Ziegenbalg and Plutschau Found the Danish-Halle Mission at Tranquebar

On 9 July 1706, the German Lutheran missionaries Bartholomaus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plutschau landed at Tranquebar, a Danish trading post on India's Coromandel Coast in what is now Tamil Nadu, sent by King Frederick IV of Denmark at the urging of the Halle Pietist theologian August Hermann Francke, one hundred twenty six years after the German editions of the Book of Concord were published at Dresden and Leipzig in 1580, already recorded here, and twenty five years before the Archbishop of Salzburg expelled his Protestant subjects in 1731, also recorded here. Their arrival founded the Danish-Halle Mission, the first sustained Protestant mission to India and the beginning of organized Lutheran mission work outside Europe. Ziegenbalg baptized his first Tamil converts on 12 May 1707 and, within six months of landing, had learned enough Tamil to read, write and preach in it; he opened a Tamil seminary in 1707 and began translating the New Testament, publishing the completed Tamil translation in 1714 after a printing press the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge shipped from London reached Tranquebar in 1712, the first printed edition of any part of the Bible in an Indian language. Ziegenbalg endured four months' imprisonment by suspicious local officials before continuing his work; he died at Tranquebar in 1719, but the mission he and Plutschau founded sent some eighty missionaries, most trained at Halle, to India over the following century and a half, establishing the pattern of vernacular translation and education that later Protestant missions across Asia would follow.