Carstairs Douglas - Mission To Amoy (Xiamen)

Mission To Amoy (Xiamen)

As one of the treaty ports opened to Westerners in 1842, Xiamen (then known in the West as Amoy) was one of the few places in China where missionaries could go about their work relatively unmolested. During his tenure Douglas was responsible for increasing the single church in Xiamen to a congregation of twenty-five churches, composed mostly of Chinese members. Contemporaries of Douglas were heavily involved in producing material concerned with the local language, including Elihu Doty who wrote the Anglo-Chinese Manual with Romanized Colloquial in the Amoy Dialect and John Van Nest Talmage, author of the Ê-Mn̂g Im ê Jī-tián (Dictionary of the Amoy Speech). While stationed in Xiamen, Douglas visited Taiwan and was influential in the decision by the English Presbyterian Mission to send missionaries to the island. In his last significant position Douglas was elected joint Chairman of the Shanghai Missionary Conference of 1877, a gathering of 150 or so missionaries employed in the China field.