Christianity in China
The Nestorian Christians were the first to reach China, and the most ancient Christian artefact yet found in the country is the Nestorian Tablet in Xī’ān’s Forest of Stelae, rediscovered by the Jesuits in 1623, and thought (perhaps hoped) to be a fake, until Nestorian documents were found in the Library Cave at Dūnhuáng in Gānsù (along with daoist, Confucian, Manichaean and Buddhist papers). The stele records a Nestorian mission to the Táng capital Cháng’ān (now Xī’ān) in 635 CE.
Named after Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople in the 5th century, Nestorian Christianity’s view that Christ had two separate human and divine personalities was banned as heretical (the modern Chinese regime would probably call them ‘splittist’). Nevertheless, the church flourished in Persia and spread eastwards to India and China from the 6th to the 10th century. Envoys from Europe to the Mongol court at Karakorum in Mongolia, such as the Franciscan John of Plano Carpini (Giovanni da Pian del Carpine) in 1246, Dominican André de Longjumeau in 1250, and another Franciscan, William of Rubruck (Guillaume Rubruquis), in 1253, found themselves reliant on the Nestorians for communication with the Mongol Khans.
After their first (and quite possibly only) meeting with Khubilai Khan at Karakorum in around 1260 the Polo brothers were given a message to the Pope asking for 100 teachers to spread the Catholic word. But they were unable to obtain more than two for the return journey and even these dropped out (see Was Polo Here?)
However, the Franciscan John of Monte Corvino (Giovanni da Montecorvino) reached Khanbalik (Běijīng) in 1294 and was sent seven bishops, three of whom survived the journey to arrive in 1308 and consecrate him first Archbishop of the Catholic Church in China. There were subsequent missions, but Catholics came under attack during revolts against Mongol rule, and the last Western bishop was expelled in 1369, the year after the restoration of Chinese rule over the region by the Míng.
The next major achievement by Christianity was the permission given to the Jesuit Matteo Ricci to live in Běijīng from 1601. Ricci had entered China from Portuguese-controlled Macao in 1583, and decided on an approach different from that of his fellow missionaries, dressing as a scholar rather than as a member of the priestly class. He devoted himself to gaining a thorough understanding of the classics needed to pass the imperial examinations, the route to advancement in Chinese society, and taught the sons of the influential not only the content of the classics but memory techniques then thought of as a branch of ethics. It was thus that he gained the support necessary to reach Běijīng, a move strongly resisted by the inward-looking Míng and the eunuchs who held power at the court.
Once there, Ricci won respect by his demonstrations of technical skill with clocks and maps. He adapted Catholic rites to make them more understandable to Chinese converts and allowed the continuance of traditional ancestor-worship and displays of respect for Confucius.
By 1610, the year of Ricci’s death, the Jesuits claimed 2,000 converts, but most of these were sick infants baptised only shortly before they died (a policy that continued with sick, unwanted, and abandoned children — usually girls — right up to the time of the Boxers, contributing to Chinese suspicions that the children were used for alchemical and deviant sexual purposes). They had, however, established the residence of a total of eight priests and eight friars.
Their influence at court became substantial. The Jesuits demonstrated the inadequacies of the Chinese calendar by accurately forecasting the time and duration of solar eclipses in 1610 and 1629. Johann Adam Schall von Bell was appointed to the Board of Calendar Regulation in 1634.
Their erudition kept the Jesuits at court through the transfer from the Míng to the Manchu Qīng in 1644, despite the Manchus’ adherence to Tibetan Buddhism, although there was a reaction against them following the death of the Shùnzhì emperor in 1661 and during the subsequent minority of the Kāngxī emperor.
Nevertheless, a Belgian, Ferdinand Verbiest, demonstrated to Kāngxī that errors had once again crept into the calendar, and the Jesuits again took control. Verbiest became science tutor to Kāngxī, cast cannon for him, and other Jesuits acted as interpreters and translators, helping to negotiate and draw up the first agreement between China and a foreign power, the border-fixing Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia of 1689.
Later Jesuits worked as cartographers, completing a map of the whole of China for Kāngxī by 1717. By 1700 the Jesuits were claiming more than 300,000 converts to Catholicism.
Kāngxī issued an edict of tolerance to the Christian religion in 1692, but this increased the numbers of other missionary sects coming to join the Jesuits, not all of whom agreed with Ricci’s accommodation of ancestor worship, homage to Confucius, and other traditions.
Debate over this issue had begun in 1632, quickly developing into a fierce campaign of letter-writing and denunciation of the Jesuits by other orders envious of their successes. While the struggle to ‘save souls’ took place in China, infighting at the Vatican led to Ricci’s position being at first confirmed and then rejected. A legate sent by Pope Clement XI had meetings with Kāngxī in 1705 and 1706, then ordered all missionaries under pain of excommunication to forbid converts to practise these rites.
Kāngxī despised this intolerance, and ordered the expulsion from China of all those who failed to obtain from him a certificate accepting his position, beginning with the legate himself, who died in 1710 while detained in Macau.
A papal decree, Ex illa die of 1710, reached China in 1716. It required an oath from all Catholics that they would forbid ancestor worship and respect for Confucius. Most Jesuits signed, but some Franciscans and Dominicans refused.
A second legate who reached Běijīng in 1720 attempted to regain the emperor’s regard by alleviating some of the terms and hinting at further future relief, but this equivocation was ended by Benedict XIV’s emphatic bull Ex quo singulari of 1742. It was the Christians’ own squabbling that lost them their influence in China.
The Yōngzhèng emperor who followed Kāngxī removed the protection of the state in 1724, leading to the expulsion of many missionaries. His successor the Qiánlóng emperor hand-picked those who pleased him, and most of those who remained at court were artists, such as painters Jean Attiret and Guiseppe Castiglione, who painted several portraits of Qiánlóng, and Michel Benoît (Benoist), who with Castiglione designed the Western-style buildings at the Yuánmíng Yuán, the ‘Old’ Summer Palace. The Jesuit order was dissolved by Pope Clement XIV in 1773, although it took two years for this news to reach China.
If Matteo Ricci was a marketing expert par excellence, who observed the needs of the powerful and earned their support through assisting them, the Christians who followed down the centuries seemed to have lacked the touch, right up to modern times. The treaties forced on China by foreign powers in the mid-19th century allowed a flood of missionaries from all over the world into the country, many of whom combined intolerance with poor education. Many other foreign residents expressed antipathy towards them and a lack of surprise that they should be the first target of the Boxer Rebellion (see A Brief History of Běijīng).
In a repeat of 17th-century problems, different sects fought among themselves and deliberately confused issues by choosing different translations for Christian terms, including ‘God’. Many observers commented that Chinese converts were ‘rice Christians’, whose Christianity lasted only as long as the free hand-outs of food some well-funded missionaries were able to provide.
The Nobel-prize-winning author of The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck, daughter of two Presbyterian missionaries to China who lived much of her life here, thought that they had no more effect than ‘a finger drawn through water’.
Some ideas did indeed stick, however. The Tàipíng Rebellion, which between 1845 and 1864 gained control of large areas of China including Nánjīng, was led by a man who claimed to be Jesus Christ’s younger brother. Two of his lieutenants claimed to speak with the voices of God and Jesus. Missionaries were excited about this new religious community until some broke through Qīng lines and found the Tàipíng ideas deviant and heretical. Cynical communist historical orthodoxy claims the Tàipíng as revolutionaries.
Modern-day missionaries, especially from North American evangelical sects, still view China as a massive opportunity. Largely prevented by Chinese government policies from carrying on missionary work, some sneak in through the porous Indo-Chinese borders, while others arrive on tourist visas with no Mandarin and little comprehension of the mammoth task they face. Many undergraduate foreign-language students find themselves getting a large dose of dogma along with a diet of religious vocabulary, as fervour to convert creeps into China under the cloak of language expertise.
The first official visit by representatives of the World Council of Churches in 1996 was given the state view of religious tolerance in China. Afterwards there were comments that, while it was exhilarating to preach to congregations many times larger than those they would reach in the West, the church in China was a Chinese church practising Chinese Christianity, with little interest in membership of a wider organisation or a wider faith. The Chinese government, frequently taking upon itself the task of appointing bishops for the reported four million members of the Patriotic Church, was no doubt happy with that conclusion but is less happy with the fact that their appointees frequently turn them down, and that the Vatican, neither recognising nor being recognised by the Běijīng government, claims twice as many Chinese are Catholics loyal to the Pope in Rome. It also immediately excommunicates Běijīng’s unilateral choices.
Estimates of the total numbers of Christians in China are like estimates of the numbers who take part in anti-goverment protest marches elsewhere: absurdly low from the authorities and absurdly high from the organisers. In this case it’s as low as 23 million from the ‘official census’ (whose figures are what the authorities need them to be), and as high as 130 million or more (assorted Christian probably wishful thinking).
In 2000 Pope John Paul II, in what was widely interpreted as a move of studied tactlessness, chose 1 October (the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic), to canonise 120 Christians who had died in China between 1648 and 1930, including 86 who died during the Boxer Rebellion and whom the Chinese authorities immediately accused of ‘enormous crimes’. The Orthodox canonisation of 222 others the same year went unremarked.
Meanwhile the process of beatification for Matteo Ricci, originally begun in 1984 but stalled in deference to Chinese sensitivities, was restarted by the Bishop of Macerata, Ricci’s birthplace, and the necessary documents were filed in 2010, the 400th anniversary of his death in Běijīng. As Ricci’s life and writings are given the required highly detailed examination there’s speculation that his accommodation of Chinese rites may again be a source of controversy. While Benedict XVI wrote in 2010 that he was ‘favorably impressed by the innovative and unusual skill with which he, with full respect, approached Chinese cultural and spiritual traditions’ there remain conservative forces firmly opposed to any regional adaptation of Catholic orthodoxy under any circumstances.
Neither Ricci, Schall von Bell, Castiglione, nor other notable Jesuits, whether foreigners or converts, ever managed to leave China, and their graves can be visited at the Jesuit Cemetery (advance booking required).
Next in West of the Imperial City: Báiyún Guàn
Previously: South Church
Main Index of A Better Guide to Beijing.
For discussion of China travel, see The Oriental-List.
