George Leslie Mackay - Legacy

Legacy

Mackay's 1896 book From Far Formosa is considered an important early missionary ethnography of Taiwan and an important contribution to the anthropological understanding of the culture and customs of the people of Taiwan during that period. Mackay himself was as fascinated by the cultures and habitat he found as he was disapproving of native practices he viewed as idolatry. He spoke approvingly of the destruction of art and other artefacts previously regarded as sacred by his newly Christian converts. Of his rustic apartment in an aboriginal village, Mackay wrote: "To that place the cast-off machinery of idolatry was brought, and more than once I dried my clothes before fires made of idolatrous paper, idols, and ancestral tablets. Three men were employed to carry other paraphernalia of idol-worship to the museum in Tanshui" (Mackay, 1896:219). Mackay was otherwise an enthusiastic collector of cultural artefacts and specimens of local flora and fauna. Many items collected by him are today preserved at the ethnology department of the Royal Ontario Museum (Ontario, Canada) and the Aletheia University Museum (Tamsui, Taiwan).

The Taiwanese language first entered written form in the nineteenth century when Mackay and his colleagues adapted the Latin alphabet to render it phonetically. The orthography, called pe̍h-oē-jī (POJ), meaning "vernacular writing", was used by the Presbyterian missionaries and became standard in the indigenous Presbyterian Church in Taiwan. The first printed newspaper on the island was a church bulletin in Taiwanese. The Presbyterians continued to use Taiwanese in their services and communications even in years when pressure from first Japanese and then Chinese authorities was intense in suppressing public use of the language.

Although Mackay had suffered from meningitis and malaria, he eventually died of throat cancer on June 2, 1901. He was buried near Oxford College (牛津學堂; now Aletheia University) in Tamsui, Taiwan; more specifically, his grave is in a small cemetery in the eastern corner of the Tamkang Middle School campus, where his own son was buried next to him. The major private Christian hospital in downtown Taipei is named Mackay Memorial Hospital, built in 1912 to replace the smaller Mackay Hospital he started in Tamsui in 1882. In recent years Mackay's life has been celebrated by advocates of a Taiwanese identity and historical understanding that stands distinct from the narratives brought to the island by Japan and China.

On June 30, 2004, a large bust statue of George Leslie Mackay was dedicated outside the Oxford County offices in Woodstock, Ontario. The delegation from Taiwan in attendance included representatives from the Aletheia University and the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan. The event was also attended by representatives of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, the United Church of Canada, local, regional, and national Canadian dignitaries, and a number of Mackay descendants from across North America. One of his grandchildren is Dr. John Ross Mackay.

In November 2006, a Canadian Television documentary was aired titled The Black Bearded Barbarian of Taiwan. It was broadcast in both Mandarin and English on OMNI 2 as part of their Signature Series.