Mimi (Yin-Hsuan) Sung has given herself a challenging assignment on her first trip to Canada. The academic and theologian at Tainan Theological College and Seminary plans to discuss longstanding historical connections between Scotland, Canada, and Taiwan. In her free talk at Toronto TAIWANfest on Sunday (August 30), she will address 19th-century churches, immigration, and transoceanic migration. She will also point out how Scottish missionaries with the English Presbyterian Church brought western healthcare and education to the island.
Sung was raised in a small fishing village in Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan. In her childhood, she couldn’t have conceived of becoming a scholar on the history of the English Presbyterian Church.
“When I was a kid—even a teenager—I didn’t know anything about the Presbyterian Church or Christianity,” Sung tells the Toronto Spark over Zoom.
But her innate curiosity ultimately led her to earn a PhD at the University of Edinburgh with a 316-page thesis titled The changing Scottish Presbyterian missionary vision of India and China, 1840-1914.
“During the nineteenth century many Scottish Presbyterians combined conceptions of the British Empire with the biblical vision of the coming Kingdom of God on earth,” she writes.
Sung converts in 2011
Her academic journey began at National Dong Hwa University in Hualien on Taiwan’s rugged and mountainous eastern coast. She studied literature in a county with a large Indigenous population.
“They are really gifted in music, in dance, in sport,” Sung says. “They are really open-minded and they have a rich culture.”
Following her undergraduate degree, she worked in Taipei for a few years before moving to Bristol, England. There, she completed a master’s degree in educational counselling.
Then in 2011, she converted to Christianity. That led Sung to pursue a Master of Divinity degree at Tainan Theological College and Seminary in southern Taiwan.
“I started to wonder why there are so many different denominations,” Sung recalls. “Some lead to a narrower understanding; some lead to really open and social-engagement understanding of the Bible. I wanted to know what makes people read the Bible differently.”
Her inquisitive mind—along with encouragement from professors in Taiwan—propelled her to pursue her PhD at the University of Edinburgh. Several Scottish missionaries who moved to Taiwan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had studied medicine at this institution.
“We always want to know the root of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan,” Sung acknowledges. “So it’s one of the main reasons that pushed me to study overseas.”
Pioneer missionaries were Scottish
In her thesis, she states that the missionaries “placed particular emphasis on education, which had been a major priority of the Scottish Reformation, and on medical work, which had been a major emphasis of the Scottish Enlightenment”.
“In 1865, the English Presbyterian Church mission started a mission station in Formosa, the pioneer missionaries, James Laidlaw Maxwell, Hugh Ritchie, William Campbell, Thomas Barclay, Duncan Ferguson, Peter Anderson, Campbell Naismith Moody, and Andrew Bonar Nielson, were either Scots or had been educated in Scotland,” she writes. “Scottish missionaries sent out by the London Missionary Society, including Robert Morrison, William Milne, William Muirhead, James Legge, Alexander Williamson, and James Gilmour of Mongolia, had a great impact on the missions to China.”
Scottish missionaries “largely dominated” the church history of Formosa. The first such missionary, Maxwell, had a medical degree from the University of Edinburgh when he arrived in 1865. But when he opened the first western medical clinic in Tainan, the locals erupted in anger and he was cast out of the city.
Sung suspects that local gentry feared that they would lose influence once people started converting to Christianity.
“They would ask the ministers—the pastors—to deal with conflicts, so they would lose power,” she says.
Maxwell moved to the Kaohsiung area, where his medical mission was more welcome. In 1871, his friend, photographer John Thomson, arrived in Taiwan and brought Maxwell to the mountainous area with Indigenous villages. According to Sung, Thomson told Maxwell that he didn’t have to remain in the city to preach the gospel.
Sung says that Scottish medical missionaries actually had more success with Indigenous people living in the mountains because they had already been exposed to Dutch traders in the 17th century.
“When they saw James Maxwell, they said, ‘That’s our red-haired ancestor or our red-haired relative.’ ”
She also points out that Canadian Presbyterian missionaries, such as George Leslie Mackay, worked north of the Daija River, whereas the English Presbyterian Church did its missionary work south of the river.
“They made an agreement,” Sung says. “They said, ‘We don’t fight; we just work together because we all work for the Kingdom of God.”
David Landsborough III, a University of Edinburgh-educated doctor, founded Changhua Christian Hospital south of the Daija River in west-central Tainan. Mackay, who was born in Ontario, founded the Mackay Clinic in Tamsui north of the river. It moved to Taipei in 1912 and is now called the Mackay Memorial Hospital.
Languages thrived
Meanwhile, Canadian’s colonial history is often condemned because the government and the churches worked together to suppress Indigenous languages, land rights, and cultures through the Indian Act, the residential school system, and other draconian measures. In Taiwan, there is not nearly so much controversy today over the role that Scottish missionaries played in the country’s history even as the colonial history remains under scrutiny.
“They did a god job in preserving the local language,” Sung says. “They wanted people to read and to understand the Bible but it couldn’t be done by people who cannot read.”
She points out that missionaries responded by spelling the local language in Romanized Vernacular—i.e., using the Latin letters to represents the sounds of the native tongue. So the people weren’t forced to learn English.
“The literacy was really high,” she states.
Yet Sung still sees parallels between Scotland, Canada, and Taiwan. In a way, she likens the residents of all three nations as “islanders”.
“People [who] come and go and actually shape our identity—and how we understand our history and how we see ourselves an islander,” Sung states. “We have this mobility.”
Toronto TAIWANfest will present Islands’ Talk: A Historical Conversation Among Scotland, Canada, and Taiwan with Dr. Mimi Sung at 2:30 p.m. on Sunday (August 30). She will speak from 2:30 to 4 p.m. on Sunday (August 30) at Main Loft at Harbourfront Centre. For more information, visit the Toronto TAIWANfest website.
The Toronto Spark is on Bluesky @torontospark.bsky.social.
