Black-Bearded Barbarian

The Taiwanese called him the black-bearded barbarian. To the Presbyterian missionaries who sent him, George Mackay was something else entirely: a principled convert who would spend thirty years bringing his faith to the island's northern coast. This fictionalized biography inhabits both perspectives with equal empathy. Mackay arrived in Taiwan in 1871, a young man from Ontario who had promised to marry a woman he'd never met if she would fund his mission. What he found was an island caught between Qing dynasty rule and the forces of modernity, a place where his Canadian Protestant earnestness would collide with temple rituals, opium dens, and the deep suspicion of locals who had seen foreigners come and go. MacGregor traces Mackay's transformation from an awkward missionary who initially repulsed his congregation into a man who would establish schools, translate the Bible into Formosan, and become a pivotal figure in Taiwan's educational and religious development. What emerges is neither hagiography nor condemnation. The barbarian label becomes a window into how Taiwanese people made sense of this strange foreigner, and how Mackay learned to listen before he spoke.