George Leslie Mackay

George Leslie Mackay (馬偕, 1844–1901) was a Canadian Presbyterian minister who landed at Hobe (滬尾), now Tamsui, in 1872 as the first Protestant missionary in northern Taiwan. Though not a trained physician, he travelled the countryside with his students, pairing preaching with dentistry; his diaries tally more than 21,000 extracted teeth, a practice commemorated at the Shitan tooth extraction site. In Tamsui he opened the Hobe Mackay Clinic, the first Western medical clinic in northern Taiwan and forerunner of Mackay Memorial Hospital (馬偕紀念醫院), as well as Oxford College and the adjoining Tamsui Girls’ School (淡水女學堂). The roughly 60 churches he and his students founded, among them Tamsui Presbyterian Church and a chapel beside Xinshe Ciren Temple, formed the core of the Northern Synod of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (台灣基督長老教會). He died in 1901 at the Mackay Residence and is buried in the Mackay Family Cemetery on the grounds of Tam-Kang High School, which his son George William Mackay (偕叡廉) founded in 1914.