(simplified Chinese: 麦利和; traditional Chinese: 麥利和; Pinyin: Mài Lìhé; Foochow Romanized: Măh Lé-huò; February 7, 1824 - August 18, 1907) was an American missionary who made pioneer contributions to the Methodist Episcopal missions in China, Japan and Korea.

[1] His father, a respected member of the Democratic Party, was raised up in the Presbyterian faith but became actively involved in the Methodist Episcopal Church, dedicating himself to spreading the Gospel, his mother an immigrant from the north of Ireland who shared her husband's religious devotion.

Heathen, athwart whose gloomy night of error no ray of light ever shines; idolaters, bowing down to senseless images, the workmanship of their own hands.

Men, created by God; fallen, ruined, helpless; victims, morally, of a foul and relentless malady; sinking into guilt and woe unutterable, inconceivable; immortals, objects of the divine compassion, subjects of Christ's mediation, into the mysteries of whose redemption angels desire to look, and for whose eternal salvation all heavenly intelligences are moved with a profound and ceaseless solicitude.

[3] On July 10, 1850, Maclay and Henrietta Caroline Sperry were married in Hong Kong by Bishop George Smith.

[4] The newly wedded couple returned on August 14 to the mission field in Fuzhou,[5] and the next year they had their first child Eleanor Henrietta Maclay.

[2] In their first years in China the Mission was slow in progress, faced with strong enmity and plagued with health problems.

On July 14, 1857, Maclay baptized the first Chinese convert connected with the Methodist Episcopal Mission, a 47-year-old man named Ting Ang (陳安).

Maclay arrived in Yokohama on June 12, 1873, and immediately set about learning the Japanese language and seeking converts.

He became an integral part of the Wesleyan mission in Japan, helping to found and serve as first president of the Anglo-Japanese College (now the Aoyama Gakuin) in Tokyo.

In June, 1884, Maclay made a brief visit to Seoul, where he acquired the permission of the king to begin medical and educational mission work.