The concept of ‘person’ figures prominently in Christian theology because the Christian God is regarded first and foremost as a person or a community of persons, but missionaries and theologians who brought Christianity into China found it necessary to coin a new word, 位格 weige, for concepts such as ‘personhood’ of God and the three ‘Persons’ of the Trinity. This might come as a surprise for some native speakers of English, to whom the idea of ‘person’ feels so natural and obvious that they would find it hard not to wonder whether any corresponding concept exists in Mandarin before the coinage. This paper aims to give a semantic analysis of weige with the Natural Semantic Metalanguage framework to answer this twofold question: what weige actually means, and why it is necessary to coin the word in the first place.