George J. Geis

Burma in 1886. Geis worked in the northeast Kachin and eastern Shan states.

The Reverend George J. Geis (c. 1860 – October 28, 1936) 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.

Background 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.