author
John Gerardus Fagg
1860–1917
A Reformed Church missionary and writer, he spent years in Amoy, China, and turned that experience into vivid books about mission work and the life of fellow missionary John Van Nest Talmage. His writing offers a firsthand window into late 19th-century Protestant missions in South China.
1 Audiobook
Forty Years in South China: The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D.
by John Gerardus Fagg
About the author
Born in 1860, John Gerardus Fagg was an American minister and missionary connected with the Reformed Church in America. Archival and bibliographic records show that he served in Amoy (now Xiamen), China, from 1887 to 1894, and that he later continued his work in the United States as a pastor and as a member of the church's Board of Foreign Missions.
He is best known as the author of Forty Years in South China: The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. (1894), a substantial biography of the veteran missionary John Van Nest Talmage. He also wrote Sketch of the Amoy Mission in China of the Reformed Church in America, another work tied closely to the mission field he knew from personal experience.
Fagg died in 1917. Though not widely remembered today, his books remain valuable for readers interested in Christian missions, church history, and Western encounters with South China in the late 1800s.