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monastery in China was founded in 638, in the capital Ch’ang-an (modern Sian), though some Nestorian missionaries may have reached China earlier. In 845, a major attack on the Buddhist church in China was launched by the emperor Wu-tsung, and in an imperial decree of that year providing for the dissolution of the Buddhist monasteries and the return of the Buddhist clergy to lay life, there is a minor clause ordering the expulsion from China of over 3,000 foreign monks, some of whom were probably — though the text of the decree is ambiguous — Nestorian Christians. This decree was rescinded soon afterwards, and may not have been enforced in the more remote cities of China. Certainly, although we hear no more of Nestorians in Ch'ang-an, an Arab writer refers to Christians among the foreigners slaughtered in Canton in 877 by Huang Ch'ao's rebels, and Nestorian Christianity may have persisted in parts of China for some time after Wu-tsung's decree of 845. But it is clear that Christianity had for all intents and purposes died out in China by the end of the tenth century. The Arabian author Abu'l Faraj mentions meeting a Nestorian monk in Baghdad in 987 who had just come back from China:
"In the year of the Hegira 377, in the Christian quarter behind the church, I met a monk from Najran who seven years before had been sent by the catholicus to China with five other clergy to set in order the affairs of the Christian church. I saw a man still young and of a pleasant appearance, but he spoke little and did not open his mouth except to answer the questions which were put to him. I asked him for some information about his journey, and he told me that Christianity was just extinct in China; the native Christians had perished in one way or another; the church which they had used had been destroyed; and there was only one Christian left in the land. The monk, having found no one remaining to whom his ministry could be of any use, returned more quickly than he went."
The dates for Nestorian Christians in China during the Yüan period are equally vague. Although individual Nestorians are found in various parts of China from about 1200 onwards, including some siege engineers in the Mongol armies, they appear only to have come in force after the final defeat of the Sung regime in southern China by the Mongols in 1279. Most references to Christians in Yüan China are found later than 1280 and earlier than 1340. A special government department,