The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Half Century Among the Siamese and the Lāo, by Daniel McGilvary This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: A Half Century Among the Siamese and the Lāo An Autobiography Author: Daniel McGilvary Release Date: November 20, 2020 [eBook #63818] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HALF CENTURY AMONG THE SIAMESE AND THE LāO*** E-text prepared by Brian Wilson, Barry Abrahamsen, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org) Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/halfcenturyamong00mcgi The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain. A HALF CENTURY AMONG THE SIAMESE AND THE LĀO Daniel McGilvary A HALF CENTURY AMONG THE SIAMESE AND THE LĀO AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY By DANIEL McGILVARY, D.D. WITH AN APPRECIATION BY ARTHUR J. BROWN, D.D. ILLUSTRATED New York Chicago Toronto Fleming H. Revell Company London and Edinburgh Copyright, 1912, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY New York: 158 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 125 N. Wabash Ave. Toronto: 25 Richmond St., W. London: 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street TO MY WIFE AN APPRECIATION Missionary biography is one of the most interesting and instructive of studies. It is, however, a department of missionary literature to which Americans have not made proportionate contribution. The foreign missionary Societies of the United States now represent more missionaries and a larger expenditure than the European Societies, but most of the great missionary biographies are of British and Continental missionaries, so that many Americans do not realize that there are men connected with their own Societies whose lives have been characterized by eminent devotion and large achievement. Because I regarded Dr. McGilvary as one of the great missionaries of the Church Universal, I urged him several years ago to write his autobiography. He was then over seventy-five years of age, and I told him that he could not spend his remaining strength to any better advantage to the cause he loved than in preparing such a volume. His life was not only one of unusual length (he lived to the ripe age of eighty-three), but his missionary service of fifty-three years covered an interesting part of the history of missionary work in Siam, and the entire history, thus far, of the mission to the Lāo people of northern Siam. There is no more fascinating story in fiction or in that truth which is stranger than fiction, than the story of his discovery of a village of strange speech near his station at Pechaburī, Siam, his learning the language of the villagers, his long journey with his friend, Dr. Jonathan Wilson, into what was then the unknown region of northern Siam, pushing his little boat up the great river and pausing not until he had gone six hundred miles northward and arrived at the city of Chiengmai. The years that followed were years of toil and privation, of loneliness and sometimes of danger; but the missionaries persevered with splendid faith and courage until the foundations of a prosperous Mission were laid. In all the marked development of the Lāo Mission, Dr. McGilvary was a leader—the leader. He laid the foundations of medical work, introducing quinine and vaccination among a people scourged by malaria and smallpox, a work which has now developed into five hospitals and a leper asylum. He began educational work, which is now represented by eight boarding schools and twenty-two elementary schools, and is fast expanding into a college, a medical college, and a theological seminary. He was the evangelist who won the first converts, founded the first church, and had a prominent part in founding twenty other churches, and in developing a Lāo Christian Church of four thousand two hundred and five adult communicants. His colleague, the Rev. Dr. W. C. Dodd, says that Dr. McGilvary selected the sites for all the present stations of the Mission long before committees formally sanctioned the wisdom of his choice. He led the way into regions beyond and was the pioneer explorer into the French Lāo States, eastern Burma, and even up to the borders of China. Go where you will in northern Siam, or in many sections of the extra-Siamese Lāo States, you will find men and women to whom Dr. McGilvary first brought the Good News. He well deserves the name so frequently given him even in his lifetime—“The Apostle to the Lāo.” It was my privilege to conduct our Board’s correspondence with Dr. McGilvary for more than a decade, and, in 1902, to visit him in his home and to journey with him through an extensive region. I have abiding and tender memories of those memorable days. He was a Christian gentleman of the highest type, a man of cultivation and refinement, of ability and scholarship, of broad vision and constructive leadership. His evangelistic zeal knew no bounds. A toilsome journey on elephants through the jungles brought me to a Saturday night with the weary ejaculation: “Now we can have a day of rest!” The next morning I slept late; but Dr. McGilvary did not; he spent an hour before breakfast in a neighbouring village, distributing tracts and inviting the people to come to a service at our camp at ten o’clock. It was an impressive service,—under a spreading bo tree, with the mighty forest about us, monkeys curiously peering through the tangled vines, the huge elephants browsing the bamboo tips behind us, and the wondering people sitting on the ground, while one of the missionaries told the deathless story of redeeming love. But Dr. McGilvary was not present. Seventy-four years old though he was, he had walked three miles under a scorching sun to another village and was preaching there, while Dr. Dodd conducted the service at our camp. And I said: “If that is the way Dr. McGilvary rests, what does he do when he works?” Dr. McKean, his associate of many years, writes: “No one who has done country evangelistic work with Dr. McGilvary can ever forget the oft-seen picture of the gray-haired patriarch seated on the bamboo floor of a thatch-covered Lāo house, teaching some one to read. Of course, the book faced the pupil, and it was often said that he had taught so many people in this way that he could read the Lāo character very readily with the book upside down. Little children instinctively loved him, and it is therefore needless to say that he loved them. In spite of his long snow-white beard, never seen in men of this land and a strange sight to any Lāo child, the children readily came to him. Parents have been led to God because Dr. McGilvary loved their children and laid his hands upon them. In no other capacity was the spirit of the man more manifest than in that of a shepherd. Always on the alert for every opportunity, counting neither time nor distance nor the hardship of inclement weather, swollen streams, pathless jungle, or impassable road, he followed the example of his Master in seeking to save the lost. His very last journey, which probably was the immediate cause of his last illness, was a long, wearisome ride on horseback, through muddy fields and deep irrigating ditches, to visit a man whom he had befriended many years ago and who seemed to be an inquirer.” Dr. McGilvary was pre-eminently a man who walked with God. His piety was not a mere profession, but a pervasive and abiding force. He knew no greater joy than to declare the Gospel of his blessed Lord to the people to whose up-lifting he had devoted his life. “If to be great is ‘to take the common things of life and walk truly among them,’ he was a great man—great in soul, great in simplicity, great in faith and great in love. Siam is the richer because Daniel McGilvary gave her fifty-three years of unselfish service.” Mrs. Curtis, the gifted author of The Laos of North 1 2 3 4 5 Siam, says of Dr. McGilvary: “Neither Carey nor Judson surpassed him in strength of faith and zeal of purpose; neither Paton nor Chalmers has outranked him in the wonders of their achievements, and not one of the other hundreds of missionaries ever has had more evidence of God’s blessing upon their work.” Not only the missionaries but the Lāo people loved him as a friend and venerated him as a father. Some of his intimate friends were the abbots and monks of the Buddhist monasteries and the high officials of the country. No one could know him without recognizing the nobility of soul of this saintly patriarch, in whom was no guile. December 6th, 1910, many Americans and Europeans celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his marriage. The King of Siam through Prince Damrong, Minister of the Interior, sent a congratulatory message. Letters, telegrams, and gifts poured in from many different places. The Christian people of the city presented a large silver tray, on which was engraved: “The Christian people of Chiengmai to Dr. and Mrs. McGilvary, in memory of your having brought the Gospel of Jesus Christ to us forty-three years ago.” The tray showed in relief the old rest-house where Dr. and Mrs. McGilvary spent their first two years in Chiengmai, the residence which was later their home of many years, the old dilapidated bridge, and the handsome new bridge which spans the river opposite the Christian Girls’ School—thus symbolizing the old and the new eras. The recent tours of exploration by the Rev. W. Clifton Dodd, D.D., and the Rev. John H. Freeman have disclosed the fact that the Lāo peoples are far more numerous and more widely distributed than we had formerly supposed. Their numbers are now estimated at from twelve to sixteen millions, and their habitat includes not only the Lāo States of northern Siam but extensive regions north and northeastward in the Shan States, Southern China, and French Indo- China. The evangelization of these peoples is, therefore, an even larger and more important undertaking than it was understood to be only a few years ago. All the more honour, therefore, must be assigned to Dr. McGilvary, who laid foundations upon which a great superstructure must now be built. Dr. McGilvary died as he would have wished to die and as any Christian worker might wish to die. There was no long illness. He continued his great evangelistic and literary labours almost to the end. Only a short time before his death, he made another of his famous itinerating journeys, preaching the Gospel to the outlying villages, guiding perplexed people and comforting the sick and dying. He recked as little of personal hardship as he had all his life, thinking nothing of hard travelling, simple fare, and exposure to sun, mud, and rain. Not long after his return and after a few brief days of illness, he quietly “fell on sleep,” his death the simple but majestic and dignified ending of a great earthly career. The Lāo country had never seen such a funeral as that which marked the close of this memorable life. Princes, Governors, and High Commissioners of State sorrowed with multitudes of common people. The business of Chiengmai was suspended, offices were closed, and flags hung at half-mast as the silent form of the great missionary was borne to its last resting-place in the land to which he was the first bringer of enlightenment, and whose history can never be truly written without large recognition of his achievements. Fortunately, Dr. McGilvary had completed this autobiography before his natural powers had abated, and had sent the manuscript to his brother-in-law, Professor Cornelius B. Bradley of the University of California. Dr. Bradley, himself a son of a great missionary to Siam, has done his editorial work with sympathetic insight. It has been a labour of love to him to put these pages through the press, and every friend of the Lāo people and of Dr. McGilvary is his debtor. The book itself is characterized by breadth of sympathy, richness of experience, clearness of statement, and high literary charm. No one can read these pages without realizing anew that Dr. McGilvary was a man of fine mind, close observation, and descriptive gifts. The book is full of human interest. It is the story of a man who tells about the things that he heard and saw and who tells his story well. I count it a privilege to have this opportunity of commending this volume as one of the books which no student of southern Asia and of the missionary enterprise can afford to overlook. Arthur J. Brown. 156 Fifth Avenue, New York. 5 6 7 PREFACE Years ago, in the absence of any adequate work upon the subject, the officers of our Missionary Board and other friends urged me to write a book on the Lāo Mission. Then there appeared Mrs. L. W. Curtis’ interesting volume, The Laos of North Siam, much to be commended for its accuracy and its valuable information, especially in view of the author’s short stay in the field. But no such work exhausts its subject. I have always loved to trace the providential circumstances which led to the founding of the Lāo Mission and directed its early history. And it seems important that before it be too late, that early history should be put into permanent form. I have, therefore, endeavoured to give, with some fulness of detail, the story of the origin and inception of the Mission, and of its early struggles which culminated in the Edict of Religious Toleration. And in the later portions of the narrative I have naturally given prominence to those things which seemed to continue the characteristic features and the personal interest of that earlier period of outreach and adventure, and especially my long tours into the “regions beyond.” The appearance during the past year of Rev. J. H. Freeman’s An Oriental Land of the Free, giving very full and accurate information regarding the present status of the Mission, has relieved me of the necessity of going over the same ground again. I have, therefore, been content to draw my narrative to a close with the account of my last long tour in 1898. The work was undertaken with many misgivings, since my early training and the nature of my life-work have not been the best preparation for authorship. I cherished the secret hope that one of my own children would give the book its final revision for the press. But at last an appeal was made to my brother-in-law, Professor Cornelius B. Bradley of the University of California, whose birth and years of service in Siam, whose broad scholarship, fine literary taste, and hearty sympathy with our missionary efforts indicated him as the man above all others best qualified for this task. His generous acceptance of this work, and the infinite pains he has taken in the revision and editing of this book, place me under lasting obligations to him. I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to Dr. W. A. Briggs and to Rev. J. H. Freeman for the use of maps prepared by them, and to Dr. Briggs and others for the use of photographs. Daniel McGilvary. April 6, 1911, Chiengmai. 9 10 NOTE BY THE EDITOR The task which has fallen to me in connection with this book, was undertaken as a labour of love; and such it seems to me even more, now that it ends in sadness of farewell. It has not been an easy task. The vast spaces to be traversed, and the months of time required before a question could receive its answer, made consultation with the author almost impossible. And the ever-present fear that for him the night might come before the work could receive a last revision at his hands, or even while he was still in the midst of his story, led me continually to urge upon him the need of persevering in his writing—which was evidently becoming an irksome task—and on my part to hasten on a piecemeal revision as the chapters came to hand, though as yet I had no measure of the whole to guide me. It is, therefore, a great comfort to know that my urgency and haste were not in vain; that all of the revision reached him in time to receive his criticism and correction—though his letter on the concluding chapter was, as I understand, the very last piece of writing that he ever did. How serene and bright it was, and with no trace of the shadow so soon to fall! But the draft so made had far outgrown the possible limits of publication, and was, of course, without due measure and proportion of parts. In the delicate task of its reduction I am much indebted to the kind suggestions of the Rev. Arthur J. Brown, D.D., and the Rev. A. W. Halsey, D.D., Secretaries of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, and of the Rev. W. C. Dodd, D.D., of the Lāo Mission, who, fortunately, was in this country, and who read the manuscript. For what appears in this book, however, I alone must assume the responsibility. “An autobiography is a personal book, expressive of personal opinion.” And whether we agree with them or not, the opinions of a man like Dr. McGilvary, formed during a long lifetime of closest contact with the matters whereof he speaks, are an essential part not only of the history of those matters, but of the portrait of the man, and far more interesting than any mere details of events or scenes. On all grave questions, therefore, on which he has expressed his deliberate opinion, I have preferred to err on the side of inclusion rather than exclusion. The plan adopted in this volume for spelling Siamese and Lāo words is intended to make possible, and even easy, a real approximation to the native pronunciation. Only the tonal inflections of native speech and the varieties of aspiration are ignored, as wholly foreign to our usage and, therefore, unmanageable. The consonant-letters used and the digraphs ch and ng have their common English values. The vowels are as follows: Long ā as in father ē as in they ī as in pique ō as in rode ū as in rude, rood aw as in lawn ê as in there (without the r) ô as in world (without the r) û is the high-mixed vowel, not found in English. It may be pronounced as u. Short a as in about (German Mann)—not as in hat. e as in set i as in sit o as in obey (N. Eng. coat)—not as in cot. u as in pull, foot—not as in but. The last four long vowels have also their corresponding shorts, but since these rarely occur, it has not been thought worth while to burden the scheme with extra characters to represent them. The diphthongs are combinations of one of these vowels, heavily stressed, and nearly always long in quantity—which makes it seem to us exaggerated or drawled—with a “vanish” of short i, o, (for u), or a. ai (= English long i, y) and ao (= English ow) are the only diphthongs with short initial element, and are to be distinguished from āi and āo. In deference to long established usage in maps and the like, ie is used in this volume where ia would be the consistent spelling, and oi for awi. A word remains to be said concerning the name of the people among whom Dr. McGilvary spent his life. That name has suffered uncommonly hard usage, especially at the hands of Americans, as the following brief history will show. Its original form in European writing was Lāo, a fairly accurate transcription by early French travellers of the name by which the Siamese call their cousins to the north and east. The word is a monosyllable ending in a diphthong similar to that heard in the proper names Macāo, Mindanāo, Callāo. In French writing the name often appeared in the plural form, les Laos; the added s, however, being silent, made no difference with the pronunciation. This written plural, then, it would seem, English-speaking people took over without recognizing the fact that it was only plural, and made it their 11 12 13 14 standard form for all uses, singular as well as plural. With characteristic ignorance or disregard of its proper pronunciation, on the mere basis of its spelling, they have imposed on it a barbarous pronunciation of their own—Lay- oss. It is to be regretted that the usage of American missionaries has been most effective in giving currency and countenance to this blunder—has even added to it the further blunder of using it as the name of the region or territory, as well as of the people. But the word is purely ethnical—a proper adjective like our words French or English, and, like these, capable of substantive use in naming either the people or their language, but not their land. Needless to say, these errors have no currency whatever among European peoples excepting the English, and they have very little currency in England. It seems high time for us of America to amend not only our false pronunciation, but our false usage, and the false spelling upon which these rest. In accordance with the scheme of spelling adopted in this work, the a of the name Lāo is marked with the macron to indicate its long quantity and stress. Cornelius Beach Bradley. Berkeley, California, December, 1911.