, but left little to record.
• ↑  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 ofMissionary Success in the Island of Formosa, 2 volumes.
• ↑  An Account ofMissionary Success in the Island of Formosa, 1:32-33.
• ↑  Campbell, An Account ofMissionary Success in the Island of Formosa, 1:94-101.
• ↑  The many dialects of the island were not mutually understandable, although all presumably came from a Malay-Polynesian base not from China. The missionaries reduced the spoken languages to written form in a Romanized alphabet.
• ↑  Formosa under the Dutch (Junius), 336-379.
• ↑  Formosa under the Dutch 159-179.
• ↑  On occassional lapses of Dutch clerics and the consequent ecclesiastical censure for "debauchery" and for "bad conduct and drinking".
• ↑  Formosa under the Dutch (Junius), 142-147.
• ↑  Tong, Christianity in Taiwan, 20.
• ↑  Campbell, Formosa under the Dutch 306-309.
• ↑  Formosa under the Dutch (Koxinga), 404ff.
• ↑  Day Journal of Commander Caeuw, Zeelandia, October 21, 1661.
• ↑  Ginsel, De Gereformeedrde 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.
• ↑  The visitor was Father De Mailla, whose notes are translated in Campbell, Formosa under the Dutch, 504-516.