The oldest and most significant of the Christian relics discovered in China are a number of decorated stone monuments—including a memorial stele and several tombstones. An image of the Madonna and child is among these works, featured on a headstone bearing the date 1342.¹ This memorial was found in Yangzhou in the early 1950s. These stone monuments are almost all examples of sepulchral art, like much of the ante pacem Christian art discovered in the Mediterranean littoral.² Graydon F. Snyder showed that the work that has survived from this earlier period of Christian history includes frescoes, sculptures, funerary art...

The Treaty of Nanjing marked the cessation of the First Opium War, fought between Great Britain and China. The fact that this formal agreement, signed on 29 August 1842, was “imposed by the victor upon the vanquished at gunpoint, without the careful deliberation usually accompanying international agreements in Europe and America”, undoubtedly contributed to the outbreak of the Second Opium War in the next decade.¹ Although signatures were exchanged on board the British naval vessel HMS Cornwallis on that date, the process of ratification by both nations’ rulers, the Daoguang Emperor (r. 1820—50) and Queen Victoria (r. 1837—1901),...

Marian images in the French style had a significant and arguably negative impact on the creation of a Chinese Catholic identity. The periods of antiforeign hostility that occurred with increasing regularity throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century reinforced this identity. As stated above, the Christian and Catholic communities were ready targets for such attacks. The antagonism of non-Christian Chinese towards Chinese Christians and foreign missionaries was partly caused by the unequal provisions of the numerous treaties and by the cultural arrogance of many of the foreigners in China. Where Catholic communities survived these...

The influence of the French and European missionaries on the Catholic Church in China was particularly pronounced during the mid- to the late nineteenth century, as seen in Chapter 2. If the period prior to the Opium Wars was the time of the Iberian churches, the age of the patronato and the padroado, then the Opium War treaties began the age of the French church. For this reason, this era has also been called the time of the French protectorate. While the history of the Chinese Catholic Church can be viewed through many lenses, given the political influence of the...

One of the traditional (and logical) ways to help a local church develop its independence is to train and educate the leadership to a particular standard. The leaders would then be aware of their church’s own history, as well as of its place in the broader history of the Catholic Church. By the early twentieth century, some of the most influential foreign missionaries united with Chinese Catholics in their lament over the poor standard of education offered by the church, especially at the tertiary level.

Arguably, the church’s lack of involvement in the world of higher education was a further...

The teachers, students and graduates of the Furen art department now produced lively and evocative examples of Christian images in local style. In this way, they resumed the work of artistic adaptation that had occurred in the time of the Zhangzhou sculptors and in that of João da Rocha and Giulio Aleni, discussed in Chapter 1. Whereas in the age of the French protectorate the French statues, paintings and pieties had overshadowed Chinese Christian images, these Chinese images now began to reappear. Chinese Christian communities and influential missionaries supported their return, as did numbers of foreign Catholics. The work of...