Heritage

My journey into this work began around 2016–2017, when I started trying to piece together the story of my ancestor Pastor Iap Han-Chow (葉漢章), one of the early Chinese pastors connected to the RCA Amoy mission. At first there was almost nothing online — only fragments, in different languages, scattered across half-broken pages. The breakthrough came when I came across a blog post by Dr. Bill Brown (潘威廉教授) of Xiamen University, which pointed me to the Hope College Archives in Holland, Michigan. Hope College has preserved more than 150 years of RCA mission material — letters, photographs, sermons, organizational records — but most of it has never been digitized. As I was learning how modern AI pipelines work, the two threads began to converge: what if these records could be made askable, in plain language, in English or Chinese, by anyone curious enough to ask?

What you can try today is a prototype: an AI agent built over digitized source documents, so you can ask questions in plain language and get answers grounded in real archival material. It will keep growing as more sources are added. The immediate goal is to make the surviving historical record openly searchable — for descendants tracing an ancestor through archived letters and photographs, and for historians and researchers studying this period — with every answer traceable back to the original source.

Special thanks to Sarah and the team at the Hope College Archives — their patience, generosity with their time, and willingness to pull boxes for an outsider asking unusual questions has been the single biggest reason this project moved beyond an idea. In parallel, I've been exchanging notes with Mr. Ye Ke-Hao (葉克豪), a researcher in his eighties who has spent more than thirty years studying the history of Christianity in southern Fujian. His published work on the RCA Amoy mission and the broader missionary record there is extensive — including his Chinese co-translation of Gerald F. De Jong's The Reformed Church in China, 1842–1951 (《美國歸正教在廈門 1842—1951》), one of the most important English-language histories of this mission. His perspective from the Chinese side complements what the Hope College material captures from the American side — together they begin to form a picture neither archive could tell alone. The longer-term vision is for the archive to grow from three directions at once: top-down from institutional archives like Hope College; sideways from researchers like Mr. Ye who have spent decades in the field; and bottom-up from the descendants themselves, contributing the photographs, letters, and family stories that the institutional record never captured. Each direction fills in what the others miss.

A note on scope: while this archive focuses on the RCA Amoy mission specifically, RCA was not the only Protestant body at work in the city. From the 1840s onward, missionaries of the London Missionary Society (LMS) and the English Presbyterian Mission (EPM) served in Amoy alongside the RCA — often sharing schools, hospitals, and the foreign cemetery on Kulangsu (Gulangyu), which was initially established and maintained by British residents and consuls. The three missions cooperated closely enough to jointly develop what became known as the "Amoy Plan" — an early ecumenical model that handed leadership to Chinese pastors and unified the resulting congregations across denominations. Where the surviving sources naturally cross over into LMS or EPM material, this archive will note the connection rather than ignore it; the lived history was shared, even when the institutional records were not.

To call the relationship 'intertwined' actually undersells what the missionaries built. Beyond church work, the missions in Amoy — RCA together with LMS and EPM — opened modern hospitals and trained local medical staff (Hope Hospital, founded by Dr. John Otte (郁約翰) in April 1898 on Kulangsu, became one of the earliest Western-style hospitals in the region); founded schools and women's colleges; ran public-health campaigns against opium addiction; and joined the anti-foot-binding movement that gave the next generation of girls the option of an unbound life. Perhaps the quietest but most consequential project was literacy: starting in the 1840s–1850s the missionaries jointly developed and codified Pe̍h-ōe-jī (白話字, also called 閩南羅馬字) — a romanized script for spoken Hokkien. Decades of that collaborative work fed into Rev. Carstairs Douglas's (杜嘉德) landmark Chinese-English Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken Language of Amoy (1873), and the RCA's own Rev. John Van Nest Talmage (打馬字) carried the project forward in the Romanized Amoy Vernacular Dictionary (《罗马字厦门音字典》, Ē-MN̂G IM Ê JĪ-TIÁN), first published in 1894 and still being reprinted today. With a few weeks of practice, a farmer or fisherwoman who had never set foot in a classroom could read scripture, write letters, and keep records in their own spoken language. The script outlived the missionaries themselves: into the 1980s and 1990s, elderly Christians in Fujian and the descendants of missionary families in the United States were still corresponding in Pe̍h-ōe-jī across the Pacific.

One last thing worth saying out loud: this is historic material, and historic material has very little room for speculation. The internet age has made history more accessible than ever, but it has also flooded the field with confidently wrong information — broken citations, conflated names, dates and places that do not quite line up. That is why every answer this archive returns is grounded in the actual source documents, with citations you can click through to verify. The AI pipeline is not here to invent narrative; it is here to make decades of unindexed archival material searchable in plain language, while keeping each claim traceable back to a real letter, a real photograph, a real organizational record. The work was patient when it was first written down a century ago — the way we surface it now should respect that same patience.

One direction this archive may grow into later is a parallel layer for personal family stories. The historic record above is, by design, source-grounded and traceable — but the people behind the photographs span a wide range: a few of the youngest, like the late-era nurses trained at Hope Hospital and Wilhelmina Hospital on Kulangsu, are still alive today in their nineties, while others are someone's parent, grandparent, or great-grandparent — and the stories that live in those families don't appear in any archive. A future addition to this site is a bridge for that: a descendant (or in some cases the person themselves) might recognize a face in a mission photograph, and contribute the family memory that goes with it. Those contributions would sit alongside the historic archive rather than mixed into it — clearly marked as personal recollection rather than verified record — so the archive's research value stays intact while a separate layer of human connection has somewhere to live. This is a longer-term direction, built as the project continues to evolve.