About the Founder
The Rev. Dr. Wee-Chong Tan was born on January 6, 1930 in Xiamen, Fujian Province, China. He left China with his family in 1945, and now resides in Victoria, BC, Canada.
Dr. Tan received a doctoral degree in Biochemistry from Indiana University in 1966. In 1968 after post-doctoring, he went over to England to study theology at St. John's Hall, London, (also known as the London College of Divinity) and was subsequently ordained into the Church of England in St. Paul's Cathedral, London. He then served his first curacy at St. James Sussex Gardens, London. Along the way he became a Life Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society, Oxford, and was a Visiting Fellow of the Biochemistry Department of Oxford University.
In 1973, Dr. Tan came to Canada to join the founding faculty of Lester B. Pearson College of the Pacific (United World Colleges) near Victoria. He became an honorary assistant on the staff of the Church of St. John the Divine in Victoria in the same year, which position he held for thirty-one years. In 1985, he took early retirement from Pearson College to found the Canadian College for Chinese Studies.
In 1997, a visit to the College by an agricultural delegation from China sparked a great interest in organic agriculture, which has moved Dr. Tan to undertake research trips to: the Hutterite farmers of Saskatchewan; the Amish in Pennsylvania; the peasants of China; the farmlands of Russia, from St. Petersburg to Manchuria; organic farmers and agricultural researchers in eighteen countries of Europe. He formed the Canada - China Organic Agriculture Centre within the College to promote organic farming methods around the world.
In 2000, Dr. Tan travelled to China to become a visiting professor at Nanjing Union Theological Seminary. He received many further invitations along the way; before returning home after nine months in China, he had become a guest professor in Philosophy and Life Fellow at the China Cultural Academy, Beijing University, and a Fellow and Professor at China Agricultural University in Beijing, and had spoken at fifty universities, including eighteen Protestant and Catholic seminaries, in twenty seven of the thirty province of China.
On November 21, 2006, Dr. Tan was named an Honorary Citizen of the City of Victoria by Mayor Alan Lowe.