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by the conversion to Christianity of a number of important Turkish steppe tribes, including the Kerait, the Naiman, and the Ongut. These successes were achieved despite competition from Buddhist, Moslem, and Manichean missionaries. But although the Nestorian church made considerable headway among the tribes whose territory lay between Persian Khurasan and the northern borders of China, little evidence has yet been produced to suggest that many converts were made within China itself.
There is abundant evidence for Christians in China during the Yüan period. It is quite clear that, while many churches and monasteries were built in China, there were few Chinese Christians. Nestorian and Latin priests competed for the allegiance of the Ongut' tribe, Turkish Christians who lived within the Great Bend of the Yellow River, and John of Montecorvino, the Franciscan archbishop of Khanbalik from 1308 to 1328, struggled to keep Alan Christian mercenaries in the Mongol imperial guard firm in the orthodox faith and safe from the errors of Nestorius: but we do not hear of either church preaching the Gospel to the Chinese. John of Montecorvino had the Bible translated into Latin, Turkish, and Persian, the languages of Khanbalik's foreign residents, but not into Chinese. Christian priests in Yüan China probably guessed that the Chinese would be unreceptive to a foreign religion associated with the unpopular rule of the Mongols, but their own behaviour was not always a good advertisement for their religion. We know of a Nestorian Christian administrator, Mar Sargis, who abused his position as governor (darugha) of Chinkiang to build Christian monasteries on land which he had confiscated from a Buddhist temple. Christians were resented, and it is therefore scarcely surprising that in 1368 both Latin and Nestorian Christians were driven from China along with their Mongol protectors.
Although the earlier wave of Nestorians was not disadvantaged by such an association with a foreign occupying power, the few Nestorian churches known to have existed in T'ang China also seem to have been mainly there to serve the religious needs of foreigners resident in China. Syrian and Persian traders could be found in both capitals, Ch'ang-an and Lo-yang, and the number of Nestorians in China was probably at its largest during the reign of Kao-tsung (649-683), when this merchant community was augmented by an influx of refugees from Sassanian Persia. The Sassanian empire was overthrown by the invading armies of Islam at the battles of Qadisiya in 636 and