A visiting museum official from Taiwan quoted celebrated art historian Peter Vergo in a presentation at Kerrisdale Presbyterian Church.
“The purpose of a museum is not to preserve objects, but to preserve meaning,” said Ya-Li Chen in Mandarin on Friday (June 26).
Chen has embraced this concept as director of the Changhua Christian Hospital Historical Museum. It documents the important role that the British Presbyterian Church played in the development of modern medicine and education in Taiwan.
Because of treaty arrangements after the first phase of the Second Opium War, Taiwan was opened to British subjects. The mission field in central and southern Taiwan came under the responsibility of the British Presbyterian Church, Chen noted.
Many of those missionaries were Scottish, including David Landsborough III, founder of Changhua Christian Hospital in west central Taiwan. Museum records reveal that this Edinburgh Medical School graduate arrived in Taiwan in 1895. Landsborough remained in Taiwan for 40 years, apart from a three-year return to Europe following the outbreak of the First World War.
“In 1928, skin from his wife was grafted onto the thigh of an injured 13-year-old boy, marking the first organ transplant in Taiwan,” Chen told the audience of about 60 Taiwanese Canadians.
In her PowerPoint presentation, Chen included a message about this from a 10-year-old girl named Xin-ling, who visited the Changhua Christian Hospital Historical Museum in 2024.
“I had never imagined that a foreigner would sacrifice their own skin for a child with whom they shared no blood ties—it truly moved me,” wrote Xin-Ling in Traditional Chinese.
Chen’s one-hour presentation offered an intriguing prelude to this year’s Vancouver TAIWANfest, which will feature an artistic dialogue with Scotland. The festival will take place over the Labour Day weekend, highlighting cultural connections and historical parallels between Taiwan, Canada, and Scotland.
The museum’s former director, Ｍei Ling Chen, is a resident of Burnaby. She also spoke at Kerrisdale Presbyterian Church.
Scottish physician landed in Anping
The Second Opium War coincided with the end of the Highland Potato Famine in Scotland. And the food crisis in Scotland drove many Highlanders to emigrate, according to Scottish historian Sir Thomas Marin Devine.
The first Scottish missionary to Taiwan, Dr. James Laidlaw Maxwell, arrived in Anping in 1865. He established the first Presbyterian church in Taiwan.
There are strong Canadian connections to this history in Taiwan, as Chen pointed out. In 1871, Ontario-born Rev. George Leslie Mackay landed in the southern city of Kaohsiung. He moved to Tamsui in 1872, becoming the first Presbyterian missionary in northern Taiwan.
Mackay learned to speak Taiwanese, married a Taiwanese woman, and lived on the island until his death in 1901. He remains famous in Taiwan for establishing a hospital and two schools. Mackay even stepped in as a dentist for those needing care, according to the Presbyterian Church in Canada Archives.
“There are so many books about George Leslie Mackay in Taiwan,” Chen told Pancouver in Mandarin after her presentation. “There is lots of research that has been done about him.”
Her PowerPoint presentation noted that Mackay was not the only Canadian missionary who travelled to Taiwan. Between 1875 and 1939, there were 12 physicians from the Canadian Presbyterian Church who were stationed on the island.
Diseases created challenges
Meanwhile, Landsborough, the Scottish physician, succeeded Gavin Russell, the first western-trained physician in central Taiwan. Chen cited an article that Russell published in 1891 in the China Medical Missionary Journal.
“I performed surgeries almost daily, ranging from simple abscess incisions to more complex intestinal procedures,” Russell wrote.
Chen’s PowerPoint presentation disclosed that Russell died of typhoid fever in 1892.
Chen also cited the 1904 Presbyterian Church of England’s Report of the Foreign Missions: China, Formosa, the Straits Settlements, and India, Submitted to the Synod. It highlighted diseases, including malaria and dengue fever, as challenges facing missionaries in Taiwan. According to this report, dengue fever was prevalent in Tainan with almost every foreigner in Anping contracting the illness.
In addition, Chen noted that in 1896, Rev. Campbell N. Moody mentioned a Chinese superstition about malaria in a letter. According to this belief, three ghosts caused the disease.
“The first ghost carries a fan, causing the patient to shiver. The second ghost holds a charcoal brazier, causing the patient to run a fever,” the letter writer stated. “The third ghost wears an iron ring on its head, causing the patient to suffer a headache.
“If a child has a headache, the mother might sometimes cry out, ‘Bring a knife! We’re going to split his head open!’ It is said that this scares away the ghost wearing the iron ring,” the missionary added.
Missionaries impress museum director
Not all of the medical missionaries were men. Elizabeth Blackburn Ferguson, who arrived in 1891, held qualifications jointly awarded by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow.
Blackburn worked in Tainan and Kaohsiung and died in her early 30s in 1901.
Chen emphasized that she is not a historian—as a Christian, she simply wants to serve the church. Yet Chen is clearly impressed by what the missionaries were doing in her country more than a century ago.
Moreover, she has been employed for more than 30 years at Changhua Christian Hospital, so she has a deep understanding of her medical institution’s history. Through artifacts and historical materials, she aims to inspire visitors of every age and background, so that each person may discover their own learning and resonance within themselves.
“Every year during Tomb-Sweeping Day (Qingming), Dr. Mu-Kuan Chen, President of Changhua Christian Hospital, leads the hospital’s senior administrators to pay respects at the missionaries’ cemetery,” Chen revealed. “This year, he made a special point of bringing young physicians along, with the hope that this new generation of medical professionals would remember their roots and bear in mind the spirit of self-sacrifice and devotion shown by the missionary physicians who, at the founding of CCH, crossed oceans to serve—and that they would carry forward this conviction that ‘medicine is itself a form of ministry’ in their own practice of medicine.”
More information
Vancouver TAIWANfest runs from September 5 to 7 in downtown Vancouver. For more information, visit the website. Watch videos about the Changhua Christian Hospital Historical Museum on its YouTube page. Vancouver resident Iris Chen translated questions and answers for Ya-Li Chen’s interview with Pancouver.
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