Tranquebar
A town on the Coromandel coast of South India with a Danish church and governor in the early eighteenth century. The Lutheran missionaries Ziegenbalg and Plütschau landed there in July 1706.
Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg dates his first letter from India “at Tranquebar, on the Coast of Coromandel” and says the place lies under the eleventh degree north of the equator (Ziegenbalg, Propagation of the Gospel in the East, Part I, pp. 17–18). His letters mention the governor of the settlement and its Danish church, called Sion, in which the missionaries preached before building their own church, Jerusalem, outside the town (Ziegenbalg, Propagation of the Gospel in the East, Part I, letter 9, pp. 68–71). See the Tranquebar Mission.
What happened here
- 9 July 1706, firm dateThe Tranquebar Mission
Two German Lutherans trained at Halle, sent under the protection of the king of Denmark, land at Tranquebar in South India in July 1706. They learn Tamil and Portuguese, baptize converts, build a church, open schools and begin to translate and print the New Testament in Tamil.