George J. Geis

The Reverend George J. Geis (c.1860 – October 28, 1936 in Kutkai) was an American Baptist minister and anthropologist of German descent, best known for his missionary work in northeastern Burma. He promoted Christianity amongst the Kachin people, a group which he also studied, collecting general ethnographical data about them. He arrived in Burma with his wife in 1892, and spent most of the rest of his life there, establishing missions throughout Kachin State and Shan State. Geis is best known for his work in Myitkyina in Kachin State, but in the 1930s he established a mission in Kutkai in Shan State, and at the time of his death in 1936 was working there at the Kachin Bible Training School.

The American Baptist Eugenio Kincaid visited Burma in 1837. While distributing religious tracts and New Testaments among the villages north of Ava, Kincaid heard of a people named "Hka Khyens", who were said to believe in a supreme being. He appealed for other missionaries to come to preach to these people, but with no immediate result. However, in 1877 a Christian named Bogalay, from Bassein, began to learn the Jinghpaw language of the Kachins. In 1878 the first overseas Baptist missionary to the Kachins, Albert Lyon, arrived in Bhamo, but died of consumption within a month.

Lyon was succeeded by William Henry Roberts, a former soldier who had fought in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. Roberts obtained grudging permission from the Burmese king, Thibaw Min, to build a school and educate the Kachins. Although his wife soon died from Malaria, Roberts was to carry out his mission for 34 years. Ola Hanson, an accomplished linguist of Swedish origin, arrived in Katchinland in 1890 and was to remain for 38 years. He formulated an alphabet for the Jinghpaw language using the Latin script, prepared educational materials in the language as well as a grammar and a Jinghpaw-English dictionary, translated over 200 hymns into Jinghpaw and wrote a book on Katchins: Their Customs and Traditions (1913). Hanson also began work on a Jinghpaw translation of the Bible, translating St. John's Gospel within two years of his arrival.

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